THE PROBLEM BEING ADDRESSED
The EU27 annually generates 90 million tonnes of food waste, implying a major environmental problem, Experts have highlighted the need for generation of food waste valorisation and re-use strategies to produce higher value and marketable products, leading to a higher adoption of circular economy strategies by the food processing sector.
This project identifies an excellent business opportunity in promoting the valorisation for reuse of certain wastes from the food and drink processing industry, characterised by:
- A high content of water (>80%), which has traditionally been a drawback for reuse, since this type of waste has a very rapid fermentation and degradation and is enormously inefficient for transport and storage.
- Containing highly valuable nutritional ingredients, thus widely validated by the scientific community as rich in functional biocompounds, demanded by the nutraceutical and pharmaceutical industry.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR SOCIETY?
Our process offers an environmental-friendly path for valorisation of food processing waste, savings CO2 emissions to the atmosphere with reference to a drying system powered by natural gas. Drying of high-water content waste brings additional climate change related benefits, from the perspective of reducing the volume of road transport from the reduction of an average 65% of mass of the product, after being dried. Additionally, DRALOD will also have an important beneficial impact by enabling the reuse of food processing waste, as a valorised product for animal feeding and/or functional ingredients for the nutritional and the pharma industries.
This project mat lead to the following benefits to the society:
- Contributing to protect society against the adverse effects of global warming, by contributing to address the challenge of shifting air drying processes to clean energy and of reducing the volume of road shipments related to waste management in food processing.
- Contributing to the generation of jobs in emerging sectors such as waste valorisation, as well as in consolidated sectors such as renewable energies, in particular solar and biomass industrial segments.
- Contributing to preserve ecosystems by providing alternative methods that displace landfilling.
OVERALL OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT
The main technical objectives of this project are:
- To design, implement and validate an energy recovery system, optimised to DRALOD plant´s operating conditions
- To implement a biomass heating system with high flexibility concerning both type of fuels / fuel quality and mode of operation to enable low operational costs as an auxiliary heat source.
- To design, implement and validate a proprietary smart controller unit for a combined solar-biomass drying plant based on thermodynamically simulation of multidomain dynamic system
- To design DRALOD drying plant, as the integration of these subsystems with the drying tunnel and auxiliary systems.
- To commission a pilot plant with a capacity of 35,000ton waste/year from >80% to <15% water content and to run a demonstrator to assess the plant performance from a financial, operational and environmental perspective.
