Where Does Your Food Waste Go?
Posted February 15, 2024
An Overview of What Davidson Environmental Does with Your Waste!
You may be one of our customers, or you may just be interested in our service – either way, this blog post will take you through exactly what we do with your food waste when our drivers pick it up.
There are all kinds of businesses that fall into the institutional, commercial, and industrial (IC&I) category that participate in our food waste recycling service. Among those businesses are restaurants, hospitals, long term care homes and retail establishments (and everywhere in between that has food and/or serves food). From these places, we get all types of different food waste, including, prepared food, biproduct foods (such as coffee grinds, or peelings), packaged foods, produce and meats/poultry. We take it all!
Once our drivers collect this food waste from our assortment of customers, that food waste comes back to our warehouse. We then unload the food waste. The waste is fed into our Biosqeeze. This hydraulically operated system separates waste into digestible and non-digestible components with a high degree of efficiency. This means that if we put in any waste that contains fragments or parts of in-organic matter/waste, this machine will properly separate the organic matter from its solid waste counterpart. This creates a nutrient dense slurry that is in a perfect composition for use at a BioGas facility as well as condensed ‘slugs’ of packaging that are perfect for waste-to-energy incineration.
The slurry is trucked to BioGas facilities for example:
- Escarpment Renewables Anaerobic Digestion Facility produces BioGas that they then burn to convert to electricity which is fed into the Ontario electrical grid under the provincial renewable feed-in tariff program.
- StormFisher produces Green Hydrogen, Renewable Natural Gas and eMethanol from the slurry we deliver to them.
The BioGas process is part of a biological waste treatment method used in waste treatment plants everywhere in the world. Most of us have heard of ‘composting’ as the way to recycle food waste, and although that process holds true during the BioGas process, the difference is that instead of releasing the gases produced during the fermentation process into the air, the gases are collected and used as a fuel product. The break down of steps are as follows:
- Liquid organic waste, animal manure and solid organic waste is led into a digester where an anaerobic process using bacteria ferments the waste and produces biogas as a gaseous bi-product.
- Through the fermentation process, a high nutrient ‘sludge’ or ‘compost’ is collected as a bi-product that is later returned to the ground as fertiliser.
- Any packaging or non-digestible solids are collected through the process and processed or discarded as is necessary.
- The biogas produced is further processed, resulting in a gas consisting of mostly methane, which is similar to natural gas obtained from the oil and gas fields.
- The methane and carbon dioxide gases can be stored under high pressures in cylinders or pumped directly back into the grid for use in both renewable electricity and renewable natural gas.
To re-cap, your food waste goes to processes that create renewable green-energy.
If you have any questions about any of our processes or services, please do not hesitate to reach out to us for more details.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form