Crapitalism

Everything Poops + Business Sees The Changing Climate = Crapitalism
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 06.16.07

Months ago we posted on a landfill methane capture project: controversial because "offsets" were being sold to cover the costs of capturing and burning methane emitted from buried solid waste. Some likened the practice to selling indulgences for spiritual gain. Then, months later, the Vatican decided to go for the green, causing that simile to lose currency. Now it seems, covering and capturing all manner of poop gas is headed toward the realm of big business. Raw material in excess. Cows do it. Pigs do it. Even billions of crowded miserable little chickens do it. We think capturing the methane wafting from their piles of excrement and selling the credits for this effort is soon to be a global love story for investors. The business potential is nicely embodied by AgCert International (AgCert™), a business that sells credits for those greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions. "Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, AgCert was founded to generate emission reductions from livestock farms to reduce the adverse impacts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to global warming and climate change. AgCert is now the worldwide leader in agriculturally derived emission reductions, and we are applying our expertise to create industrial based emission reductions as well. The GHG emission reductions are pooled and sold to industrial emitters, governments, funds and energy traders."

Anaerobic digestion, the biotic and major source of atmospheric methane releases, works on straw, wasted food, animal bedding, manure....all kinds of organic material...not just the collected byproducts of factory farming.

Now if we could just think of an incentive for capitalists to conserve old growth forests and protect biodiversity on this same scale. Oh wait...there are some. Offsetting, again, if deployed for conservation reserve. And, tax credits for donating money to the Nature Conservancy, for example.

If the covered lagoon method (pictured) proves to be globally valuable for business, the upshot is a large scale incentive to prevent lagoon flooding or leakage, and the resulting loss of raw material (the poop) needed profit from a waste that, if not carefully retained to extract economic value, offends neighbors, is a potential disease vector (for Avian flu for example) and poses an ecological hazard to downstream waters. (What are those huge lagoon covers made out of anyway? Could be a good supply chain aspect to invest in.)

US-EPA (other side of pond from Ireland) is offering a Federal grants program to help animal waste handlers do a better job of managing waste, primarily through education and free consultation. Is there a potential synergy between "crapitalism" and the US-style, regulatory carrot/stick method for improving animal waste management? Or could this be a conflict looming?

Via:: RP at The Shaw Group, Inc.

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Comments (7)

part of the energy mix I buy from my utility includes "landfill gas" which is methane. Since cows are the biggest threat to global warming in the USA (info quoted from articles found online), why not capture and use that gas?

Crapitalism. I love it!
June 16, 2007 2:45 PM | flag a problem
dwightstreetrenter says:
Well, that would evolve putting the cows in a sealed container with no in or out air circulation. Sounds even worse than their life now.

===== author's response follows ===
The cows are already in climate controlled stalls. The manure is carried away by a chain driven conveyor , into a pit, from where it is augured by a big worm gear device into storage lagoons. The whole affair is periodically washed down and that rinseate goes also into the lagoon. In the lagoon is where anaerobes do their methane magic. The balloon cover is over the lagoon.
June 16, 2007 4:49 PM | flag a problem
Anonymous says:
...or we could just promote vegetarianism and stop breeding chickens, cows, and pigs all together. But wait...that means people actually have to give something up. On second thought, I'll just wait for the hybrid Hummer.
June 17, 2007 8:30 AM | flag a problem
Joshua says:
This is a significant shift and has a lot of upside. I remember reading about bio-digestion in Mother Earth news about 30+ years ago. Now it's gone mainstream. Then it was skewed as a methodology for the third world and small farms - which is still very applicable.

The difficulty has always been collecting the wastes efficiently. Free range cattle require hundreds of acres per cow, and you can't really send someone out with a shovel to follow them all.

Feedlots and industrially scaled penned livestock are the main beneficiaries here, which has pluses and minuses.

