Big River Fish Corporation has acquired a liquid food composter machine from Power Knot LLC to digest waste fish on site and save sending the waste to the landfill.
The LFC-200 (pictured) reduces the carbon footprint of the company by over 800,000 lb of CO2e per year and has a payback of less than two years, Big River Fish says.
BRF is situated a few miles from both the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. The company processes Asian carp that is caught in these rivers for sale in the US and China. Although many shipments from BRF comprise whole fish, much fish is processed at the facility. BRF sells the fillets, leaving the head and guts as waste.
Waste is also generated if fish cannot be processed in time. The typical waste at BRF is about 700 to 900 lb per day.
BRF says that disposing of this waste had been an increasingly troublesome problem. The waste cannot be left for a weekly collection due to its odor. Instead, it had to be taken daily to the Pike County Landfill, 35 miles away. BRF estimated that the costs of disposal were averaging $75 per day and likely to continue to rise.
The LFC has a rated capacity of 440 to 800 lb per day, but it digests about 400 lb of waste fish in less than eight hours and is therefore able to keep up with the production at the facility. Staff at BRF put waste fish into the machine every 30 minutes. This is more convenient and less messy for them than driving the waste to the landfill, the company says.
Last month the EPA launched its Food Recovery Challenge, signing up a number of grocery stores, universities, entertainment venues, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, convention centers and federal facilities to a five percent cut in food waste in their first year.