Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives

So, doing another environmental-esque post is not to say that this is the only topic we can cover in the Café... but this site is too cool not to share!

I think a lot about waste reduction. Why do we make things that are designed to be thrown away? (Check out Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart.) Take a clue from nature, who recycles herself endlessly. That's the purpose behind ZERI, Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives.

The Monfort Boys Town school for boys in Fiji has teamed up with ZERI to make beer into fish. Working together they have set up program where the boys collect sludge left over from a local brewery and plant mushroom spores which break down the barley protein so that it becomes a nutritious food source for pigs. The school then collects the pig poop and run it through a biodigester which allows them to collect gases that can be stored and used for heating and cooking. Finally they spread the remaining material over shallow pools to disintegrate and act as food for algae that in turn feeds a wide variety of fish in the ponds. ZERI has this and other waste reuse case studies on its site at http://www.zeri.org/.