28 – A facilitated symbiotic exchange between a frozen food supplier and an anaerobic digestion plant in the UK: improving waste management by exploiting facilitator’s network

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, it helped the implementation of a profitable symbiotic exchange between a supplier of frozen food and an anaerobic digestion plant, both based in the UK.

The challenge that led to the creation of the symbiotic exchange was on the one hand the need of the frozen food supplier to improve waste management practices, while on the other hand the need of the anaerobic digestion plant to find additional suppliers of raw material.

The main barrier that both companies faced was to find and contact the right partners for the symbiotic exchanges they wanted to implement.

The approach they both used in order to overcome such barrier was to contact representatives of the NISP and ask them to use their network in the UK.

The discovery process, led by the facilitator, started with analysing the quality of the waste produced from the frozen food supplier. After this first analysis, they were able to establish that such material was a good input for the anaerobic digestion process, and therefore put the two companies in communication.

The main precondition that allowed the creation of the symbiotic exchange was the compatibility of the composition of the food waste with the anaerobic digestion process.

Source: NISP website.