mickclub1955
02-21-2014, 12:11 PM
Ever wonder what happens to the leftover food you don't eat at WDW.
By Kevin Spear, Orlando Sentinel
6:52 p.m. EST, February 20, 2014
The big truck tipped its load, and out gushed a bubbling slop of burger pieces, buns, onions, carrot peels, whole oranges, lettuce bits and much more that smelled as sour as it looked. Paul Sellew watched as if he were getting a gift.
"It's beautiful," he said.
Sellew founded Harvest Power Inc., which has started a factory at Walt Disney World that turns what's scraped off plates at restaurants into electricity and fertilizer.
The plant, off-limits to the public, is at the receiving end of all the food waste that Disney's government-operations wing, Reedy Creek Improvement District, hauls in from the theme-park giant's eateries.
Liquid leftovers of the district's sewage plant also are sent to what the company called an "energy garden."
Pictures: Orange County Jail mug shots
Harvest Power is paid to take in all that wet stuff because it has to be disposed of somewhere. It's pumped into enormous tanks where it's eaten by naturally occurring micro-organisms.
The byproduct from that feast is a lot of methane and carbon dioxide — stuff called biogas — that is piped a short distance to run locomotive-sized generators.
Harvest Power will burn the biogas to produce electricity and sell it to Reedy Creek Improvement District, where eventually the juice will serve rides, hotels and other needs at Disney property.
In another corner of the plant, what's left of food scraps that micro-organisms have chewed on for a month is baked by heat from the generators to produce granular fertilizer.
When the energy garden's micro-organisms are "fully inoculated," or have reached their eating peak, the facility will be able to handle 350 tons of waste daily, said Alex MacFarlane, Harvest Power's project developer.
"The configuration is pretty unique in North America," MacFarlane said.
Based in Massachusetts and established in 2008, Harvest Power has 40 operations in North America that perform some version of converting table scraps, restaurant grease, out-of-date supermarket produce, deli goods and yard waste into energy, fertilizer and mulch.
The Disney location is the most advanced, Sellew said, speaking of what looks sort of like a refinery and cost more than $30 million.
The business this month was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the world's 50 most innovative companies.
Debra Reinhart, a University of Central Florida professor who is an expert in landfills and solid waste, said the technology is well-understood, but actually putting it to work will require success on many levels.
One area where Harvest Power's expertise will have to come into play, said Reinhart, who is not affiliated with the project or company, is the challenge of securing a reliable and efficient delivery of food waste otherwise toted to landfills by daily convoys of garbage haulers.
Landfills like the one run by Orange County have pipes and pumps that collect methane generated by garbage, but food waste rots long before that collection system is in place, and the methane is lost, Reinhart said.
There is no shortage of food waste sent to Orange County's landfill: 200,000 tons a year, said manager Jim Becker — which is about 10 percent of all waste received there.
And that goes to the point of Sellew's showing off the plant. He said as environmentally friendly energy becomes a priority, it's an eco-crime to squander food waste. The stuff has an advantage over solar and wind power in that it can be used to crank out kilowatts day, night and when the wind isn't blowing.
Thursday's reception was to get the word out to restaurants and supermarkets outside the Disney kingdom to reroute their scraps to the new plant.
"This is a valuable product that society calls waste," Sellew said.
By Kevin Spear, Orlando Sentinel
6:52 p.m. EST, February 20, 2014
The big truck tipped its load, and out gushed a bubbling slop of burger pieces, buns, onions, carrot peels, whole oranges, lettuce bits and much more that smelled as sour as it looked. Paul Sellew watched as if he were getting a gift.
"It's beautiful," he said.
Sellew founded Harvest Power Inc., which has started a factory at Walt Disney World that turns what's scraped off plates at restaurants into electricity and fertilizer.
The plant, off-limits to the public, is at the receiving end of all the food waste that Disney's government-operations wing, Reedy Creek Improvement District, hauls in from the theme-park giant's eateries.
Liquid leftovers of the district's sewage plant also are sent to what the company called an "energy garden."
Pictures: Orange County Jail mug shots
Harvest Power is paid to take in all that wet stuff because it has to be disposed of somewhere. It's pumped into enormous tanks where it's eaten by naturally occurring micro-organisms.
The byproduct from that feast is a lot of methane and carbon dioxide — stuff called biogas — that is piped a short distance to run locomotive-sized generators.
Harvest Power will burn the biogas to produce electricity and sell it to Reedy Creek Improvement District, where eventually the juice will serve rides, hotels and other needs at Disney property.
In another corner of the plant, what's left of food scraps that micro-organisms have chewed on for a month is baked by heat from the generators to produce granular fertilizer.
When the energy garden's micro-organisms are "fully inoculated," or have reached their eating peak, the facility will be able to handle 350 tons of waste daily, said Alex MacFarlane, Harvest Power's project developer.
"The configuration is pretty unique in North America," MacFarlane said.
Based in Massachusetts and established in 2008, Harvest Power has 40 operations in North America that perform some version of converting table scraps, restaurant grease, out-of-date supermarket produce, deli goods and yard waste into energy, fertilizer and mulch.
The Disney location is the most advanced, Sellew said, speaking of what looks sort of like a refinery and cost more than $30 million.
The business this month was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the world's 50 most innovative companies.
Debra Reinhart, a University of Central Florida professor who is an expert in landfills and solid waste, said the technology is well-understood, but actually putting it to work will require success on many levels.
One area where Harvest Power's expertise will have to come into play, said Reinhart, who is not affiliated with the project or company, is the challenge of securing a reliable and efficient delivery of food waste otherwise toted to landfills by daily convoys of garbage haulers.
Landfills like the one run by Orange County have pipes and pumps that collect methane generated by garbage, but food waste rots long before that collection system is in place, and the methane is lost, Reinhart said.
There is no shortage of food waste sent to Orange County's landfill: 200,000 tons a year, said manager Jim Becker — which is about 10 percent of all waste received there.
And that goes to the point of Sellew's showing off the plant. He said as environmentally friendly energy becomes a priority, it's an eco-crime to squander food waste. The stuff has an advantage over solar and wind power in that it can be used to crank out kilowatts day, night and when the wind isn't blowing.
Thursday's reception was to get the word out to restaurants and supermarkets outside the Disney kingdom to reroute their scraps to the new plant.
"This is a valuable product that society calls waste," Sellew said.