Aquaponics Brewery powered by fish waste?
Is it a brewery or a tea shop or an aquaponics system or even a bit of a mixture of Permaculture design? It’s so crazy, it might just work?
Wouldn’t it be great to have an aquaponics system running like a perpetual motion machine where you just add a few fish and some plants and the system grows food and beer as well? Heck, why stop there, add a bio-digester and power the whole thing off the waste of the spent grain from the brewery?
This is the brainchild idea of Chicago entrepreneur John Edel who plans on turning a 93,000 square foot disused meat packing plant to a vertical farm with zero waste called The Plant!
Now that’s an ambitious project. Watch this very short clip showing you how the whole system is meant to work.
Getting the whole system to work requires choosing the right tenants. The plant requires the services of a handful of bakers, a tea house, a brewery, a aquaponics fish farm, and mushroom garden to use all the waste in a symbiotic relationship. The waste from one tenant is the raw materials for another. Once the Brewery is set up its all meant to run like clockwork. The brewery’s spent grains will feed the aquaponics fish farm running tilapia and the bio-digestor which is expected to power a generator to power the whole plant. The waste products from the fish will nourish the mushroom garden or feed the plants under grow-lights powered by a bio-digestor , and the plants (found in the aquaculture operations) will clean the water and send it back to the fish farm. Sort of.
The system is under construction and won’t be ready for a few years yet.
There’s an interview with creator John Edel that gives you a tour of the abandoned meat plant. Down in the dungeons of the plant you can see the aquaponics setup and red grow-lights powering away (around the 6 minute mark in the interview).They intend to fill the entire basement of 20,000 square feet with aquaponic growbeds.
We like the idea of a brewery. Ever Aquaponics system should have one. Makes inspecting the plants and looking at the fish more enjoyable.
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