Kathy Puffer of Tillson, state of New York, has been recognised on the AD and Biogas Business Awards for bringing small-scale-biogas options to communities and girls all over the world. On the annual Awards gala in Birmingham, UK, on 29 March, Kathy received the Ladies in Biogas Award, and her Biogas Schooling Hub was extremely recommended with second place within the Instructional Marketing campaign of the 12 months Award.
“Kathy goes the additional mile, proactively spreading the phrase about biogas, educating all all over the world”, commented Chris Huhne, chairman of ADBA. “The judges have been vastly impressed by the work Kathy and Photo voltaic Cities are doing. The Biogas Schooling Hub works with communities all around the world to assist small scale biogas succeed and allows individuals to entry anaerobic digestion and biogas know-how from any background, tradition, economic system and local weather. Kathy is admittedly making a distinction and making biogas occur!”
Kathy has been a devoted biogas person since putting in a house scale biodigester in 2014. Her household harvests the greens grown with the assistance of the liquid fertiliser, and so they prepare dinner most of their stove-top meals with the methane produced. She just lately upgraded to a HomeBiogas2 that she winterised and heats with sizzling air photo voltaic.
Kathy believes that when learners really feel empowered from their very own success, they’ll encourage their communities to get fired up about biogas and thus do their half to cut back greenhouse fuel emissions. She goals to construct group resilience, whereas producing their very own vitality from meals and animal residuals.
“Once I first began educating small-scale biogas and constructing digesters, I used to be one in every of solely a handful of ladies doing the work in a discipline of principally male engineers,” Kathy says. “I devoted myself to satisfy ladies the place they have been (whether or not within the kitchen, backyard, workshop, or lavatory) to reclaim their meals, waste, and vitality as a type of self-care and Earth-care for themselves, their households, and communities.”
In 2021, she established a curriculum for educating others easy methods to web site and dimension the very best biogas answer for their very own context through a smartphone app. By taking ladies’s realities and world inter-sectionalities into consideration, Kathy has devised a curriculum {that a}) works higher for everybody b) robustly helps individuals to succeed with small scale biogas, no matter their context c) empowers individuals to play a job in widespread biogas adoption.
Kathy has led a number of on-line programmes with members from Haiti, Belize, India, Africa, Europe, the U.S., and Puerto Rico, over 65% of them being ladies. The programme is being expanded to be supplied in numerous languages—this 12 months, Kathy is working together with her French/Haitian Creole-speaking colleague and fellow biogas educator Rose Bazile to translate the course supplies and educate Kathy’s curriculum.
You’ll be able to study extra about Kathy’s work and phone her at kathypuffer.com.
Try the “Succeed with Small-Scale Biogas” course, which opens for enrolment twice every year, at biogaseducation.com. Enrolment for the 4th cohort opens on nineteenth April.
The AD and Biogas Business Awards are run by the Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Affiliation (ADBA) and the World Biogas Affiliation (WBA). ADBA is the commerce affiliation for the UK anaerobic digestion and biogas trade, and the WBA is the worldwide commerce affiliation for the biogas, landfill fuel and anaerobic digestion sector
