Our Biogas Kitchen

In Germany it was our common practice to compost all of our kitchen waste. Now that we have built an ARTI India style biogas digestor on the porch, however, we only compost the tissue paper, napkins, cardboard, tea-bags and fibrous, cellulosic material that our household generates as garbage. All the food waste (including flower petals and banana peels) go into the blender with warm water and then into the biogas digestor. What we get out is liquid fertilizer for our rooftop herb, berry and vegetable garden, and biogas. We are still experimenting with the yields of gas, but are so far averaging 10 minutes a day for the small size of our digestor and the small quantities of food waste our family of 2 (with a baby) generates. Two days worth of kitchen waste gives us enough gas to usefully cook for 20 or 30 minutes.