The reason is that unused food was once simply thrown into landfills, or burned in mass-burn municipal incinerators, and this is no longer socially or environmentally acceptable for numerous reasons. Instead, the requirement is now for the organic content to be anaerobically digested, and for the rest of the material to be recycled. In reality, the rejects almost always end up in a landfill or are inefficiently incinerated, but this is far better than the whole lot going to a landfill or for incineration.
Packaging prevents spoilage, preserves freshness, and allows smaller portions of food to be sold. It's not perfect. After the sell-by date, the packaging becomes problematic. When food cannot be given to food banks or is not suitable to be fed to animals, the packaging must be removed prior to, or upon arrival at a Materials Recycling Centre. Invariably, without using a depackager to remove the plastic and other rejected materials, the packaging present prevents anaerobic digestion and composting systems from processing the contaminated food waste.
Depackaging and Climate Change
Food waste is a big contributor to greenhouse gas and global warming, as readers who followed the COP26 conference on curbing global warming will know.
Incredibly, we waste so much food that if global food waste were a nation, its climate-changing influence would be similar to the 3rd-largest in the world. It would rank below the US and China.
So food producers, the catering and hospitality business, the agricultural industry, and everyone else, including you and me, must modify our wasteful ways urgently.
Renewable Energy Foods are "Energy dense"
Not everything about this is bleak. Here, a difficulty can be a huge opportunity because food waste is full of energy. Most favourite foods are heavy in calories. Just think how much energy food gives an athlete. Enough for some of them to run a 25-mile marathon before they eat again!
Depackaged food can be utilised as renewable energy. It's made from recent sunlight, not geological (or fossil) energy. It's sustainable since it's renewable.
Climate-neutral Renewable Energy
In the future, we'll acquire a lot of our energy and make biogas, which is refined to become biomethane, which when compressed can fuel the largest of trucks. Yes! All that is possible from uneaten/ inedible food.
Depackaging creates two outputs. First, organic materials (like a pulp or soup), and other materials (called "rejects").
Why depack?
We depack to use organic content (as a "soup" or "paste") to make biogas to be used as a source of renewable energy. The solution is to feed organic matter to anaerobic digesters, which produce renewable methane. This will replace natural gas use. Natural gas has to be phased out as an energy source because it is a non-renewable, climate-damaging fossil fuel.
Digesters produce biogas which is mostly methane, which can be refined into "renewable natural gas" (RNG). RNG is non-fossil-fuel sourced natural gas replacement. It's also utilised as a fuel for heavy transport, which is much cleaner for use in cities, and on the road, than diesel and petrol.
Depackagers' Goals Go Beyond Food Removal
Removing food from packets and wrappings to make a clean organic soup for a biogas digester is no longer the industry's only goal.
The holy grail of depackaging is to take the "rejects" and, if clean, sell them for:
• plastics to be recycled by reusing the resin or burned in biomass boilers to extract energy, as a saleable product;
• recyclable metals
• soil-making grit and inert materials (subject to heavy metals content and other regulatory requirements).
Avoiding garbage disposal to landfills has both environmental and financial benefits. In the UK, landfilling or mass-burn incineration incur a charge of approximately £150 GBP ($200 US) per tonne.
Both organic soup and depackaging machine rejects can be profitable recyclates using the latest generation of food waste depackaging systems.
Whether it's uneaten, out-of-date, out-of-specification food, or mixed municipal (black bag) garbage, the solution is the same. They are essential machines that:
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