Hi there!

We are students of University of Reading, who are working on a business plan. It requires us to study the target market of a home-use anaerobic digester fueled by food waste (assuming there is one).

We are not selling or marketing our product. It is just a market research survey that all of us have to do because we need to be sure that there will be a potential market for the product here in the UK.

This survey is our first draft and we are very keen on the feedbacks that we get, therefore, we decided that we should post the survey up online.

Your time and effort in answering this 5-questions (although its stated 7 in the survey - its a typo error) survey would help us a lot in our research and get our grades!

We appreciate all of your help and feedbacks. Thank you very much!

Please click on the link to proceed: http://www.survey.com/cgi-bin/pollxt.pl ... 2U1AR1U7R8

I'd love to save the world (or at least healthy living systems)
But I don't know what to do

so, I guess I'll continue to strive to make the transition as smooth as I can for myself and those around me.

I know the title is a little way off but in a way, we are trying to encourage the practice of 'recycling' food waste, which will reduce landfills, leading to a reduction of many climate change problems out there.

So yeah, help save the world!

Hello! Its great to hear that the people here practice recycling
But i have a question for all of you. According to the survey so far, 48% recycle their food waste while 19% throw their waste away. 37% of them chose 'others'.

I should have put this question as an open-ended question (my bad!) but can anyone suggest what else do they do with their food other than recycling and throwing them away.

Burying? Worm bins? Feed their pets? Thanks a bunch peeps!

You trying to promote methane digestion as a energy source or as a waste-treatment diversion?

There is no mention of EROI in this questionare. You also have failed to notice that many\ most UK landfill sites now have large methane burning power plants next to them that extract the methane and use it to power the national grid, these would benefit from the scale of carnot engine involved. Even before I looked at buying something like this I would need to see an analysis compairing the enrgy involved in its manufacture to what could be extracted with the energy involved in already existing landfill methane buring infrastructure..... to see whether something like this would have a genuine real impact or just be a marketing gimmik like Dave (torytwatscumsonofthatcher) Cameron's home wind power generator.

Thinking on this it strikes me as something dreamed up in the Uppin Arms or Pavlovs Dog (famous Reading student pubs for the uninitiated) than a serious energy project. It requires the kind of waste levels found at industrial farms, sewage or landfill sites to make an economicaly viable amount of methane. It also occurs to me that directly buring the methane for heat, or storing it through the summer to burn in winter would have a much better return on energy that a microgenerating facillity.

Are you just looking for people to fill in a form or are you genuinely investigating alternative energy sources. If the latter hanging round here you will find a huge amount of infromation on the many problems we are facing and a fertile repository for ideas. If the former, well its a bit noddy for many of those round here who are geniuley prepairing for some pretty hairy upcomming energy and enviromental problems.

Energy source

Thanks for your comment! We are still in the midst of structuring our survey and its our first draft so there can be some questions that we have failed to include. So, that is why we posted our draft online to get some feedbacks before going onto the streets

And yes, we are also working on the fact if the digester can produce enough energy to power the entire house which is more on the technical side so researching on it is going to take some time. At the meantime, we want to be sure that people are interested and are willing to use such an equipment in their homes

Relax, the world cannot be saved.

dude.

There isn't enough methane in your municipal digester to power its own paddles and heater.

How will it ever replace petroleum and drive Mom, Sis, and Buster to the mall?

Yes, I want to save the world but the world the way it is run now is not worth saving. What should be saved is the forests, the oceans, the ecosystems of the planet itself and the few people that can live sustainably within the bounds of nature. The consumerist society based on enriching the elite few has to go.

You can. Save the cheerleader. If you get what i mean

It would have been more interesting if they didn´t. I still have my hopes in Syler though...

We are just focusing on generating enough power for a house but yes, it could be an extension to replace petroleum. We'll see where this will lead us to