The Clean Plate Club: The Search for Value from Food Waste Finds a Center of Gravity in Hawaii

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) All that food waste, all that potential value. What’s being done about all that material heading from the garbage pail to the landfill? Turns out, the State of Hawaii and BioTork are doing a lot. The Digest investigates.
The EPA tells us that there’s an epidemic in food waste dumped in landfills — which is pretty sad given the hungry people around the world, and all the things we can do with that waste even if it is past the point of suitability for the hungry. In the US alone, in 2012, “more than 36 million tons of food waste was generated, with only five percent diverted from landfills and incinerators for composting,” according to EPA.
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The State of Hawaii recently passed legislation to assist in funding a zero-waste project that converts crops, crop residues, dedicated energy crops, and agricultural waste into economically and environmentally sustainable biofuels and value-added co-products. Hawaii’s Department of Budget and Finance is now authorized, with the approval of Governor Neil Abercrombie, to issue special purpose revenue bonds in an amount not to exceed $50,000,000 for the purpose of planning, permitting, design, construction, equipping, and operating BioTork Hawaii’s commercial facilities.
BioTork’s bioconversion development efforts in Hawaii date back to 2010 when it launched proof of principle research for its technology. Using a proprietary evolutionary optimization approach, BioTork enhances the performance of non-GMO microorganisms under real-world industrial conditions in an unrivaled cost efficient way. The conversion process takes a few days to cycle in a heterotrophic environment, meaning no sunlight is needed, to create oil for biofuel and high-protein feed.
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With the additional support of special purpose revenue bond funding, BioTork Hawaii will be able to fuel the third step of its development program. This would involve scaling up to build and operate commercial facilities that will have the capacity to convert agricultural crops and by-products such as albizia, sweet potatoes, papaya, sugarcane bagasse, glycerol and molasses to biofuels and high-protein feed.
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It’s not as if industrial societies don’t know how to move waste. The problem is that, by and large, waste is an externality. The public subsidizes waste disposal, as a health measure. The lowest cost means of dealing with waste, to this point, has been landfill dumping. So we dump and dump until there’s no place left to dump locally. Then we dump it with our neighbors until they scream for mercy. Or dump into the river until the fish all die. Then we barge it somewhere else until the developing world or the oceans are filled with it.
Thank God we’re talking about visits to Mars and the Moon — two very nice, very large, interplanetary dumps.
So, let’s chat for a moment about the profit motive. Which is the absent friend in all our societal discussion of waste. READ MORE and MORE (Biomass Magazine/Gov. Neil Abercrombie's Office)