We speak to David Newman, Chairman of the World Biogas Association, about why biogas has a big role to play in reducing global emissions.

Despite only seeping into the public consciousness in the past few decades, the use of biogas has a long history; more than 2,500 years ago to be more exact, when the Assyrians worked out that if they fermented waste, they would get gas from it and if they lit that gas,  they would get heat. And so baths across the Assyrian Empire (which stretched from modern-day Egypt to Kuwait to Turkey) were heated by this method.

David Newman is the President of the World Biogas Association, and someone who has worked in biowaste management for more than 20 years; the perfect person to explain the role biogas can play in effective climate action. “If you put a banana skin in your bin, after a day or two, it will go black and start to smell,” David says. “And while it is going black, it is releasing what we call biogas, which is a mixture of CO₂ and methane. If that banana skin is in an uncontrolled environment (as 98% of all banana skins in the world are), then that CO₂  and methane [which is more potent than CO₂] will just float off into the atmosphere.”

Indeed, the global figures for this type of waste are staggering (“the food waste system globally is comparable to the US or China in terms of emissions”) which is why it is vital that we think about food waste and agricultural waste in a new way. Old habits die hard however, and several countries are still making new investments in fossil fuels. That isn’t entirely surprising. As David puts it: “We use 20^th century thinking to solve 21^st century problems. Humanity has not made that collective shift in our thinking about the urgency there is to get to grips with the climate crisis. There is no more time for talk or experiments or research, we have to act.”

Seismic Shifts and Proper Pricing

Yet that seismic shift needed won’t be easy, not least due to the fact that setting up and running a full-scale biogas plant is not easy. And while biowaste collection can be done on different levels, the larger biogas plants make the best use of the biowaste from a climate, energy and waste collection perspective. “These plants are industrial installations, which take time to plan, to authorize and to get the finances for, and so it can take a number of years to get them up and running,” David says. “You need to go out and collect these wastes through collection programs, through the agricultural system, through your industrial systems, and stop a practice that has been going on for decades if not centuries which is just throwing that waste away,” he adds.

Another issue is cost, but as David points out, you need to “price in the damage that coal does, and the advantages that biogas has. But the problem is we don’t price in the environmental costs of burning coal or oil; and we don’t price in the environmental benefits from doing the right thing.”

Yet the genius of biogas is that it is a “carbon-negative” fuel source; not only are you capturing methane that would ordinarily go into the atmosphere, you are turning it into a renewable energy source as well. “Of course, when you burn biogas you release C02 that goes into the atmosphere, but what you are releasing is biogenic CO₂ [this means no methane is released, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂] as it comes from a plant-based renewable source,” David says.

Above: Aerial view of a biogas plant

Industry on The Rise

“Biogas has gone from a small-scale industry 25 years ago, to being a giant of an industry. And if you look across the world, there are nearly 32 million small-scale biogas installations, from Latin America right the way to the Himalayas, that are producing light and cooking gas, and they are using animal slurry and human sewage for power; so this type of technology is multiplying rapidly, but of course most of us don’t live in the countryside. Therefore, a lot of the cost comes from collecting urban waste and bringing it to biowaste plants, as collection systems need to be set up from scratch.

“We are seeing now that some of the largest food waste installations deal with half a million tonnes a year; that’s a 50-megawatt energy production each year. That technology is now there, and it wasn’t there ten or fifteen years ago. The question now is how quickly we can scale up to be able to really make a difference to greenhouse gas emissions. We believe that with the right policies we can actually scale up to reduce about 10 per cent of global gas emissions in a decade. But you need the policies; you need cities to set up collecting and to build biogas plants. You have to tell the bus and trucking and transport companies that you have to buy the gas that comes from these plants. You need a series of frameworks, and in Europe and many states in the US, we mostly have them. The expansion in China, also is already enormous and is still growing very fast.”

The Italian Job

Luckily, we do see a country where this sort of energy was utilized long before most other places: Italy. “I helped set up some of the first food waste collection systems in Italy in the late 1990s, and I remember people telling me that no one will collect food waste, but now 45 per cent of all recycling in Italy is food waste. They got a grip of it twenty years before anyone else, and even now 50 per cent of all the food waste in the EU is recycled in Italy. It shows you that if you do it right, that people do participate.”

As for what we can do right now, the first step literally begins at home. “If you have a house with a garden, you can compost a lot of your food waste; you can home compost with your garden waste and you take it out of the waste system,” David says. Of course, it is better for the environment that this waste is brought to dedicated biowaste plants and treated.

And, thanks to the lobbying efforts of David and others, food waste collection will be mandatory both in the UK and across the EU by the end of 2023. “Every household, council and small business across Europe will be obliged to segregate their food waste from the end of 2023. And we know a lot of similar legislation is going through in other parts of the world, such as in parts of Australia and parts of the US.”

More details on the World Biogas Association’s 2030 Pathway can be found here.