DIGIVU Combined Blogs » Waste

Are You Starting To Think About Carbon Footprints & Sustainability?

admin — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:52:50 +0000

Its my feeling that you need to be! both from a point of view of “saving the world” and from the point of view of satisfying your customers moral desires. The introduction of the lifecycle concept in this argument is very important because a partial analysis can miss larger hidden differences if all impacts are not determined.

This article by IUFoST is a good place to start understanding the issues and the practices.

from: IUFoST
(click image for full story online)

The article outlines a range of issues such as Life Cycle Assessment, global warming, eutrophication, acidification, abiotic resource use, pesticide use/ecotoxicity, land use, Water use and Carbon Footprint of food and interaction with other impacts, before focussing on food processing.

It covers the process based approach, assessment boundaries, mass balance, emissions and co-products and highlight the difficulty of assessing complex foods. The paper gives information and links on the sources of data and provides some data comparing the carbon footprints of food.

A final section shows how the kind of information given here can be used to support decisions and actions in many areas.

Waste & Over Eating vs Need & Malnutrition

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 06:04:41 +0000

The work in the United Kindom on waste in the food system has lead to an intriguing, data rich report which is available on the WRAP website.

from: WRAP
(click image for full story online)

Taking the information of how much food is wasted from this report, with the post on excessively nutritious foods and Michele Obama’s work with the the food industry to reduce the energy content in the food they sell together surely indicates a process that should start to redistribute calories.

Maybe some more about this in future posts.

SAB Miller Uses Brewery Waste from Alrode Brewery in South Africa to Reduce Carbon Footprint

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:19:45 +0000

I copy this post from Ecowordly, because I think all food processing industries should be investigating the potential of anaerobic digestion to convert waste into biogas to supplement their energy supply. It makes sense in lots of ways!

SAB Miller, South African grown, second largest brewer in the world has introduced anaerobic digestion to treat the waste leaving its Alrode Brewery in Gauteng, South Africa. Anaerobic fermentation of organic material produces methane, which is used to reduce the consumption of fossil fuel based energy.

TrappistBrewhouse.pdf

Copper brewhouse in a Trappist brewery

Brewery Waste & Biogas

In the brewery the waste is a collection of unavoidable losses of carbohydrate and protein rich materials, which would otherwise be sold as beer or byproduct and the large quantities of water used to maintain a hygienic operation.[social_buttons]This waste is normally fed to standard industrial effluent treatment plants, either in the brewery or at the local authority, where physical and aerobic fermentation processes are used to remove the organic material. The cost of this treatment or the fee paid is directly related to the organic level and volume of the waste.

In the biogas recovery project the brewery’s effluent is treated by converting organic material into methane gas by means of the anaerobic digestion process. The anaerobic digestion process converts 90% of the 25 tons a day of organic material leaving the Alrode brewery in five million litres of effluent. This produces 9,000 m³ ( 320,000 cubic feet) of biogas containing 85% methane. The biogas is fed to a boiler where it is burnt to produce steam that is used to power the brewing process. The biogas saves the consumption of 10.4 tons per day of coal a saving of around R 7,000 ($1,000) a day.

At the same time there is a saving in effluent tariffs and costs as well as electricity which would otherwise have been used to power the activated sludge process.

Other Opportunities

Many industries in South Africa use anaerobic digesters in their waste water treatment but Alrode is the only of its kind to make optimal use of its biogas. This installation is likely to act as a model for other breweries in the group.

In South Africa food manufacturing is concentrated in the urban areas and the plants effluent is mainly, possibly with some pretreatment, discharged to the municipal sewers. With the increasing load on these systems and the national concern about South Africa’s water resources the tariffs charged by municipalities are certain to escalate in the short and medium term. This along with increases in energy costs is certain to increase the attractiveness of anaerobic effluent treatment both as a cost saver and a contribution to combatting global warming.

Biogas can be used to generate either electrical and/or thermal energy depending on the demands of each installation. It is also possible for electricity produced from biogas to be sold into the grid at a realistic price that will be determined by the second set of feed in tariffs about to be announced by NERSA (Mational Energy Regulator of South Africa).

This is the sixth in a series of posts that aim to provide information on the development of renewable energy in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa in particular. These are

Photo by Luca Galuzzi – www.galuzzi.it in Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.

What Should I be Publishing?

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:07:52 +0000

Here is your opportunity to tell me what you would like me to be publishing here! Please email me here – dave@digivu.co.za or simply make a comment at the end of the post. Everyone who makes an input can supply me with information, which will be posted on www.digivu.co.za – what about using this as an advert?

You will have noticed I’ve been posting a bit more of non food processing bits and a bit slower in the last while – but remember you can access the information in many ways.

1) Remember though you can look at particular types of posts by going down to the bottom left and clicking a category, or even by entering an expanded URL.

eg food processing – http://www.digivu.co.za/category/food-processing/
African Businesses – http://www.digivu.co.za/category/african-foodbiz/
waste – http://www.digivu.co.za/category/waste/
biofuels – http://www.digivu.co.za/category/biofuels/

2) You can search the site/blog from the the “Search Just The Blog” google search box.

3) Scan bookmarks I make to interesting articles under “STORIES NOT POSTED” to the left or in more detail from News buttons in the top menu.

4) You can email for free assistance – see “Free Q&A Service” in the top menu.

5) You can also watch other of my channels like Facebook & twitter although I need more feedback on whether these are at all useful.

BUT PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU WOULD REALLY FIND USEFUL!

Fruit & Vegetable Drying – I

admin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:31:01 +0000

I intend to do a series of posts on fruit and vegetable drying given that this is one of the simplest, safest and cheapest processing technologies. However, as I am always promoting that we need to start at the market side. We also need to define the sector we are working in.

But first a photo to get us thinking away from the shriveled dark brown piece of “banana” that we are used to see.

photo by ccarlstead
(Creative Commons License)

This attractive and tasty looking of fruit is on sale in bulk, in a market in Istanbul. While I have seen many markets selling bags of cereals in Sub Saharan African few seem to sell dried fruit which is essentially just as well preserved.

Also of interest in this photo is that the fruit is not simply dried but glazed, dusted and prepared in different ways.

These large quantities of dried fruit could represent fruit that was in excess of the demand for fresh fruit that could have been wasted if not dried and was possibly purchased at a low price. Otherwise it could have been fruit that was purposefully grown to be dried to provide food for use during the winter or even as a supplier to a dried fruit producer.

So there’s lots to think about! which we will be doing over the next while in this series of posts.