"

What The Muncher Does

And How It Does It










#
What The Muncher Does

The Muncher combines biological, chemical, and mechanical processes to quickly
transform organic waste into solid cake mulch and liquid effluent, which significantly
increase the growth rate and yield of plants. It does this without producing
environmentally harmful materials. The Muncher does produce CO
2
(carbon dioxide),
which has commercial value, and can be captured and sold. For every 100 tons of
waste that enter The Muncher, only 20 tons remain in the form of cake and effluent.

It is easy to understand what the Muncher does, and how it does it, if you consider
another machine that you are intimately familiar with, which performs many of the same
processes. This machine is YOU! You perform all the processes of a Muncher, you
produce similar output, and you do it in much the same way as a Muncher.

Food

Anything you can eat, The Muncher can eat; but the Muncher also can eat lots of things
that you cant or wouldnt. The Muncher can eat all forms of organic waste, including
material that we would consider inedible or dangerous, such as rotting fish, manure, or
plastics.

Your food enters your body via your mouth. Organic waste enters The Muncher
through a hopper.






$
Chewing

You were probably told to chew your food thoroughly as a child, for two reasons. The
first is that, if you dont chew it, food might get stuck in your throat. The second reason
is that the digestion process works more efficiently if your food is mechanically broken
down and pulverized.

You chew your food with your teeth. The Muncher uses grinders to do the same thing.
Grinding the waste thoroughly prevents it from getting stuck as The Muncher moves it to
where it is digested, and it makes The Muncher digestion process more efficient.
Grinding increases surface area, which makes more room for the necessary chemical
and biological reactions. A fire will burn sawdust much more rapidly than a log of equal
weight, because the sawdust exposes more surface area.












%
Digestion

You digest food in your stomach. Digestion is a complicated process, with both
biological and chemical aspects. The food you eat is usually made of complex
chemicals. The digestive enzymes in your body break these complex chemicals down
into simpler ones, which your body can more easily utilize.

What your body accomplishes with enzymes, The Muncher accomplishes with a wide
variety of naturally occurring microorganisms. Like you, microorganisms need to eat
and different microorganisms have different dietary needs.

Some people have delicate digestions, but others have what is referred to as a cast-
iron stomach they can eat practically anything. The Muncher has a cast-iron
stomach because its mixture of organisms can adapt to any type of organic material.
For example, we demonstrated The Muncher for an organization that needed to process
pine needles something which conventional composting operations avoid! Fed a diet
of pine needles, the microorganisms that thrive on this diet rapidly multiply and
dominate The Munchers microorganism mix. The balance of The Muncher
microorganism mix enables it to adapt to any and all organic input material. In this
sense, The Muncher is much like you you live a healthier life if you have a balanced
diet but you can survive for a long time on some basic dietary essentials.





How Food Is Used

Your body uses the nutrients in food to stay healthy and active. Healthy adults
generally do not gain weight if they have a reasonable diet (one that supplies the right
amounts of useful nutrients), and exercise.

The Muncher reduces 100 pounds of organic waste to approximately 20 pounds of
mulch and effluent. Where do the other 80 pounds go? The microorganisms that
&
power The Muncher digest the organic waste and reproduce creating more
microorganisms. This accounts for some of the 80 pounds. Much of organic waste is
carbon, as the carbo in carbohydrates suggests. The Munchers microorganisms
metabolize these carbon compounds, combining the carbon with oxygen in the air to
produce carbon dioxide. This is called respiration, and you do it as well: when you
exhale, you are exhaling carbon dioxide.



Residues

Your body excretes food that is digested, but not used or stored in the body, in liquid or
solid form. Both forms have value as fertilizers, and are often used in more primitive
societies in this capacity. Urea is a nitrogen-rich fertilizer, is now artificially synthesized,
but was originally obtained from urine. Manure is often used to promote plant growth.

In a way, we can compare The Munchers solid mulch to manure; but there are
important differences. The smell that is characteristic of manure is a sulfur-containing
gas: either H
2
S (hydrogen sulfide) or SO
2
(sulfur dioxide). In addition to the foul smell,
these gases can be dangerous. By combining with moisture in your lungs, they can form
sulfuric acid, and they are explosive in high concentrations.
These gases are produced by your bodys anaerobic digestion process. An anaerobic
process is one that does not require oxygen. Anaerobic digesters produce the same
noxious byproducts as your digestive system. The Muncher, on the other hand, uses an
'
aerobic process: the microorganisms it uses breathe oxygen. Therefore, The Muncher
does not have this problem. The Munchers microorganism mix includes some that
thrive on sulfur. The sulfur component of organic waste becomes part of their bodies
rather than forming environmentally harmful and potentially dangerous sulfurous gases.

Another advantage of The Muncher, compared to anaerobic digesters, is that its aerobic
organisms reproduce much more rapidly than anaerobic organisms. In the time it takes
to double the population of an anaerobic organism, The Muncher organisms population
has doubled five times, producing 32 aerobic organisms for every two anaerobic
organisms. When a second generation of anaerobic organisms has produced four
offspring, the Muncher organisms have produced 1,024!

The solid cake and effluent produced by The Muncher are natural and organically
enhanced. Although the cake can be used for other purposes, such as mulch, both
cake and effluent are saturated with Muncher microorganisms. These organisms
facilitate the extraordinary plant growth. Some plants, such as legumes, have their own
microorganisms that fix nitrogen from the air; the plant produces its own fertilizer. It
appears that Muncher microorganisms act symbiotically to give non-legumes the same
capability.










(
Keeping Healthy

You dont digest your food well when youre sick. Youre not as hungry; food doesnt
taste as good; and you may prefer simpler foods, such as chicken soup. To maintain a
good digestion, you must maintain your health.

The Muncher needs to stay healthy as well. Keeping a Muncher healthy involves
several aspects. Just as you are vulnerable to toxic materials, there are certain
chemicals, such as chlorine and sulfuric acid that are toxic to Muncher microorganisms.
If youre sick enough, your digestive system empties itself and starts over. If The
Muncher experiences a similar crisis, it just means that the operators must dispose of
the toxic materials, and re-boot with a new batch of microorganisms.

There are other aspects to keeping a Muncher healthy. A Muncher needs to have
enough oxygen, because it uses aerobic microorganisms. A Muncher should be hot
inside, because its microorganisms reproduce more rapidly at higher temperatures; but
not too hot, as too much heat will kill the microorganisms. A Muncher also needs to
maintain a good acid/base balance.

To keep The Muncher healthy, the controller uses sensors to track these and other
operating parameters. If any parameters are in an unhealthy range, the controller
instructs subsystems to change oxygen flow, turn heaters on or off, or make other
changes, to restore the proper balance.



)
Things the Muncher Does That You Cant

Although The Muncher functions most efficiently when operating in aerobic mode, it can
function as an anaerobic digester. Anaerobic digesters differ from aerobic digesters in
that the primary product is CH
4
(methane): the main component of natural gas, an
important fuel. If fuel is more desirable than plant growth stimulators, the flip of a
switch will convert The Muncher to anaerobic mode and then back again.

The Muncher can do something else that you cannot do: environmental remediation.
The Muncher can break down many of the noxious chemicals that contaminate soil and
water. The Muncher can reduce or even eliminate polluting agents as diverse as
ammonia, nitrates, hydrocarbons, organic phosphates, and even PCBs.

# # #