A BREATH OF FRESH AIR SAY CHEESE WAR ON ... - GEA Group

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14 AT THE END OF 2011, THE UK GOVERNMENT PUBLISHED A POLICY DOCUMENT ON WASTE THAT CONTAINS SOME SHOCKING STATISTICS. Food waste At the end of 2011, the UK Government published a policy document on waste that contains some shocking statistics. Each year, Britain throws away around 16 million tonnes of food and drink. Half of this is from households, and at least 60 per cent of this waste is avoidable: the food could have been eaten at some point. As well as costing the average household EUR 588 a year, there are significant costs to the environment of producing, transporting and then disposing of food that ends up being wasted. Research suggests that 20 million tonnes of CO 2 equivalent emissions are created and 6.2 billion cubic meters of water are used to produce food wasted by UK households. This equals three per cent of the UK’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions and six per cent of its global water footprint. AnAErobic diGEstion procEss How it works Complex organic material (manure) In landfill – where at least 40 per cent of this food waste ends up – it degrades slowly giving off methane, which is a greenhouse gas 21 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The UK Government’s vision for tackling this involves working to ensure that no food waste goes to landfill, and that it is used instead for the production of renewable energy and biofertilizer through anaerobic digestion (AD). Food to energy AD is a natural process in which microorganisms break down organic matter, in the absence of oxygen, into biogas (a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane) and digestate – a nitrogen-rich, renewable fertilizer. The biogas can be used directly in engines for Combined Heat and Power (CHP), burned to produce heat, or can be cleaned and used in the same way as natural gas. AD has a number of advantages over other renewable energy technologies. The energy is generated constantly – unlike wind, tidal or solar power – and can be delivered to the grid in the form of electricity or stored in the grid First phase: Liquefaction Simple organics Acid-forming bacteria second phase: Gasification Volatile acids Methane-forming bacteria 5-20 days temperature dependent Methane and carbon dioxide (biogas) Low odor nutrient-rich liquid
UK AGRICULTURE PRODUCES ROUGHLY 90 MILLION TONNES OF SLURRY AND MANURES EACH YEAR. in the form of gas. AD facilities are relatively quick and cheap to construct and can be scaled to local feedstock availability. Methane is also one of the few renewable fuels suitable for heavy goods vehicles. The UK Government estimates that if five of the seven million tonnes of food waste sent to landfill were digested, it would save 386,000 tonnes of CO 2 equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions. UK agriculture produces roughly 90 million tonnes of slurry and manures each year. According to a UK Government report half of this, combined with the food waste digestion, has the potential to generate approximately 3.5 TWh of electricity: enough to supply over 900,000 households and saving 1.8 million tonnes of CO 2 equivalent from grid-based electricity production. However, there are several ‘ifs’ in this vision, not least of which is to ensure that local authorities provide weekly collections of food waste. At the moment these cover three million households in England out of 22.5 million – or just 13 per cent. convErtinG biomAss to hEAt And powEr In the anaerobic digestion process, plant and animal material (biomass) is mixed with water and put inside sealed tanks where, in the absence of air, naturally occurring micro-organisms digest it. They generate methane which can be used to provide heat and power. The material left over at the end of the fermentation process is also valuable, but needs to be dried before it can be used. GEA Mechanical Equipment has supplied decanters for dewatering fermented biomass to fermentation plants in Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Portugal. The digested left-overs are supplied in suspension to a continuously operating scroll-type centrifuge, and are decanted at between 3,000 to 4,000 times gravity. The machine removes the solid particles and dewaters them to a dry consistency. The separated solids are used as a nutrient-rich compost in gardening and agriculture, and the clear water is recycled back into the process. cApturinG cArbon Carbon dioxide (CO 2) is a waste product from many industries – and a damaging greenhouse gas. Around the world there are projects seeking to use algae to capture industrially generated CO 2 and put it to good use. In Queensland, Australia, for example, the MBD Energy company is using flue gases from the Tarong power station as ‘food’ for its algal synthesizer plant. The CO 2 allows the algal biomass to double every 24 to 48 hours – which means it can be harvested daily. It can be used as a fertilizer, be converted into solid fuel briquettes, or used as a feedstock for the production of biodiesel. Another project, at the Glenturret Distillery in Scotland – home to The Famous Grouse whisky – percolates CO 2 made during the whisky distillation process through a microalgae bioreactor. Each tonne of microalgae absorbs two tonnes of CO 2. Scottish Bioenergy, who run the project, sell the microalgae as high value, protein-rich food for aquaculture (fish farms) and for the dairy cattle market. In the future, they will also use the algae residues to produce renewable energy through anaerobic digesters. But in order to extract the value from the algae, it needs to be separated from the water that it is grown in, and GEA Mechanical Equipment has a new generation of separators specifically designed for algal biotechnology. These separators can be used for processing small to medium capacities of farmed algae suspension (up to 24,000 liters an hour), and producing very high levels of dry matter. GEA Process Engineering supplies GEA Niro Soavi homogenizers for use in algal processing and GEA Niro and GEA Barr-Rosin equipment for drying algae. GENERATE MAGAZINE ISSUE 15 15
Page 1 and 2: WAR ON WASTE SAY CHEESE A BREATH OF
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Page 11 and 12: SIMPLE PRODUCTS FOR CLEANING OUR HO
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A BREATH OF FRESH AIR SAY CHEESE WAR ON ... - GEA Group

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