Peter Crownfield is officially retired but spends most of his time working with students in his role as internship coordinator for the Alliance for Sustainable Communities–Lehigh Valley.
Gadfly:
I don’t know any of the details of Easton’s plan, but let’s hope they avoid the nasty pollution problems that come with many such plans.
Asking whether food waste from Bethlehem’s educational institutions could fuel this plant in Easton seems to me like the wrong question. [See John Marquette’s post yesterday.]
Bethlehem should be requiring all residents, businesses, & institutions to compost food waste and should provide free curbside pickup / composters for residences. Composting returns food waste to the soil, where it belongs. Several cities already do this, and the state of Vermont plans to require all food waste to be collected separately. (Actually, that might already be in place.)
If the EAC/city can find a clean, sustainable waste-to-energy model to process food waste (there are some in Europe, I believe), that might be worth discussing, but they need to deal with food waste properly NOW.
Peter
