FAQ

Almost certainly more than one, and they come from different authorities that do not coordinate with each other. In Ohio there are five separate determinations: whether the unit is a regulated waste-processing facility (Ohio EPA, Division of Materials & Waste Management), whether it is a building or equipment (your local building official), whether it needs an air permit (Ohio EPA, Division of Air Pollution Control), what happens to the liquid fraction (your local sewer authority), and whether your zoning allows the use.

We run all five for you as part of site scoping, and we tell you what we find, including when a site is a bad candidate.

That is decided by your local building official, and Ohio has a mechanism that works in our favour. Under Ohio's Industrialized Unit program (OAC 4101:10), a closed-construction unit built in a factory can have its design reviewed and certified once at state level. The local building department then reviews only the on-site work: the pad and the utility connections.

The design consequence is that we build for it: skid or pier foundation rather than footings below frost line, quick-disconnect utilities at a single labelled panel, no occupiable interior space, and a documented removal procedure that restores the pad.

Source: OAC 4101:10-3-01 and Ohio BBS Memo 402.

Digestion happens in a sealed vessel, which is the structural difference between this and a compost pile. There is no open windrow to turn and no exposed pile to work. The parts that need managing are receiving and storage, not the process, and odour, vector, noise and dust control are explicit operating requirements under Ohio's composting rules, which we design to whether or not they are ultimately held to apply to us.

We will not tell you it is odourless. We will tell you exactly where the odour risk sits, and design the receiving arrangement around your site rather than around a brochure.

Source: Ohio EPA GD-667, Class II operating standards.

This is the question most likely to decide whether a site works, and it is the cheapest one to answer. One phone call to your sewer authority's pretreatment coordinator. Digestate liquor is high in BOD, COD, ammonia and suspended solids, and most pretreatment ordinances have hard limits and a surcharge schedule for exactly those.

There are three possible answers: the liquid fraction leaves as a saleable product, it goes to the sewer under your permit, or it has to be hauled or treated on site. They have materially different economics, and we establish which one applies before we quote you anything.

It depends on what happens to the biogas, and the threshold is lower than people expect. Ohio's de minimis exemption (OAC 3745-15-05) falls away if potential emissions of any single listed contaminant exceed 10 pounds per day, and sulphur dioxide is usually the binding one, because hydrogen sulphide in raw biogas oxidises to SO₂ when it is burned. That makes H₂S removal an air-permitting design decision, not just an equipment-protection one.

There is a second rule worth knowing early: the exemption can also be lost when similar sources at the same facility, combined, exceed 25 tons per year. If you are thinking about adding modules later, that is a question to ask at unit one, not unit three.

Source: OAC 3745-15-05.

Legally, those are different things decided by different agencies, and we are pursuing the first. In Ohio, a specialty fertilizer is registered with the Department of Agriculture, at $50 per product per year, with a guaranteed analysis and a compliant label. That is a product registration, not a waste permit.

Two things worth knowing. First, federal biosolids rules (40 CFR Part 503) govern sewage sludge; a digestate made only from source-separated food waste is not sewage sludge, so those rules are not the ones that apply. Second, the evidence that supports product status is laboratory data, which is why our fertilizer testing is not a side project.

Sources: Ohio Dept. of Agriculture, 40 CFR Part 503.

We run the standard test and we publish the number rather than the verdict. The Zucconi germination index is the accepted bioassay for compost and digestate maturity: seeds are germinated in an extract of the material and compared against a water control, on both germination count and root elongation. It uses the product of the two because immature material frequently permits germination while stunting roots, so a germination-only score reports a false pass.

A result is only interpretable with its conditions attached, so we report the index together with the species, the extraction ratio, the incubation time, and the extract's pH and conductivity. We also run a salinity control, because high conductivity suppresses germination for reasons that are physics rather than toxicity, and the two are easy to confuse.

Footprint is a spec-sheet number and it is not published until it is measured. That is the same rule as the rest of the specification table. What we can tell you now is the number that actually governs site selection: Ohio's composting rules exempt operations that do not exceed 500 square feet, and a container plus its working area gets close to that before you have staged any feedstock. Staging is what usually pushes a site over the line, so it is the first thing we measure on a site walk.

Beyond space, the site needs process water, a drain path, electrical service and truck access to the receiving point. We enumerate all of them during scoping.

Source: Ohio EPA GD-667.

EPA's Wasted Food Scale, which replaced the old food recovery hierarchy in 2023, ranks anaerobic digestion with beneficial use of the digestate above composting, and both far above landfill. Landfill sits second from the bottom, ahead of only incineration and the drain.

The reason is methane. EPA attributes 58% of the methane that municipal landfills release to the atmosphere to landfilled food waste, and estimates that 61% of the methane generated by landfilled food waste is never captured by gas collection systems. Digestion captures the gas by design instead of chasing it after the fact, and it returns a product, which is the part landfill cannot do at any price.

Sources: EPA Wasted Food Scale; EPA, Quantifying Methane Emissions from Landfilled Food Waste (2023).

Faces and licence plates are blurred on the device, before any image leaves your site. That is where the redaction happens architecturally. It is not a setting that can be switched off from a dashboard, and it is one of the criteria we verify at pilot closeout by auditing the stored record.

You do. You can export the raw record at any time and at the end of the pilot, and we do not use your site's data to make claims about your site publicly without your written permission.