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Spending the last two days’ RV camping in Janice’s driveway at her lovely home in Pennsylvania has been a fantastic experience. After years of admiring each other’s work, the opportunity to finally meet in person and learn directly about her USDA-funded biogas research project has been nothing short of revelatory.

Janice and I have been online friends since 2017 largely because of Li Zhu, a mutual friend through the USF Patel College. Li and I, both students at the Patel, became close friends because of his work as an intern in my organization, Tampa Bay Farm 2 School. After his graduation, Li joined Janice in her business Solar CITIE. It should also be mentioned that Li’s mastery of everything related to the build-out and management of biodigesters led him to be on the team at USF that designed and built the college’s existing biodigesters.

On day #1 of my visit with Janice, I took notes intending to do a write-up on the Phase I activities she’s doing to develop a home biogas unit funded by a $100,000 USDA grant. The idea is to make energy from food waste available to homeowners, thus reducing methane emissions from landfills that contribute to global warming.

“Every year in the United States, approximately 31% (133 billion pounds) of the overall food supply is wasted, which impacts food security, resource conservation, and contributes to the 18% of total U.S. methane emissions that come from landfills.” –EPA, America’s Food Waste problem

The grant is a partnership with Advanced Cooling Technologies (ACT) located in nearby Lancaster County, PA. ACT brings the engineering, technology, data collection tools, and manpower to the partnership. Solar CITIES brings their knowledge of small-scale biogas systems for residential and homestead use. See Janice’s Ted Talk on home-scale biogas use here.

And yet, this morning Janice and I created these lovely videos, all the better to share with you about Janice’s work in glorious visual detail. Please enjoy!