Every year important quantities of wood are deposited along the riverbed and the banks of the Vara and Magra rivers, as well as their tributary streams: a threat to the communities living in that area of Liguria, given the frequent dramatic floods.
Punctually, then, at the beginning of each winter, the floods of the Magra bring stacks of timber to the coast, creating serious problems for citizens and businesses and huge costs for local public administrations, with an average annual cost of no less than 400,000 euros for its disposal.
Furthermore, in the case of open-air combustion, these biomasses produce CO2, and it is well known how much the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is decisive for global climate warming and for the natural disasters related to it.
The Co.Co. Farm 2021 project for renewable energy
The Co.Co. Farm 2021, promoted by the Terre del Magra Community Cooperative together with other local associations, aims to find a sustainable solution to the problems of cleaning and land management, through a technology that uses in a virtuous way all the agroforestry biomass: wood recovered along the banks of waterways and on the coast as well as that produced by the maintenance of woods and paths, and agricultural waste.
These resources can be developed locally in a recovery cycle that allows to turn them into clean, renewable energy, pellets and compost to be reused in agriculture.
All this by sequestering the greenhouse gases produced during processing, that is, by removing more CO2 from the atmosphere than is produced, as an active policy for climate warming and for limiting climate change.
The tool to implement this simple, sustainable and scalable community project, capable of creating a social and circular economy and feeding an employment chain, with the inclusion of resident, disadvantaged and out of the labor market workers, is the realization of a certified ecological platform, which consists of:
- An area for the transfer, differentiation and shredding of biomasses;
- A “Power Pallet” biomass boiler (PP30) with attached storage systems for both electrical and thermal energy;
- An electric compacting vehicle for handling and transport off the ecological platform.
The heat generated by the combustion of a small fraction of biomass in the Power Pallet, unique devices for the production of “carbon negative” renewable energy, transforms the remaining part into a combustible gas which, after suitable filtering, can be exploited in an internal combustion engine for the production of renewable energy, both electricity and heat.
This is an excerpt from an article originally published on Fairbnb.coop.
