The question of what to do with Spent Grain has gotten more complicated as thousands of breweries have opened across the United States and Canada - particularly in urban areas.
Traditionally, breweries were located in more rural areas and had the ability to donate spent grains to nearby farms to be used as a soil additive or as animal feed. But, as the craft brewing industry has taken off, there are now more than 7,000 breweries in the US alone. This has created new challenges and costs as a single 10-barrel brewing cycle can produce as much as 1,200 pounds of wet grain that must be disposed of, and not every city or town has a central composting facility or nearby farms that can accept this much material. As a result, many breweries are forced to pay to dispose of this waste at landfills. The problem however is much greater than the cost to transport and dispose of spent grain. The true costs come in the form of the environmental damage that decomposing organic waste creates via methane emissions which have been shown to be 72x worse than CO2 over a 10-year period in terms of their impact on climate change and global warming. In 2011, Alaskan Brewing Company became the first brewery to utilize their spent grain as biomass to power their boiler. They were able to build a system that converts 1,150 pounds of grain per hour to steam at 125 psig, saving over 83,000 gallons of No. 2 Diesel per year. The system not only gives Alaskan Brewing Co a way to repurpose their 6-8 million lbs of spent grain each year, but also saves them $450,000/year in energy costs. The catch: Their system cost $1.8M to build, in part using a $500,000 grant from the Rural Energy for America Program. This created a new question: Could Alaksan's waste-to-power system to replicated but at a much lower price and for breweries producing much lower amounts of beer, or could this type of closed loop system only be implemented at scale? Cleanpower Worldwide has the answer. With systems that can process as little as 300 lbs of waste per day, or as much as 2,000 lbs of spent grains per day, CPWW has made it possible for breweries in US and Canada to leverage this technology for virtually any sized brewery. Now, no matter how large or small, your brewery can work to reduce methane and carbon emissions, save money and time, and reduce your transportation and energy costs, all while saving the environment. To learn more about our systems, please visit: www.cleanpowerworldwide.com.
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Did you know that every single year more than 237,000 tons of food worth $1 Billion Dollars is wasted on Oahu alone? Organic waste is actually the largest source of waste in Hawaii at 36% of total waste. While City and State agencies such as Honolulu's Office of Climate Change, Sustainability, and Resiliency are working towards solving this issue, progress has been slow and pilot programs are just recently getting underway to repurpose food that would be otherwise destined for landfills to provide meals for those in need. Laws and regulations have been put into effect to require restaurants with greater than 5,000 square feet to separate food waste and recyclables, but how many restaurants meet that size criteria? And what do they do with that waste? Composting has become one good option as it provides aerobic digestion of organic waste, reducing methane and carbon emissions while producing reusable matter that can be used as a soil additive. This is hugely important as food waste and other organic material that ends up in landfills produces methane emissions that are greater than 21x more harmful for global warming than carbon emissions. But, we need more immediate solutions, more accountability, and ways for small and medium sized restaurants, businesses, and buildings to reduce their waste onsite in a cost effective, planet-friendly manner. That is why Cleanpower Worldwide has assembled a host of solutions to convert both wet and dry organic waste into reusable biomass that can be tailored to any sized business or public institution. We provide shredders to break down dry organic material such as cardboard, dehydrators to reduce the weight of wet organics by over 80%, and biomass boilers to allow businesses to utilize their waste as a source of power. While some businesses may find value in simply reducing the weight of their waste by 80%-90% which reduces transportation emissions and costs, others may wish to partner with local farms to donate or sell their biomass as a soil additive, and some operations that rely on hot water may wish to utilize the full end-to-end solution to create their own full cycle waste-to-power systems.
To learn more about how Cleanpower Worldwide can help your business or building fight climate change through waste reduction and waste-to-power systems, please visit us at: www.cleanpowerworldwide.com or contact us directly at: cleanpowerworldwide @ gmail.com. Together we can work together to reduce methane and carbon emissions, reduce waste, save power, and fight climate change. Organic Waste & Methane EmissionsOrganic Waste has become a grave global environmental concern.
When organic Waste is disposed of in a landfill, it undergoes an anaerobic decomposition and generates methane emissions. One pound of organic Waste creates forty pounds of methane. Once released into the atmosphere, methane becomes a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane gas has 21x the global warming potential of CO2! If we diverted food waste from landfills, it would be like removing 2 million cars from the road. This is why at CleanPower, we are helping businesses be at the forefront of waste-to-power solutions, helping them turn organic Waste into biomass energy onsite. With an incredibly rapid return on investment, we can help your business save the earth while reducing waste disposal and energy costs. Contact us today to learn more! |
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