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 begin offloading the food waste, sorting it and putting it in our trailer for its end destination. Once this trailer gets full (approximately 36 tonnes of food waste!), it is tarped and ready for transport to StormFisher, a London, Ontario based BioGas facility.
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, 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 biproduct.
- Through the fermentation process, a high nutrient ‘sludge’ or ‘compost’ is collected as a biproduct that can later be returned to the ground as a method of fertilization
- Any packaging or non-digestible solids are collected through the process and discarded as necessary
- This biogas produced is further processed, resulting in a gas consisting of mostly methane. This 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.
This is the current journey that your food waste takes to get recycled with our service. In the near future, this procedure will be modified when we fully install the BioSqueeze 200 system, the first of its kind in North America to process IC&I food waste. This will help better sort the waste between food waste and packaging, ensuring we are able to recycle more food waste then ever before, while properly disposing of packaging, garbage and other non-digestible solid waste. More details on this new equipment will be released very soon!
If you have any questions about any of our processes or services, please do not hesitate to reach out to us for more details.