Case Study
The Zero Waste Concept: Using waste intelligently to produce good products and support local communities
Zero waste means the elimination of waste by replicating the natural cycles of nature where all waste is food for other organisms within the ecocycle. This is being practiced with beer breweries in Fijii, Tanzania, China, and Namibia, by an ecoengineer, Gunther Pauli. He has designed a system whereby the solid waste from breweries ends up producing seven times more food, fuel, and fertilizer, simply by using good waste in an intelligent way.
First, the brewery waste is used to grow mushrooms. The mushrooms break down the lignin content of the waste into high quality carbohydrates, which is then fed to local cattle.
Earthworms are also cultivated in the protein content of solid waste, producing 130 kilos of worms from one ton of solid waste. These earthworms are fed to chickens.
The chickens and cattle produce manure rich in methane. The manure is collected and fed into a digester, which then generates steam and electricity. One of the largest beer breweries in China, which produces 800,000 litres of beer a year, comes from a digester running on the wastes of the chickens and cattle. The digester itself generates liquid slurry waste, which has a very high biological oxygen demand (BOD), but this is put into fish ponds to support floating gardens that produce flowers, ryes, and tomatoes. Within 24 hours, the digester slurry is broken down and helping to support seven kinds of fish.
The results of this clustering of production activities are that materials and energy are maximized by applying the principles of the natural cycle — and nothing is wasted. Nothing is linear. In terms of output, they have accomplished seven times more than a brewery would in an alternative system. The system has generated four times more jobs than in a normal brewery.
The other advantage is that every resource comes ‘free,’ because it was simply considered to be waste. The expense on infrastructure is minimal because everything is located around the brewery thereby avoiding transportation costs. The brewery is always located close to a consumption center, which means the mushrooms, chickens, eggs, and fish are sold locally.
For more information on the Brewery case, study, please visit the Zero Emissions Research Institute’s website.