The vast majority of global food waste ends up in landfills, where it will spend the next few decades releasing methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. An estimated 80% of this waste originates upstream of final consumers, with the majority of waste produced at farms, factories, and shipping and handling facilities. These waste streams are uniquely free of chemical and inorganic contaminants, coalescent, and high in protein and carbohydrate content, making them well-suited to microbial processing. Current organic digestion processes either restrict input composition or yield only methane, forcing users to choose between incomplete waste usage or a lower-value, polluting end product.
Our process kills two birds with one stone by yielding hydrogen at 1.5x the Thauer limit from almost any food-grade substrate in the span of eight hours. We do this by combining three decomposition modes into a single piece of equipment: thermal hydrolysis, microbial metabolism, and solute electrolysis.