Electro-Methanogenic Reactor Electrode Optimisation

Food & Beverage Manufacturers (FBM) is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the UK. The industry has been significantly affected by COVID-19, rising energy prices and waste management fees.

The food supply chain generates significant volumes of organic waste and wastewater. There is an opportunity to implement on-site circular waste treatment. The waste contains valuable chemical energy, water and nutrients that can be recovered with appropriate technologies. Treating waste on-site can reduce carbon emissions, lower operational expenditure (OPEX), create a sustainable bioenergy supply, and reduce water demands. However, current waste to energy solutions such as Anaerobic Digestion (AD) has a large footprint and slow treatment time of 20-30 days.

WASE is developing a novel approach to decentralised wastewater and organic waste treatment. We have developed a patent-pending electro-methanogenic technology to provide a circular approach to waste treatment with our industriWASE system. industriWASE allows Food & Beverage manufacturers to generate biohydrogen and biomethane that can be converted into electricity and heat, and they can recover water and nutrients that can be sold as fertilisers. industriWASE is a modular, containerised solution that can treat 1-2 tonnes of organic waste a day or 10,000L of wastewater.

Our patent-pending technology treats solid waste 3 times faster and has up to 10 times faster flow rates when treating wastewater compared to AD. Our process further breaks down waste to generate 10-30% more energy than AD and reduce the amount of sludge produced. The accelerated performance comes from our novel electrode technology that accelerates the breakdown of organics. Using our process, we integrate biosensing to understand the health of the bacteria in the reactor in real-time. The real-time analysis removes the need for skilled engineering operators and makes decentralised treatment feasible in places it wasn't before.

industriWASE has a low ROI (3-5 Years) and provides multiple benefits over conventional AD, including the reduced footprint and associated civil costs, the increased energy generation and higher waste removal rates.