Humans are wasteful (sorry, we know that’s hard to hear). Today, we’ll focus on our food waste. That’s because it constitutes about 10% of the excess bad stuff in the atmosphere that’s making us all so miserable, like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Since we can’t seem to reel it in, that means somebody must swoop in and clean up the mess.
What does that look like here? It looks like food waste being converted to energy for our use… if we can’t clean up our habits, we can at least use them to our advantage. This means there’s what appears to be a quickly growing market for food waste for clean energy. According to Grand View Research, the global food waste to energy market is set to grow by billions a year for the foreseeable future.
Food waste is food we don’t or can’t eat for some reason. As of right now, a good chunk of food waste isn’t being used for anything helpful to us. We’re happy to report that is changing… rapidly. Now, we’re starting to take this food waste at a larger scale and convert it into clean energy. Things like fruits and vegetables, which are high in organic matter, making them ideal for clean energy conversion technologies.
Grains and cereals are also high in organic matter, and meat, poultry, and fish are high in protein and fat, great for biogas and biodiesel. Wasted dairy products have lots of lactose, which can be used for biogas and ethanol. Oils and fats are also good choices for biodiesel. Processed foods can go into biogas and ethanol… food scraps to biogas and compost. Food manufacturing waste (like wastewater and sludge) is good for biogas and biodiesel.
We want to start doing this for a few reasons. An important reason is that converting food waste into clean energy is cost-effective. That means it’ll play an important part in our larger clean energy mix. You may have noticed your local government’s PR starting to push the concept, along with images showcasing recent technological advancements in food waste to energy conversion.
We’re seeing a marked rise in demand for sustainable energy sources as folks struggle to detangle themselves from crumbling infrastructure grids not ready for climate chaos. If you follow the space, names you might recognize include Waga Energy, Waste Management, Suez, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. Keep an eye out for new guys, you might just spot a future winner.
Think of converting food waste to energy as garbage alchemy… one way it can be can be done is the production of renewable natural gas (RNG) from pre-consumer food and beverage waste. Pre-consumer products are just things that we’ve manufactured, but aren’t in the hands of consumers yet. Companies like Goldman Sachs darling Synthica Energy are an example that works well here.
Just to draw a contrast, using pre-consumer food waste is different from the approach of some other companies. Some aim to use post-consumer food waste, which is stuff like leftovers that we throw out at home, or that’s tossed out by restaurants. Some prefer food processing byproducts… these are generated during the processing of food, like whey from making cheesecake.
Food and beverage company Danone North America is turning food waste into renewable energy, and we should have a look because they’ve joined something called the Farm Powered Strategic Alliance. This is a movement that wants to bring us our next iteration of food waste recycling. They want all of America to have access to clean energy, so they’re working on a network of renewable energy facilities.
Divert Inc. has busied themselves with a network of integrated diversion & energy facilities to process food waste into renewable energy and other valuable products and has broken ground on several facilities, including one in Longview, Washington. They already operate multiple facilities across the U.S… seems they may share Walmart’s proximity strategy, as they plan expand be within 100 miles of 80% of the population by 2031.
Looking at these trends, there’s probably no backtracking on garbage alchemy. So, what now? To cover all our bases, we should be looking at what’s next. Converting food waste to clean energy looks like it’s on track for rapid expansion. We have processes like anaerobic digestion, which uses bacteria to break down food waste to generate electricity or heat. There’s gasification, which converts food waste to a useful fuel source called syngas (synthetic gas).
There’s also pyrolysis, which gives us something called biochar, which is like charcoal and can improve soil fertility or generate electricity. This one is newer… so look out to hear more about it. We should see increasing government support, corporate interest, and public awareness of these processes… there’s billions of us, it’s silly not to use every tool at our disposal to benefit ourselves. Come back next week, we’ll have more from the green tech space.