BioHiTech Food Waste Digester Cuts Hard Rock Café’s Food Waste Disposal Costs 56%

The Hard Rock Café in London cut its food waste disposal costs by 56 percent and reduced carbon emissions by 9.7 metric tons since installing BioHiTech’s commercial food waste disposal system.

The restaurant installed an Eco-Safe food waste digester to reduce increasing waste disposal costs and the associated problems with getting waste collected in Central London.

BioHiTech’s on-site Eco-Safe Digester converts food waste into grey-water and transports it through standard sewer lines. During the digestion process, the digester weighs each increment of waste and allows users to quantify its type and origin, and report environmental metrics such as waste and CO2 diversion.

BioHiTech expanded to Europe with its new London headquarters last October.

“We had concerns that this magical new technology would not do what had been promised, but it is fair to say that it does exactly what BioHiTech said it would,” said Andrew Noone, general manager of Hard Rock Café, London. “On some days we will dispose of more than 300 kilograms (661 pounds) of food waste into the digester. We feed the digester throughout the day and into the early morning, and it eats up whatever we put into it and the wastewater simply goes down the drain. It’s a very clever piece of equipment that we are looking to roll out elsewhere in our group.”

BioHiTech Europe has received accreditation for waste savings from the Carbon Trust, which means the company will be listed on the Carbon Trust website as an accredited supplier in the category of waste savings.

As part of the accreditation process one of the case studies submitted by BioHiTech Europe was on the Hard Rock Café in London.

In other BioHiTech news, the company has launched a new subsidiary, Entsorga North America, which expands the company’s products to include organic and inorganic waste streams.

Entsorga North America will manage Apple Valley Waste Conversions, an Entsorga North America part-owned subsidiary, the company that holds an exclusive license to deploy Entstorga’s HEBioT mechanical biological treatment technology throughout the northeastern US.

The HEBioT MBT system converts food waste, plastics and other carbon based materials from the mixed municipal solid waste stream into an EPA-recognized alternative fuel source. The waste received at a facility is converted to a clean burning alternative fuel, also called solid recovered fuel or SRF, which will be used as an alternative or supplement to fossil fuels. SRF is ideal for co-processing plants such as cement kilns and steel mills, as well as coal fired power plants, as a source for the production of renewable energy.