A supermarket store in the United Kingdom has gone off the national electricity grid by recycling its own rotting food. The Sainsbury’s store in Cannock is running entirely on electricity that is generated from refuse. It’s the first time a grocer from a major retailer is not relying on the national grid for power.
Outsideonline describes how they do it:
Here’s how it works: Any food that can’t be donated to local charities for human consumption or turned into animal feed is transported to a nearby anaerobic digestion (AD) plant run by waste management company Biffa. The food waste is converted into biomethane gas, which is used to power the store.
A 1.5-kilometer cable (that’s less than a mile, for you metric-phobes) connects the processing plant to the Sainsbury’s, thus very literally closing the loop on food recycling.
As Richard Swannell, a director at Wrap, a government-funded organization that promotes recycling and sustainable business, told the BBC, “There are now 60 AD plants recycling food waste, which can process up to 2.5 million tons of food waste per year and generate enough renewable electricity to power a city three times the size of Cannock.”
