From Food Waste to Biobased

by Helena Tavares Kennedy (Biofuels Digest) ... “About 1.3 billion tons of food is lost or wasted every year – an estimated one in three mouthfuls of food every day,” according to Alessandro Demaio, Chief Executive Officer of the Norway-based EAT, an international NGO engaged in the fight against hunger. “In poorer nations, this waste generally occurs pre-market. In wealthier countries, the majority of waste occurs after market, in supermarkets and in our homes.”

Food waste has become such a mainstream issue now that United Kingdom-based food tech company It’s Fresh! launched a food waste calculator to enable consumers to understand the true cost of the fruit and vegetables they discard.

It’s not just a U.S. problem either. Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975. 39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2016, and 13% were obese. Most of the world’s population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight. Maybe the Clean Plate Club and your Mom telling you to eat all your food wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Solutions

Since the supply chain is the biggest issue in poorer countries, better supply chain technologies like packaging and refrigeration could help alleviate food waste. Precision agriculture could also help tremendously. For wealthier countries, individuals can make a huge impact by just buying less, avoiding impulse buys, and going back to 1970’s food portion sizes instead of today’s supersized portions (.

While we can surely curb food waste, it probably will always still be there to some extent. So what do you do with the food waste that remains?

Scotland-based Celtic Renewables has a good solution for whisky residue anyway, turning it into biobutanol that can power a car.

Montana-based Blue Marble Biomaterials is creating advanced flavorings made from seemingly impossible materials, including a highly sought after U.S. and E.U. Natural version of bacon dithiazine (bacon flavor ingredient) made from food waste like old coffee grounds and spent grape pomace (the stems, skin, pulp, seeds leftover after juice pressing).

Ohio State University researchers discovered a way to use food waste as a replacement for fossil fuel based fillers used in tire manufacturing. Eggshells made the rubber larger surface area for better contact with the rubber, and tomato peels made the rubber more stable at higher temperatures, allowing these two food waste products to be flexible and resilient options to replace carbon black. This would allow the U.S. to rely less on importing carbon black or other rubber fillers from overseas, help deal with food waste issues, and help improve rubber tires’ properties and performance.

Tomato waste seems to be pretty useful with Italy-based BIOPROTO project which aims to create bioplastics from the tomato fruit peel residues.

Most people don’t do a backyard compost pile either. So other than launching a huge campaign to get people to start backyard compost piles (or for those in cities and apartments, indoor worm composting), we need to do something.

And why can’t the food waste just to go landfills? Methane gas is a big issue in landfills and food doesn’t adequately compost mixed in with all those plastics, metals and other non-biobased materials that take hundreds of years to decompose. In fact, if food waste is composted properly with access to oxygen (which doesn’t happen in a landfill), then it doesn’t emit methane at all…it emits carbon dioxide, much less toxic to our planet and our health than methane.

However, companies like California-based Fulcrum BioEnergy are making progress with what food waste does go to landfill, that something valuable still come out of it, like biojet fuel. Canada-based Enerkem is also turning trash to treasure with their waste-to-chemistry project in Rotterdam to be the first of its kind in Europe to convert municipal solid waste into methanol, ethanol and other widely-used chemicals.

Velocys enables modular gas-to-liquids and biomass-to-liquids plants to convert unconventional, remote and problem gas and waste biomass into valuable, drop-in liquid fuels.

Velocys has also been making strides with technology that helps modular gas-to-liquids and biomass-to-liquids plants convert unconventional, remote and problem gas and waste biomass into valuable, drop-in liquid fuels. They’ve been working with big name companies like Red Rock Biofuels to get their technology in place and make the magic happen. READ MORE