New York City is banking on Sewage Gas and Sludge?

Apparently cows are not the only thing producing and releasing methane gas into the air, so too are Sewage Treatment Plants in New York City. Along with large amounts of smelly gases being released into the atmosphere, potentially toxic layers of sludge and waste water byproducts run an extremely high risk of contaminating waterways. Maybe naivety has allowed a majority of Americans to assume that a longstanding system for dealing with billions of gallons of city waste water has been both efficient and environmentally responsible up until this point but, it is simply not true. Whatever the case may be, it has taken a city as large as New York until 2011 to realize that what they are doing to manage their waste products is not just costing taxpayers a great deal of money but, it is not reaching its fullest environmental potential and needs immediate attention.

According to the New York Times, “like other cities around the country looking to reduce both the costs of sewage treatment and disposal and the heat-trapping greenhouse gases emitted in the process, New York is beginning to look at its waste as an untapped resource.” Finally, a large American city is no longer hiding their heads in the sand when it comes to its own impact on the environment and the sustainability of the planet and becoming proactive in its efforts to make a difference and to change its ways. So what if the only reason they are doing this is to cut costs in order to better their own economy? Every little bit helps when it comes to bettering the planet and recycling anything and everything that comes out of human propensity towards creating large amounts of waste.

But, with no end in site to the billions of gallons of water used and flushed on a daily basis in this country, at least something good can come out of this. Both the recycling of methane gas and the byproduct sewage sludge has major potential according to city and environmental officials. One official states that they “hope to have a contract by 2013, said the solid could be harvested for gases that produce clean energy and could be used in more traditional ways, too, as fertilizer or as paving and building materials. The biggest potential source of energy, officials said, is the methane gas from sewage treatment plants’ digesters. About half of the methane produced by the city’s plants is already used to meet about 20 percent of the energy demands of the city’s 14 sewage plants, whose electric bills run to a total of about $50 million a year. Now the city wants to market the other half, which is burned off and wasted.”

Whatever their reasons for this kind of change, New York City has taken a positive step in the Environmental movement. It just goes to show you that going green doesn’t have to be a bad thing and ultimately, everybody benefits when you make going green a priority.