If you love to cook, no doubt a gas range is a must-have in any home or apartment. But if you're an environmentalist, you know that natural gas is not sustainable or a renewable resource. One Israeli company could have the Goldilocks of answers.
HomeBiogas is a five-year-old company based in Tel Aviv whose founders are on a mission to give anyone, anywhere in the world the ability to create clean energy for cooking just by composting their kitchen scraps and yard and animal waste.
The 2.0 model of their beta-tested all-in-one "eco appliance", a contained unit that sits in your backyard ready to collect food waste and yard waste (compost) and convert it into both clean cooking gas and liquid fertilizer, is currently funded on Kickstarter five times over.
The average family collects three liters or more of food scraps per day — 1.3 billion tons of food wasted annually worldwide — which can now be converted through the compact HomeBiogas 2.0 unit into up to 3 hours of cooking gas per day through the specially adapted cooktop included with purchase. That's an estimated cost savings of $300 annually on powering your stove (and fertilizing your garden, using the liquid fertilizer byproduct from the Biogas unit), according to the press release, not to mention the savings to your carbon footprint.
The company says the product "looks, smells, and burns just like any traditional gas would, the only difference is that this gas is made from recycling in your own backyard!" Plus, unlike a traditional compost pile, the HomeBiogas unit claims to need no churning, can accept animal proteins and animal waste, and won't attract pests or bugs — plus, instead of having to wait a full year for garden-ready compost, the appliance provides biogas and fertilizer daily.
Can't envision yourself composting, let alone having the space or time or energy to use a biogas device at home? For $50 through the Kickstarter, you can donate a HomeBiogas 2.0 unit to an organization in Kenya or Puerto Rico who have partnered with the company and can put it to best use where clean energy is most needed right now due to economic or environmental hardships, such as recent hurricanes.
A complete Home Biogas appliance currently costs $485 through the Kickstarter campaign, including the Biogas 2.0 appliance and the specially adapted biogas cooktop stove.
Food waste has become such a crisis around the world (shown in depth in these features by the New York Times and Forbes) that many cities and towns have implemented curbside composting (such as where I live, in Austin, Texas), some elementary schools have started implementing "share tables" for unwanted yet perfectly edible lunch box items, and other cleverly resourceful programs.
Founded in 2012, HomeBiogas claims it is the first company to produce and sell DIY family-sized biodigesters, with a mission to offer every household in both developed and developing nations the opportunity to lead a more sustainable life through cooking, growing, and smarter energy production with easy access to renewable energy.