23 – Producing renewable energy from dairy effluents: a facilitated symbiosis exchange in Northern Ireland, UK

The National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP) in the UK acted for several years as a facilitator to create several symbiotic exchanges across the whole Country. In this specific case, and in collaboration with the Industrial Symbiosis Service in Northern Ireland, it helped the implementation of a profitable symbiotic exchange between an electricity producer and a network of dairy companies, providing dairy effluents as input for an anaerobic digestion process.

Thee challenge that led to the creation of the symbiotic exchange was the need of the electricity producer to find new sources of organic material to expand and stabilise renewable energy production, maximising the plant’s capacity.

The main barrier that the electricity producer had to face in the Industrial Symbiosis implementation process was to identify and contact several companies in its area in order to identify most suitable partner.

The approach the company used to overcome this barrier was to ask the local Industrial Symbiosis Service to facilitate the creation of the exchange by contacting companies within its network.

The discovery process, led by the facilitator, started with the identification of several suitable food producers in the area, with organic waste material available. These food producers were then introduced to the electricity producer and, after a few conversations, it was established that the most suitable partners would have been dairy producers, basing on the quality and composition of the organic waste. The electricity producer then set up a transport service to collect waste from its new partners and a storage system.

The main preconditions that allowed to successfully start this symbiotic exchange were the fact that dairy producers had good quality waste and the fact that they were paying high fees to dispose of it. Thus, they were willing not only to give their waste to the electricity producer, but also to pay them a small gate fee for its disposal, which made the exchange even more profitable for the electricity producer.