DIANE BARKER: One of the beauties of this
machine, in the previous dish rooms, we?ve
had flat conveyer belt systems.
This moves the dishes faster.
We have more people working in order to take
the dishes off faster, but it moves the dishes
faster, so that we can get them off the trays
and the customers won?t be lined up, trying
to get their trays taken care of.
The student worker would take the tray off
the accumulator, and they would take the food
and they would bang it into the dish and get
the food into the trough.
The trough water recycles grey water throughout
the mechanism, and basically, it takes the
water to the pulper, and pulps the food.
That is the pulper, and basically, the food
will go into this, grinds it up, takes it
downstairs into an extractor that extracts
the water, recycles the water back up here,
and then puts the pulp into a compactor.
You are looking at the extractor part of this
pulper, and basically what happens is that
this extracts the water, and then the pulp
material comes down a chute and comes back
out into the compactor, ground up into small
bites.
STEVE SAFFERMAN: So this is food waste that
came from preparation of the food and from
people?s trays.
And so, you can actually look in there and
identify certain materials like rice and corn.
It does not look particularly appetizing,
to say the least, and it doesn?t smell particularly
good.
And now, instead of throwing it away, we?re
going to put at least a small quantity of
it into our digesters here in the facility.
And then, if things work out, it could ultimately
end up in a full-scale digester.
But again, that?s a long way out.
First, we have to see how things work by experimentation.
So we have the 100 liter digesters.
We have to heat these to 100 degrees fahrenheit.
So, all it is, really, is a pipe with two
ends to it, and that?s it.
There?s nothing else in there.
And there?s a mixer, so the big pump on the
side simply mixes the contents, because we
have to have good contact between the waste
and the microorganisms, and so we mix it about
four or five times a day, just for a few minutes.
Otherwise, it just sits there, just like it?s,
in a sense, cooking.
Is there enough energy associated with some
of this waste to make it practical for us
to pick it up and deliver it here, and on
a regular basis? Those are the questions the
university?s going to have to ask, too, as
they look at this as a full scale.
