This event is part of the NYC Food Waste Fair 2021. To see all NYC Food Waste Fair events, visit www.foodwastefair.com
About this event
Join Alicia West, the Department of Environmental Protection's Director of Public Design Outreach, on an architecturally focused virtual tour of New York City's largest wastewater facility, Newtown Creek, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Following the virtual tour, Jennifer McDonnell will lead a live Q&A with the audience.
In addition to being an architectural marvel, DEP’s Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility at Newtown Creek is the only location in the City that hosts an innovative operation to co-digest food waste. DEP’s project partner, Waste Management, receives and pre-processes truckloads of collected food scraps at their Brooklyn CORe® facility into a homogenous food-based energy product called engineered bioslurry or EBS®. This pumpable “food waste smoothie” is delivered to the Newtown Creek WRRF, where it is combined with wastewater sludge in the digester eggs.
After about 30 days of mixing and churning, anaerobic microorganisms will have converted nearly all the slurry of organic material to biogas (methane) and carbon dioxide. Work is underway to purify this biogas into pipeline-quality renewable natural gas for direct in-home use (as seen in the video!). By capturing our byproducts (waste) and recovering their value, we are reducing long haul trucking, reducing emissions, and creating renewable energy and soil amendments (biosolids) right here in NYC!