I’m all about “Oh Wow” green stories. This is surely one of them. I’m not about hearing TV anchors make cheesy jokes about cool green stories. That’s why Will Farrel in Anchorman was such a GAS!

The short of it is….Onion plant goes green, big time and the news people were trying to have fun with a story from Oxnard, California. A big onion processor will now have the ability to run itself with onion juice extracted from onion waste.

Incoming cheesy TV anchor line, “You’d have to make a pretty big salad to get the blah blah blah kind of energy …” C’mon you guys. You wonder why www.theonion.com is such a hoot! Because, TV anchors  need to know they are a parody of themselves. I worked in the media for two decades with TV folks and I gave the ones that behaved real on or off the set, major kudos.

It’s the Mary Hart from Entertainment Tonight fake stuff that just drives me nuts. Yes, I saw her interviewed about her getting walked on stage with Michael Jackson and sorry, I know it’s true, but that sounded far from authentic. Mary, I know you’re a diva TV veteran and I do give you props, yet I just can’t get there with ya. Love ya!

Now, lets hope they can wipe that besmirched smirk off their face and celebrate how green our ONIONS really are.

We’re talking whole peeled onions, onion slices and onion dices for food service and retail use, as well as for the processing industry.

“We built an advanced energy recovery system,” said Nikki Rodoni, sustainability coordinator. “We generate about 300,000 pounds of onion waste per day.”

From that waste material, Gills Onions will extract the juice and send it for conversion into methane. Hydrogen is stripped off, and that feeds into two fuel cells that power the facility.

“We’ve installed two 300-kilowatt fuel cells, so we’re generating 600 kilowatts 24/7 at our processing facility,” Rodoni said.

Rodoni joined the company a year and a half ago and has spent a lot of her time devoted to this project.

The leftover onion waste, after its juice is extracted, is used as cattle feed.

“This is utilizing 100% of our waste,” Rodoni said.

I like the fact that the state is really incentivizing us to go green. The Onion tribe down in Oxnard pulled down a $2.7 million rebate from the Self Generation Incentive Program. Along with the new facility, the company plans to unveil a slew of sustainability efforts.

For one, the company joined the Climate Registry, a nonprofit North American organization that is working on standards to calculate and verify reports on greenhouse gas emissions.

This was a show stopper and I believe it’s true. The CO2 emissions genie is not going back into the bottle.

“Eventually everyone will have to report CO2 emissions, so we’re just taking a voluntary step to start that,” Rodoni said.