Next month, Bridgwater in Somerset, England, will become the first town to benefit from green fuel generated at a local recycling plant, reported The Sunday Times.
Grass clippings from roadside verges in South Gloucestershire will go through a 45-day anaerobic digestion (AD) process. The first batch weighed 13 tonnes.
Alan Armstead, commercial director of Cannington Enterprises - which is converting the grass - said the organisation mixes the grass clippings with a bit of maize, and pours it into an anaerobic digester at the rate of four tonnes per hour.
"We inject the biomethane into the grid where it goes off to Bridgwater where we are powering about 8,000 homes with gas. We also take some of the gas and convert it into electricity.”
Advisers to Greenprint, which has received £4 million (€4.7 million) of funding from the Department of Transport for the project, said the scheme could eventually supply enough gas or electricity to satisfy the demand from 260,000 homes if it was extended to half of Britain’s 313,000 miles of roadside verges and council-owned public space.
Greenprint is part of a £30 million (€35.6 million) Live Labs 2 government project intended to decarbonise the highway network across Britain.
Pilot scheme utilises roadside grass clippings for AD process
