Beached seagrass: Italy’s first plant that will use it to generate biogas and thus energy will be built in Pollica, Cilento, in the province of Salerno. We talked about it with Stefano Pisani, mayor of Pollica, who has been fighting to make the project a reality for years and is seeing the finish line.
Beached seagrass to produce energy: how did this innovative idea come about?
From a rather trivial circumstance. When you find yourself serving as mayor of a seaside resort, tourists often point out the dirty beach to you. For many beachgoers, a basic mistake is made: they consider beached Posidonia, which is fundamental to the balance of the marine ecosystem, including the production of energy and the preservation of biodiversity in the sea, as waste, because maybe it bothers our walk by the sea. Or maybe because the normal evolution of the Posidonia banquet produces small insects that are instead crucial to the balance of our coastal ecosystem. As mayor I have to find solutions that should not be overly impactful either.
So how did you go about it?
We began to envision proper management of Posidonia that would be able to ensure adequate survival of the Posidonia bank ecosystem, and at the same time allow us to accommodate those who had less sensitivity from the standpoint of understanding the role of Posidonia. Let us remember that beached Posidonia is nothing more than dry Posidonia that exhausts its life cycle: the current deposits it into the sea, but it has more fundamental functions, the first of which is to protect our coasts from coastal erosion. So we first allow Posidonia during the winter season to remain on our coasts to exhaust its first function. After that, in order to continue to provide the function of protection from coastal erosion, a not very large amount of this Posidonia we bury under the beach so as to compact the dunes and provide greater coastal defense. As long as it is possible we let the Posidonia manage the life cycle of the microorganisms that are generated in the bank. Once this function is exhausted, it is necessary to manage it.
Is this where the idea of planting is grafted in?
That’s right. We imagined a life cycle of Posidonia that would be exhausted within a fermentation cycle, a classic biogas plant that has a very important feature. We looked for the right management mix between beached Posidonia and FORSU, wet waste from separate collection, doing several researches so that the optimum of biogas production through the mix would be achieved. Normally we are all familiar with the existence of plants that produce biogas and electricity from the fermentation of wet waste, much less from Posidonia because it does not have adequate production capacity from the economic point of view, a break even point is not easily reached. But in this case, the innovation of our plant really comes from the mix of inputs that we put inside our plant.
Have you also been inspired by experiences made abroad?
Yes, mainly from small or large plants that were already managing Posidonia in different quantities and in different ways. Given the possibility of realizing the plant itself, we began to analyze the limitations of the context. We are a national park area where making “waste” treatment plants is not easy, in fact it is almost impossible. The Campania Region had chosen a medium-high size of composting and wet waste treatment plant because it considered in its waste management plan that the lower size, the one we chose for our plant, was too small, 7 thousand tons, including Posidonia, wet waste, structuring and whatnot. We first had to convince them in order to get us on the permitting path, because the region considered that plant absolutely not sustainable.
How did you convince the Region?
In a very trivial way: the Pollica plant is being built under project financing, at the total expense of the private entity. This is also a very interesting experience, because sharing the plant allowed us to overcome a number of barriers in terms of perception of the project. The usual not-in-my-backyard mechanism did not work; the exact opposite worked for us. Within the national park it is very complicated to build the plants, in fact we are taking advantage of two exemptions in the permitting process, one from the environmental point of view with respect to the national park plan currently in force and the other with respect to the landscape protection plan.
Is this a respect in name and in fact?
Of course: the plant fits into an area of great environmental value, but where we have already built in an absolutely environmentally friendly way a fundamental facility for the management of human-environment interaction, which is the recycling collection center. Pollica averages 83 percent separate collection all year round, even in the months of highest tourist load, which are August, July, June and September. Sewage sludge will also flow into the beached Poseidonia treatment plant. The plant’s production potential is equal to the needs of 500 families. Pollica is a small municipality, during the winter we are about 2200 inhabitants, about 500 families.
In this way are you self-sufficient?
Pollica is a constant source of renewable energy production, which has no connection with the life cycle of the elements, sun, wind, water. Instead, it is a stable source that allows us within our renewable energy community project to stabilize the path of disconnection of our community from the non-renewable sources of energy production, on which our electrical life is supplied. Normally in Italy we are in pretty bad shape, so it seemed particularly relevant to us to push in this direction. From what appears to many to be a great negativity, namely the “dirty” beaches of Pollica, which instead have been rewarded for 30 years for being among the best beaches in Italy, today we have come to the conclusion of a path that will lead us to produce the energy for our citizens from this extraordinary plant that is Posidonia.
