Producing Renewable Energy from Food Processing Wastes

Food processing plants consume huge amount of energy for converting raw material to final product so food industry accounts as one of seven high consumption industries. This industry as well as high energy requirement, producing large amount of solid and liquid wastes. These wastes basically contain biodegradable organic compounds that their discharge to environment could cause serious pollution. Generally, large amount of these solid wastes discharge to landfill and liquid ones to rivers and oceans without any treatment. Recently, the strict environmental legislations restrict discharge of wastes to environment, so discharge of these materials is a big challenge for food industry. (Increasing the price of fuel and high cost of energy, encourage the researchers for finding approaches for producing low cost and green energy sources from food wastes). In this article some of the most important ways for converting food wastes to different form of energy such as biodiesel, Gasification, Anaerobic digestion, Thermal liquefaction and ethanol production is discussed.