This brings us to new technologies and strategies to manage food waste. Of course, there will not be one easy solution to manage all food waste in all its forms, and it will take a combination of technologies and strategies because food waste includes everything from wastewater to misshapen fruits and unbought vegetables to industrial frying oil. Valorization of food waste falls under three main categories: One, the conversion of food waste into repurposed non-food biological products. This would include converting used frying oil into vegetable oil biodiesel to fuel your car. The second is food recovery and salvage which would be if a grocery store were to donate unsold produce to a soup kitchen to use. And the third is waste management through speeding up the process of decomposing.
Aerobic digesters
Aerobic digestion occurs in an activated sludge treatment plant. The sludge is passed to a thickener where the solids content is increased. And this process significantly reduces food waste in volume which can be converted for other uses such as biomass fuel. Another thing is that aerobic digestion is much less complex than anaerobic digestion which I will get to and is easier to manage. Actually, aerobic digesters are used right now mostly for sewage treatment, but are being used increasingly more for food waste also, with a lot of new startups developing this for food waste such as BioHiTech Global Incorporated which is a startup working to divert food waste from landfills. Aerobic digesters can process anywhere from 250 to 2,000 pounds of food waste per day using oxygen, microorganisms and warm water to break down food.
Anaerobic fermentation
Anaerobic digestion is a process in which food waste and organics are mixed together in a container called an anaerobic digester. In the absence of oxygen, microorganisms break down this organic matter and transform it into biogas. And then once this biogas has been purified at a biogas plant, the natural gas can be turned into things like electricity, fuel, and thermal energy. Right now, there are about 282 on-farm anaerobic digestion facilities across the United States, about 58 of which process food waste, but according to the American Biogas council, there is large potential for the number of on-farm digesters to increase to 8,200 facilities which is good because there are many advantages including opportunities to manage both manure, food waste, and other organics, being an additional source of income for farmers, allowing farmers to use the electricity and fuel outputs to be used on their farms.
