Waste is not going to waste at Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.
The center’s Wooster campus is using agricultural and food-processing wastes to generate nearly one-third of the electricity needs on campus.
The 3.6 megawatt-hours of energy produced is enough to power 313 average U.S. homes. The university says the center is using anaerobic digestion technology, which turns a variety of organic wastes into biogas that is then converted to electricity.
The energy is produced by quasar energy group, a Cleveland-based company that built an anaerobic digester in 2010 at the center’s BioHio Research Park. The 550,000-gallon digester can process 30,000 wet tons of biomass annually.
