Developing compost heat recovery at Highfields’ Compost Research and Education Facility is an effort to take a process that is fundamental to sustainable food and farm systems, composting, and develop new technology to yield a second value from the process – renewable energy in the form of recovered heat. This system will advance this emerging technology and improve its effectiveness and efficiency, all the while bringing down the entry-level costs associated with it. In keeping with our organizational culture of appropriate technology for the people, we’ll make our understanding and designs of these systems available to everyone – ‘copy-lefting’ open-source designs.
The process of composting generates tremendous amount of heat, which results from the biological activity occurring during composting, primarily bacterial metabolism of organic Carbon. A big fat handful of active compost contains a bacterial population much greater than the human population on earth. Those little buggers are living large in an environment we create just for them and they are so abundant that they produce body heat that collectively generates temperatures of 140º-160º F over a period of several months. We can harness that heat. Compost heat can be captured and transferred for heating water, greenhouses, barns, and other heat applications. But the technology is still very much in the early stages of development and we want to bring it much further along in order to popularize it and bring it to farms and other applications everywhere… maybe even your house.