A pile of food waste can make rich compost for the garden. But some Northwest companies are going beyond composting. This week we’ve been bringing you stories on the challenges of wasted food. We discovered three companies that are using it to power homes, race cars and city buses.
Remember that last scene in Back to the Future?
Doc: “Marty you’ve got to come with me.”
Marty: “Where?”
Doc: “Back to the Future.”
Doc tears into Marty’s driveway in the DeLorean time machine and raids the trash can.
Doc: “I need fuel”
He puts some banana peels and the remains of a half-empty beer can into the fuel tank and tells Marty to get in the car.
Back in 1985, using food waste for fuel seemed about as far off as flying cars. But now, it’s reality. Welcome to the future.
21-year old Matt Coffman is a formula drift race car driver. This year, he switched to a new fuel that’s made from fermented food waste.
In drift racing, two cars squeal around tight turns, one following the other and trying to match its precision. Smoke from burned rubber billows around each bend in the track. The race is over in less than a minute.
Coffman: “People are just all around surprised to hear that we are running a race car off of food-based products.”
The ethanol fuel comes from a company that makes dried fruit in Cornelius, Oregon. Coffman says it runs his car even better than petroleum-based racing fuel. Plus it's cleaner for the environment and less toxic for him. There’s an aromatic benefit, too.
Coffman: “Our current fuel is made out of I think blackberries and blueberries. The exhaust smells like berries. It's amazing.”
Mark Smith is the owner of Summit Foods, the company that makes the fuel. He says the idea was born out of a problem. The process of making dried fruit left his company with lots of sugary waste juice. As his company grew, the volume of that waste was growing too.
Smith: "We just kept talking about what do we do with this waste? The landfill didn't want it, and the sewer you know, it was very, very expensive. So we just kept storing it and storing it."
Smith and his dad, a food scientist, developed a system of fermenting the waste and distilling it into alcohol. They combine their waste with expired or rejected foods from other businesses. And they sell the resulting ethanol to Sequential Biofuels and to race car drivers like Coffman.
Smith: "We're hand-crafted, the microbrew of fuel. We’d like to at some point do millions of gallons a year of waste-stream ethanol, and we’ll just keep working on it til we get it.”
While Summit turns food waste into ethanol, another Oregon company, JC Biomethane of Junction City, is turning it into electricity. That project uses a methane digester to extract gas from the food. Then it burns the gas to generate enough electricity to power about 10 thousand homes.
A new project in Eastern Oregon relies on a similar concept. But it speeds ups the process.
Burke: "We create biogas in four days and a typical anaerobic digester takes about 20 days."
That's Joe Burke, CEO of Novus Pacific. His company plans to use an advanced digester to turn food waste from onion and potato manufacturers into biogas.
But instead of using that gas to make electricity, the company will just sell the gas.
Burke: "The natural gas we're producing in the end, from a chemical perspective, is indistinguishable from regular natural gas. So, anywhere you would traditionally think of natural gas being used, our natural gas could be used there as well."
That means it can be condensed and funneled into vehicles that run on compressed natural gas.
The city of San Diego is the company's first customer. It plans to use the gas to run its fleet of city buses. Burke says he hopes to replicate the Novus project across the country to prove that wasted food doesn't have to be a total waste.
Copyright 2014 Earthfix
