Gaia EnviroTech builds and designs modular biodigesters in Regional Victoria

Gaia EnviroTech, the bioenergy and organic waste management division of Gekko Systems, have designed and manufactured Australia’s first modular anaerobic biodigester, with successful installations across regional Victoria and Tasmania.

Anaerobic digestion is a series of processes in which micro-organisms breakdown biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen. The Gaia EnviroTech biodigester allows these processes to operate in their optimum conditions, unlike other digesters where they can be compromised by the need to coexist in a single chamber.

Gaia EnviroTech’s modular biodigester is both highly configurable and efficient with the multistage system allowing each step of the digestion process to be optimised for greater biogas production, and thereby energy generation, from a particular feed material.

Based in the regional Victorian city of Ballarat, Gaia EnviroTech was born out of a conversation between Gekko Systems Technical Director, Sandy Gray, and a local pig farmer, Jock Charles, who had been running an anaerobic digester on his Berry Bank pig farm for over 20 years treating pig manure.

The conversation revolved around the question of why waste to energy initiatives are not more utilised in Australia, and that not only will the application of bioenergy help solve the ever-growing waste problem, but it will also contribute to reducing carbon emissions.

The recently released Australia’s Bioenergy Roadmap (November 2021) outlines the significant opportunity that bioenergy presents in reducing Australia’s emissions, diverting waste from landfill, enhancing fuel security, creating local jobs, and ultimately contributing $10b in extra GDP per annum over the next decade.

Sandy Gray highlights that “food waste alone costs the Australian economy over $20b per year in wasted resources; and if you include the significant volume of organic agricultural waste that Australian farmers produce each year, the role that bioenergy can play in combatting climate change becomes obvious”

Utilising Gekko Systems’ 25+ years as a leader in the mining, technology and services sector (METS) and the company’s extensive engineering and design capability, Gaia EnviroTech are focussed on empowering remote, regional and metropolitan communities to manage their food and green waste (FOGO) and other organic waste streams in a more localised setting, and reducing the amount of ‘waste miles’ required to dispose of waste effectively.

By providing solutions that are modular, scalable, and designed for the local context, Gaia EnviroTech are focussed on providing end-to-end organic waste management and bioenergy solutions to the Australian community.