“13 Olympic pools of fat and waste:” Queensland to burn food for power

Queensland water company Urban Utilities has signed an agreement with Australia’s largest waste management company, Cleanaway, to begin generating biomass energy from organic food waste.

Urban Utilities, the South East Queensland utility responsible for retail water supply and wastewater services, will use its Luggage Point Resource Recovery Centre to treat fat, oil, and grease waste collected by Cleanaway, as well as food waste unable to be sold or donated from major supermarkets.

The organic waste will be used as fuel in anaerobic digesters at Luggage Point which are able to convert the waste materials into renewable energy.

The new five-year partnership between Urban Utilities and Cleanaway follows a successful test pilot at the Luggage Point facility in Brisbane.

“Over the past 18 months we’ve been working with Cleanaway to successfully treat fat, oil and grease waste and use it to generate clean energy using our anaerobic digesters at Luggage Point,” said Matthew Magee, general manager of Urban Utilities’ Water Ventures.

“The digesters break down the liquid waste and generate biogas that can be fed into our cogeneration units, which are essentially giant engines, to create renewable electricity.”

Urban Utilities is currently upgrading its liquid waste receival unit so as to allow its six large-scale digesters to directly accept and treat organic food waste as well as fat, oil, and grease collected from local restaurants.

“At full scale, we’ll work with Cleanaway to treat up to 32 million litres – or 13 Olympic swimming pools worth – of organic liquid food and fat, oil and grease waste from restaurants and supermarkets across our region each year,” said Magee.

“We’ll use the electricity generated from treating that waste to help power our Luggage Point Resource Recovery Centre, reducing our carbon emissions by increasing our use of renewable energy.”

The partnership will address a critically overlooked source of recycling. According to Cleanaway’s Steven Trajceski, food waste is often directed to general waste, rather than being recovered and recycled.

“Food waste is becoming an increasingly important challenge to address, particularly as our population grows, and we want to avoid organics ending up in landfill wherever we can,” said Trajceski.

“Through our new partnership with Urban Utilities, we’ve found a cleaner, greener way to beneficially reuse both organic food waste and fat, oil and grease waste.”