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“We have to reduce the cost of operating this facility. We wanted to do something and that's when we started talking about the anaerobic digester,” said Steve Giarusso, Minoa Wastewater Treatment Supervisor.

Steve Giarusso supervises Minoa's wastewater treatment operation which uses a combination of wetlands, a fixed film reactor, and a sequential batch reactor.

The sequential batch reactor is very productive, cleaning about a half million gallons of waste water every day.

Everything has a drawback. It's expensive to operate electrically; it has a ton of moving parts and a lot of o and m, operation and maintenance.

But it also produces about 20,000 gallons of biosolids during an average week and village officials hope an anaerobic digester like this one can turn those biosolids into energy.

Right now the liquid biosolids are processed here.

What we're trying to do is reduce anything left in the waste, any carbon, any ammonia. We want that stripped out. Then from here it goes to a bell press where we make it into a solid and from there it goes to a landfill.

Instead of sending it to a landfill, our goal is to combine the liquid biosolids with food waste, both pre - consumer and post consumer, and run it through an anaerobic digester and from the anaerobic digester create methane.

The methane will be used to run a generator that will produce electricity and they hope to use the methane in a new garbage truck.

“It's a compressed natural gas garbage truck and it's another part of this project. We hope to convert the methane to power that also,” said Mayor Dick Donovan.

Minoa Mayor Dick Donovan hopes to see the project under construction before the end of the year.