Have you managed to put together the needs of tourists who do not know the importance of Posidonia, with those of its disposal and the economic needs of citizens?
It is definitely a win-win project, this I say proudly. In the project financing tender through which we entrusted the construction and simultaneous operation for 30 years of the plant itself, we were offered the possibility-as soon as we complete the construction and go full-scale with the plant-to reduce the energy bills of our citizens, with an annual fee to be determined later. But it even allows us to save about 150,000 euros of the wet waste delivery cost, which we were normally paying to dispose of our wet waste. So this is the first savings, reduction of energy bill and reduction of waste tax for the benefit of our citizens.
Explained this to your fellow citizens, have they become supporters of the project?
Extraordinary supporters, especially because for a long time in Pollica we have had a very good relationship with our waste, our citizens, but also our temporary citizens, our tourists, who even when there was a waste emergency in Campania were the ones who did the separate waste collection. In Naples, where they have their main residence, there was garbage in the streets, in Pollica they were the ones who were sorting. So the culture of managing our correct correlation with the environment is fundamental, and we have made it one of our development cables. There is also to say that we are not content to put in place good initiatives that are environmentally and economically sustainable, but we tend to educate what are the future generations.
In what way?
The biogas plant will be built near the collection center and our water purifier, which are located in the nature hiking trail, where you can encounter extraordinary biodiversity. The Cilento National Park collects more or less 33 percent of the national plant and animal biodiversity, and there people will be able to learn about two pieces: the value of our environment, and also how human beings can have an absolutely proactive and positive relationship with the environment, maintain a balance that is often lacking. For the lack of balance we sometimes justify ourselves, however, we have to do something, find solutions that allow us not to negatively impact the environment in which we live, rather tend to regenerate the resources that we normally draw from our planet.
In a nutshell, from a technical point of view, how will the plant work?
It is quite simple: we recover the posidonia from the beach, bring it inside the plant, where it is washed with ultraviolet-filtered sewage water, so the first piece of circular economy we generate in the first phase. Normally it would have to be washed with fresh water and therefore generate non-potable water resource use, but still water that can be used for irrigation. Near the sewage treatment plant we have applied an ultraviolet treatment that allows us to use the sewage water for non-potable, dual use. So the plant will be connected to the sewage treatment plant for washing the posidonia, with the collection of all the findings of the washing. Very often we find a lot of sand when we remove the posidonia, which has to be brought back to the beach for proper nourishment. The litter part is then removed, although our beaches do not have a significant amount of litter: there are definitely a minimum of microplastics, but it is really a small amount. Then the wet waste is brought into the plant for mixed fermentation, which is recovered from the collection center that is adhered to the plant itself, and is left to ferment for a necessary number of days. This allows us to produce biogas, which through a burner generates electricity. It is an anaerobic plant, so there is no production of odors either. It’s quite simple, the technicality is in the right mix, the right balance of inputs, if you lack that you don’t produce energy or you produce too little, so the key to the success of the plant is in that. The technology is quite mature, we all know it, but the right mix was missing.
What kind of difficulties did you encounter in taking the project forward?
I would have liked to answer: it was simple, instead it is very very complicated, especially when we imagine creating innovations. Innovations under the private sector are a little bit easier to do, it is much more complicated for a public administration to have a burst of creativity, especially when then it is political governance that has it and not a technical structure that steers in that direction. The biggest handicap we have in Italy is definitely bureaucracy. Not having simplified procedures to put in place innovative actions in critical areas such as waste management, with the need to have to first imagine every time to undergo the process of intention and then to be able to demonstrate the value of the design, has forced us to work relentlessly for four years, and we are still trying to untangle the last missing pieces. However, perseverance is definitely the determining element in making great process innovations, we know that very well, there is no other way. Telling about experiences is fine, very often, however, it is necessary for those experiences to be translated into normative, regulatory, contextual directions needed by others. When we tell the Japanese about this plant, as was the case recently, then they call us and say, why don’t you come and set up this plant with us in a very short time, so you can help us manage our posidonia? My fear is that my plant in Pollica will come later than the one in Tokyo, and I am very sorry about that.
At this point realistically what could be the time frame for implementation?
We hope next spring to be operational, with the plant completed. After four years this is a great achievement, taking into account that very often the competence of administrative decision makers and public administration is not as strong as we would like.