Veolia will bring NSW’s only industrial scale biodigester plant dedicated to leftover food organics back online in April 2024, with an enhanced processing capacity of more than 50,000 tonnes per year. The EarthPower plant has just undergone a refit to supercharge the technology for energy recovery and the circular economy.
There has already been strong interest from large businesses looking for a sustainable way to dispose of waste food and liquid organics. Veolia ANZ CEO Richard Kirkman said this likely relates to its limited capacity.
“I’ve had a lot of calls asking to reserve some capacity, it’s as if there is a Fear Of Missing Out processing food organics. It’s FOMO for this FO,” he said.
“It’s easy to see why disposing of food organics is increasingly a concern for businesses. Government policy mandates collection of food waste by 2025 and will create a need for hundreds of thousands of tonnes of leftovers and food waste like fish bones and banana skins to be processed by biodigestion plants and right now NSW doesn’t have the capacity to meet the coming demand.”
What makes the EarthPower facility desirable is its ability to automatically remove and separate packaging from food organics and extract contaminants like glass and metals. That’s a big plus for larger commercial enterprises looking to dispose of packaged food organics in a no-fuss and sustainable way that meets current and future regulations.
The digestor extracts bioenergy from the food and manufactures a pelletised fertiliser from the biosolids, which can go back to the fields that grew the original food. It will also produce enough electricity to power 3600 homes offsite from the methane gas is produces.
Biodigesters like EarthPower are a green form of energy displacing fossil based gas, which will be an important part of the future. In the meantime, some food can, and is, being diverted to food banks and farms, with Veolia’s first action to ensure upstream recovery of viable food.
“The EarthPower plant is one of the best ways I can think of for disposing of unavoidable food waste at a commercial level and we expect the refitted plant to be running at full capacity by the end of 2024. If you want a piece of the ecological transformation, reserve your space” said Kirkman. “This is just the beginning. There is no doubt in our mind that this Veolia facility will be playing a prominent role in the circular economy of NSW for many years to come.