Texas A&M Dining Takes Sustainability To The Next Level

(Texas A&M University) Sustainability is more than a buzz word with Texas A&M University Dining, which partners with Terrabon, Inc. to collect post- consumer food scraps from the two biggest dining centers on campus for use in producing biofuels.
Terrabon will produce the biofuels by means of a process called MixAlco technology. In true Aggie fashion, Mark Holtzapple, professor of engineering at Texas A&M, developed the MixAlco technology that makes the process possible.
Terrabon has been a decade-long sponsor of research with Texas A&M’s Department of Chemical Engineering and the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, and the company has a license agreement with The Texas A&M University System to commercialize biofuel technology developed at the university, notes David Riddle, executive director for University Dining at Texas A&M.
“As director for licensing at the System’s Office of Technology Commercialization, I had the opportunity to negotiate the license agreement with Terrabon for the commercialization of the MixAlco technology,” Riddle says. ”In my role now with University Dining, I saw an opportunity to help further the commercialization of the technology by providing it with a critical raw input, food waste. It’s a cycle that benefits dining today through a reduction in costs associated with sending waste to the landfill, and has the potential to facilitate commercialization of a technology that the Texas A&M System has a vested interest in.”
The food waste is collected and stored in 55 gallon drums; Terrabon picks it up at no cost to the department and delivers it to its facility in Bryan. Currently, approximately 20 to 30 tons is recycled from University Dining per month, Riddle adds.
...Additional sustainability efforts by dining include all of the facilities cooking with zero trans fat oils and then taking the used cooking oil and recycling it into bio-diesel fuel, which is then used to power the department’s delivery truck.
...A combination of sustainability efforts by University Dining and the efforts of students, faculty and staff are responsible for The Princeton Review recognizing Texas A&M as one of the nation’s most environmentally responsible colleges last April, says Kelly Wellman, who heads green initiatives at Texas A&M. Wellman, whose title is “sustainability officer” in the Division of Operations, says sustainability is most commonly defined as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability ofr future generations to meet their own needs. READ MORE