Food waste is fuel, whether it is being eaten by people, animals or microbes. But because humans are not omnivores, preparing food for our tables produces food wastes – and always will. Fundamentally, there’s no difference between the food wastes produced in a domestic kitchen, and those arising from the food processing industry, and traditionally these wastes have been thrown away or perhaps recycled into animal fodder or back into the soil – it has been the easiest, cheapest thing to do.
The heightened awareness of the need to reduce carbon emissions and generate renewable energy has increased interest in exploiting the fuel value of those food wastes as an alternative means of managing food waste disposal.
Suitable technologies (notably anaerobic digestion) have been around for many years, and Government incentives in the form of sticks (landfill tax, for example) and carrots (renewable energy subsidies) make adopting such technologies increasingly economically attractive.
But there’s a catch. A moment’s thought will reveal that the vast majority of food wastes are generated in domestic kitchens or in small commercial operations such as restaurants, food stores and snack bars. Even larger organisations such as supermarkets and fast-food chains, who may generate substantial amounts of food waste overall, do so at many locations across the country which each generate only small amounts.
Plants to convert food wastes into energy are costly, and need to be of a certain size to be viable. You can’t have one on every street corner, so all those small volumes of waste need to be collected and transported to a central plant located somewhere within economic transport range. Before anyone will take the risk of building a plant, therefore, it is essential to be confident that sufficient wastes can be secured, at the right cost, to provide the fuel for the plant and the income to pay for it. This is not easy and largely explains why so few projects serving the commercial or industrial food waste sector have got off the ground.
The food processing industry is uniquely placed to profit from this situation – especially the operators of the larger processing sites where substantial volumes of food wastes are available in one location. Why? Simple – if your site has enough food wastes of its own, then you have a guaranteed baseload of fuel for a conversion plant. You don’t have to ferret around tying up hundreds of deals with small waste sources to fill a plant. You can simply build your plant using AD or another suitable technology, process your waste, generate power, and use it to drive your process in an efficient closed-loop treatment process. You gain a number of benefits besides the obvious one of generating renewable energy; you reduce transport of waste off site, you avoid off-site disposal costs, and you can proudly explain to customers and consumers alike how you are reducing your carbon emissions and building a more sustainable business.
Of course it is not quite that simple. Building a conversion plant makes sense only if it is right to do so technically and economically. Few manufacturers would wish, or can afford, to build a plant on “green credentials” alone – it needs to make sense from the perspective of the bottom line as well. This means that it is necessary to carefully analyse the available waste feeds, the costs (or indeed revenues) of current disposal options, the potential income from generated energy, the design and technical performance of the proposed plant, and the capital and operating costs of the conversion plant. Going through this process of exploration, design and development costs money, takes time, and demands expertise.
Some food manufacturers are happy to do this for themselves, perhaps with the help of consultants, and indeed a number of such projects are under way – for example there are several in the distillery sector which is particularly suited to this approach. In many cases, though, companies are unwilling to divert precious resources into non-core areas, are under cost constraints or do not wish to invest their own capital into waste handling activities, or simply do not wish to be distracted from their core missions.
Which is where InSource Energy comes in. We are an independent developer of waste-to-energy projects, specialising in on-site, closed loop projects for the food processing sector, We offer a complete package – we will develop the initial concept at our risk and at no cost to the client until we can demonstrate that there really is a viable project for a given site. We are not tied to any technology and can offer the best fit from all the available technologies for the unique needs of a given client. Once we have demonstrated a viable project, we can fund the planning, construction and operation of the plant in return for a long term agreement with the client to process waste and purchase energy. We always aim to deliver a solution which provides the client with a tangible bottom-line benefit by sharing the project returns with the client, as well as the non-financial benefits associated with the adoption of sustainable technology.
Even if you think your site is too small to sustain such an approach. This may not be the case. Some wastes which are currently sold (for example for animal feeds) and represent an income may be more valuable if converted to energy than the income received. In other cases, it may be possible to supplement the wastes available on a given site by importing wastes from other food factories nearby, or it may make sense to purchase supplementary fuels such as grass silage or maize to increase the energy output of a unit.
One thing is for certain – all food manufacturers should be thinking about the scope for benefiting from using their food wastes for energy generation. Even if it is not for you, you need to understand why not so that you can explain this to your shareholders and customers when they ask why you are not doing it!
