Transforming Waste and Reducing Carbon Footprint

Urban Water TMU, Ryerson's Science Discovery Zone (SDZ), and CCI-BioEnergy collaborated on a successful research proposal to Ontario's Low Carbon Innovation Fund (LCIF). Led by our industrial partner CCI-BioEnergy, the proposal is to demonstrate anaerobic digestion of food waste from campus and commercial sources in an urban context.

Managing food waste near its production and use and converting it into energy and fertilizer promises several benefits - it reduces greenhouse gas production, creates renewable energy, reduces transportation impacts, and is consistent with Ontario's goals for a circular economy.

CCI-BioEnergy is a North American pioneer in the development of organics processing solutions using anaerobic digestion (AD). Their projects include large AD systems for the City of Toronto's Green Bin Program, and they have recently introduced robust, micro-scale AD solutions to produce energy on-site from recovered organic materials.

Ryerson technicians and researchers will provide support in operating a micro AD system in an urban setting including loading feedstock, taking samples, quantifying and optimizing biogas production, and characterizing digestate and its uses.

Urban Water TMU visited one such system at Algoma Orchards as seen in the attached photograph to the left.