Landline Peats Soil Sept 2017

hello there's been a lot of talk lately about the war on waste well a South Australian composting company is way ahead of the curve having invented a special bin which starts composting piggery chicken farm and restaurant waste on site the bio bins are now being sold across Australia and the world but as Prue Adams reports it's not the only way peat soils is making use of waste which would otherwise be sent to landfill and a warning this story contains footage of dead animals [Applause] Adlai Deauville it's one of South Australia's most recognizable landmarks but it's what goes on behind the scenes of the cricket and footings that most people don't see there's an army of kitchen staff working in 25 different function areas putting together thousands of meals each week and with that food preparation comes a lot of vegetable fruit and meat scraps over three tons of it each year instead of wasting this resource sending it to landfill where the rotting food produces the greenhouse gas methane chefs around the country are increasingly tipping their offcuts into something called a bio bin [Music] we started making potting mix for a father when we're sort of ten and twelve before we let a girl play footy and then we grew into a nursery business and then we got into organics when government's decided that we're going to recycle organics Peter water wits is what you'd call an ideas man although he says those ideas don't keep him awake at night I sleep like a log my wife cannot believe how easy and how long I sleep and how well I slept in his waking hours though the newly appointed chair of the Australian organic recycling Association is constantly thinking about how to make use of food and farm waste something like 2 billion ton of year around the world is going to landfill what a waste over a decade ago he developed the bio VIN a mobile unit that's placed near restaurants supermarkets and bakeries but also at vineyards piggeries and chicken farms this is not a pretty sight the downside of chicken and egg production is there will be dead birds it's made a little easier to stomach when you know within a few months this will become compost that'll help enrich farmland it's Matt Keating's job to pick up the bins when they're full and he goes to some interesting places including a local open range Zoo we had a rather large critter came out the last one which had Longhorns I'm not sure what exactly it was and I was told there may have been a line and I lost a line recently a couple of months ago but once again I don't go out of my way to look in the bin what makes bio bin more than just a metal box is that there is air pumps at regular intervals starting the composting process and killing the pathogens Peter water weights explained the system when he appeared on the new inventors back in 2005 so you get your stuff in you get your meat and all that sort of waste product in you close the lids and then and then you turn on the air compressor that pumps the oxygen through through circulates it through the boiler with full of organic microorganism yeah that'll clean it send it back through and blow it back up again yes continue that that does it two hours on and two years off around 500 bio bins have been built most of them distributed around Australia but dozens have also been exported to the United States China and the Middle East done a little trial in China got a long way to go there it's plenty of waste up there we've got them in America we've got them in the UAE I mean those places of all places that need organic matter because it's just sand [Music] and that brings us to the other end of this waste collecting system at the Pete's soil site southeast of Adelaide the piles of partially composted material are really the prize in this process every year this company deals with 100 to 150 thousand tons of organic material they collect it via the buyer bins but also have contracts with councils to take the green waste after manually picking out the non compostable materials the rest is turned into a carbon-rich water retentive soil conditioner that goes back to Gardens farms and vineyards so they want to get all this organic matter out of landfill that's one of the drivers but the second water and I think the most important driver is getting this organic waste back out to farming it's so important to build our organic matter in their carbon in their soils well the grandmas for years have known that you know sustainable agriculture is you know you've got to get to two to four percent carbon in you saw and most of our soils around particularly South Australia and into the wimba is you know one half a percent carbon and so this material can get in there and the composting process makes it sort of waxy stay a long time in the soil the microbes won't eat it off some of the materials were producing there will last 25 50 100 years in the soil to make it easier for farmers to use the composted material peter wada watts has started playing around with a pellet Iser the pellets can be custom designed by adding gypsum or clay or whatever is required by the farmer and can be incorporated at seeding time so getting that down the air cedar right next to where the seed is it's just going to build up that carbon level in the soil the term increasingly used in composting quarters is the circular economy I would say this is one of the leading examples in Australia in the organics recycling industry of tapping into the circular economy historically we've had very much a linear economy where we've extracted natural resources we've manufactured goods from them we've used those Goods and then we've disposed of them and we've buried them in a hole the circular economy is taking a look at doing more recycling apart from the bio bins there is another element of this circular economy being practiced at the compost company behind me you can see a front-end loader being filled with biodiesel made from the grease collected from cafes restaurants and supermarkets in fact Peter water wits is working towards having his entire transport fleet and equipment run on his own biodiesel [Music] fast-food outlets fish and chip shops and other cafes and supermarkets all use and need to dispose of grease the wash down water and fats from cooking and processing are funneled into underground waste tanks then every day in every part of the world large tankers suck out the foul-smelling liquid it's usually then disposed of it some off-site repository but in a classic case of one person's trash is another's treasure the dirty fatty fluid is a precious resource at pits so we go to companies like the oily and clean away and ramond us and all those bigger companies that have contracts to go around and McDonald's and KFC cetera et cetera and collect the washdown fats so it's not the cooking oils fats that we're concentrating on we've concentrated on the dirty fats and of course they are dirty because they're full of grit and slime and all the stuff the dirty liquid is separated and sprayed onto the compost heaps what's left in the tank is the greasy solid material and that's useful for the on-site biodiesel plant okay so well the same pumping into the plant is the grease from the grease trap waste holds you in about 30% solids and water which is basically held in an emulsion mm-hmm the fat will start to heat up and and come out with the hate so this is the fact here this yellow stuff all through that's correct you see that it's trying to get out we've just got to get rid of those solids too to really force the issue okay so gonna have a look at the biofuel plant in here then let's rather show you the first part of the process mike Gherardini has long worked in the biodiesel industry is now consultant with people what are what's biofuel projects what we're seeing in the plant here is effects with this loop so the product goes from this end the solids are taken out the borders taken out and then we come through the reaction the reaction server is a really special part of the process where we we're mixing the stuff with ethanol in the presence of the catalyst it's early days but the plan is to produce more than a million litres of biodiesel a year which would be enough to fill the company's 16 prime movers 9 front end loaders and other on-site equipment mike Gherardini says the reason this project should succeed where others have failed is that they don't have to pay for the raw material the matter of economics I think when we first started looking at biodiesel the the price of the feedstock or the oil was probably about half of what it is now now the case is that about 80% of the cost of producing biodiesel is the oil that goes into it we've got a bit of a different model here because we're fully vertically integrated the fact is already coming into pates there's no additional cost been to then take out that fats to then put into the biodiesel process so we're looking at a full vertical integration model that it just has completely different economics well around the world there's a big problem with this fat's I mean most countries don't know what to do with this dirty fat they can do the cooking oils and that seems to be very successful around the world but so many places have got not a solution for this dirty greasy fat so we we think that by a combination of our biodiesel composting you know growing the sorghum etc we can actually leak the whole lot into a real true commercial circular economy [Music] the sorghum he refers to is growing up the road the sugars of which will be turned into ethanol to blend with the biodiesel you believe in climate change where you don't it's about pollution and that's what's driving this the next step is to power the whole operation with gases produced from an on-site anaerobic digester but that might have to be a story for another day when it's completely up and running told you he's an ideas man [Music] you

Channel: Peats Soil & Garden Supplies Head Office

Views: 3,145

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: composting, biodiesel, landline, peatssoil, newideas, ADplant

Id: U0CzQD917r4

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2017