The downside is that this makes it more cost effective to keep livestock confined by the thousands, with all of the disease and quality of life issues for the animals that this entails. The quality of the meat, dairy and byproducts is also problematic, compared to animals who can roam to greater or lesser degrees.

The upside is that the multiple-acre manure lagoons can be brought under control, and their environmental effects mitigated. Pig farms have been particularly problematic in the SE US where they dominate certain regions, where the stench, flies, contamination of groundwater, blowouts into rivers and wetlands, and dispersal of antibiotics and hormones have despoiled entire counties.

The processed manure that results from bio-digestion is sterile, less smelly, and better suited for crop fertilizer. The burning off of the methane removes an aggressive greenhouse gas. The CO2 from burning methane is probably in carbon balance with the livestock feed. Plus you can generate electricity, and do co-generation to provide process heat, heat the livestock barns, and provide hot water for cleaning needs.

This also works for towns and cities with waste treatment plants, you know. My local plant has a series of huge egg-shaped digesters. They capture the heat from burning the methane for much of their needs. The released, treated effluent water is the most innocuous that's ever been released into the waters of the city. Not quite a Clivus Multrum, but a vast step up from what a million people had done previously.

==== author's response follows ====
Thanks for the insightful comment. I hope all readers of this post take the time to ponder the tradeoffs you cite here.

Extrapolations on your thoughts follow.

As any naive person who has traveled in the Lancaster PA, USA area can easily observe, the "nature friendly" free range livestock operations often mean trampled pastures, severely caved stream banks, high silt loads, and excessive nutrients flowing into the Chesapeake Bay.

Better management practices surely are available at low cost - where there is a will there is a way - but we should not romanticize, as often is done, about a more natural farming method being good for nature in all aspects of the product life cycle.

This applies also to the production of goat cheese and sheeps wool. Goats and sheep are extremely destructive to the environment from their over grazing if not properly managed. Every wonder why almost every new photo you see of the landscape of the Middle East shows a near barren landscape? Two millennium of goat and sheep will do that.
June 17, 2007 9:25 AM | flag a problem
jon says:
Ahh, well we certainly should talk about the positives of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Because far be it from us to consider something like factory farming could go away. Or that people could fathom not eating meat.

Sustainability can supersede ethics and consideration for animals, because the people actually changing their diet or lifestyle is inconceivable. And I also forgot how destructive free range, pastured animal farming is. It must be that, and not the concentrated Smithfield Farms hog lots that are polluting the Chesapeake.

Crapitalism is exactly how it sounds and smells. A reeking compromise and excuse because it's "the best we can do".

I am dumbfounded here. People talk about it as though "making the best of a horrible industry," but ultimately that message gets distorted into "oh it may be a good thing". Before you know it the greater population deludes itself into thinking it some kind of sustainable closed loop system. It's like the Canadian and Russian governments talking about the economic boons they may reap from global warming.

I'm with Joshua: I'll nibble my vegan happy meal in my hybrid hummer.

PS to Jon: Cynicism aside, I'd love to read something that quantifies the damage of free range farming in contrast to factory farming.
June 19, 2007 2:19 PM | flag a problem
Jon says:
I'm not a complete vegetarian but after having been raised to eat meat I have cut back by over 90%.

The reason the economy of meat "works" is the final step when a truck is loaded up with the very dense weight of meat. Compare a truckload of tomatoes to a truckload of meat. Even though meat started at a deficit in terms of costs to create, it's the final step where it gets loaded into a truck that it becomes economically feasible.

Localized farming is probably the best solution. Read up on South Central Farms in South Central Los Angeles. Here was a 15 acre plot of land that was divided into a couple hundred individual garden plots, but in the end the land was basically given back to the original owner at far below market value so that the land can be "developed". Developed means put a building up on it that then becomes energy dependent on non renewable resources with a property overvaluation that causes the businesses that will reside in the property to import their goods so they can heavily mark them up to pay for their overhead. This destructive practice continues to proliferate. Yes, local cities do there part to create the problem as much if not moreso than the federal government.