Viva Brighton April 2015 Issue #26
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trade secrets<br />
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Planet Feed<br />
Food waste to fertilizer<br />
What is Planet Feed about?<br />
We’re in the early stages of<br />
developing genuinely sustainable<br />
local solutions for making<br />
top quality, natural fertilizers...<br />
out of our community’s food<br />
waste. For us, food waste is<br />
our raw material.<br />
Food waste is increasingly<br />
spoken of as a ‘valuable<br />
resource’, but too often it is<br />
then just treated like waste.<br />
Whether we bury it, burn it or<br />
turn it into biogas, the main<br />
focus still seems to be on ‘disposing’ of food waste.<br />
To me, this offers us the least bad option. Food<br />
waste often has to be transported long distances<br />
to be treated and there’s a heavy dependency on<br />
government subsidies for the renewable electricity<br />
generated. Our solution doesn’t require subsidies,<br />
will significantly reduce waste-miles, and will produce<br />
valuable, eco-friendly products that can offer<br />
local growers a viable alternative for the chemical<br />
fertilizers they currently use.<br />
We’re using innovative, small-scale technology<br />
to turn food waste into organic fertilizer in just<br />
2-3 days. Working closely with our technology<br />
partners, we’ve already run in-house trials that<br />
produced our first batches of liquid feed using an<br />
innovative new technology they have developed.<br />
And we then used it to cultivate some pretty impressive<br />
turnips in our first growing trials.<br />
We’re a social enterprise that will put the<br />
local community’s interests first in business<br />
areas that are typically dominated by large private<br />
companies. Rather than be driven primarily by<br />
delivering shareholder value, we plan to maximize<br />
the value to the community of<br />
the food we have to throw away,<br />
and to use profits generated to<br />
support local growing and waste<br />
reduction initiatives.<br />
<strong>Brighton</strong> is a good place to<br />
start. I developed a strong<br />
interest in environmental<br />
sustainability and food waste<br />
issues while living in Asia, so<br />
when I moved back to <strong>Brighton</strong><br />
in 2012, I was really surprised<br />
that food waste was not being<br />
collected here - especially given<br />
the city’s green credentials. There’s tremendous<br />
passion, opinion and activism around both food<br />
and waste issues here, and it seemed like a city ripe<br />
for looking at food waste as a resource rather than<br />
a problem!<br />
We plan to develop small-scale, local organic<br />
waste treatment capacity that can operate from<br />
small spaces close to where the waste is generated.<br />
On top of that, unlike large-scale, permanent waste<br />
treatment facilities, our solution is highly scalable<br />
and is easy to relocate. So, if a community actually<br />
achieves the ultimate goal of eliminating all its<br />
food waste, we can just pack it up and move to<br />
solve waste problems elsewhere.<br />
Ultimately, we’d love to be able to take all<br />
the city’s food waste – whether commercial or<br />
residential. That said, we’re going to focus on<br />
developing solutions for commercial food waste<br />
initially, and aim to run a full pilot project this year<br />
here in <strong>Brighton</strong>. We’re hoping to have our first<br />
fertilizers for sale in 2016. Lizzie Lower<br />
Learn more about Planet Feed at the Eco Technology<br />
Show <strong>2015</strong>, Amex Stadium, 11-12th June<br />
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