A New Take on Food Waste: Turning Scraps into Liquid Fertilizer
At LeanPath, we’re advocates for food waste prevention. However, even with systems in place to measure and prevent waste, some food scraps are inevitable. But those scraps don’t have to be trash-bound.
A start-up company in the Pacific Northwest is offering the industry another new way to keep food scraps out of the trash and turn them into something useful. WISErg, founded by two former Microsoft employees, is using food scraps as the building block for an organic fertilizer.
In May of this year they installed a Harvester at a local grocery store where employees dump their trash produced daily from the juice bar, deli, meat and produce departments. This on-site Harvester begins a conversion process, creating a nutrient-packed liquid fertilizer base, and then it’s sent a few miles down the road to a WISErg facility where it’s transformed into WISErganic fertilizer.
This story garnered national media attention and adds to the list of innovations that are helping turn waste into something useful—rather than harmful—for the environment. It leaves us thinking, what’s next for food scraps?
Interesting. We still will need to work on the front-end and reduce our overall waste, but since I do not envision we will ever get to zero waste this is a solution. I believe I read once that the city in Sweden that produces Absolut vodka is fossil free fuel wise because of their ability to convert food waste as well as other forms of garbage waste into fuel. I am also an advocate for operators to get on board converting over their cooking oil to bio-fuel. It appears to be happening in pockets around the country.
Nice! I have been looking for info like this , thanks for posting.