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Dr Lena Madden pictured at LIT's Moylish campus

Clare academic to fore of LIT project to turn waste into profit

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CLARE woman Dr Lena Madden is at the forefront of an exciting new project from LIT that speaks to a number of the world’s pressing issues, writes Kevin Corbett.
A staggering 4.2 million tonnes of food waste is generated in Ireland each year, with some of the material finding its way, sometimes in toxic form, back into the landscape.
The potential to exploit this byproduct for numerous purposes, like fuel, fertiliser or animal feeds is underexplored currently in Ireland – something Lena and her colleagues wish to change.
The problems of renewable energy sources and sustainable agricultural fertilisers are just two of the issues the joint project with UCD aims to tackle.
The project, known as WAVA, is also one of five food challenge projects shortlisted for a prize fund of €2 million for Science Foundation Ireland’s (SFI) Future Innovators Prize.
Five teams have been shortlisted under the SFI Food Challenge and 10 under the SFI Plastics Challenge. At the end of the 12-month programme two overall winners will be announced.
Naturally the LIT team is hopeful of winning that competition, but in the meantime Lena is looking to air the project’s aims to the public in a bid to possibly open other avenues of funding.
A native of the Ukraine who has been living in Ireland for over 20 years and Ennis for 15, Lena has a doctorate in bio-nanotechnology from LIT, where she has been working in research roles in the areas of environmental engineering and biochemistry since 2015.
She told the Champion the team is trying to bring existing technologies to bear on the issue of maximising output and minimising waste from food products.
“We want to make electricity efficiently and also not to affect soil quality and hydrology, that would be two of the points,” she said this week.
“At the moment, there is a lot of agricultural byproduct entering water systems, like rivers and water tables. Because fertilisers are leeching underground, it damages soil, roots, water, everything.
“We are trying to create a project that deals with this and other issues and find a better purpose for these byproducts. The Nordic countries like Sweden and Denmark buy other countries’ rubbish for this purpose.
In Ireland it is not currently mainstream, though there are some anaerobic digestors (AD) that produce biogas operational in this country.”
Helping to improve the technology and make it commercially viable is one goal of the  LIT initiative.
“We want to use anaerobic digestors, which basically are like huge buckets. People use compost buckets at home in the back yard. But when you compost food and greens, they decompose, but they still produce carbon dioxide, which goes back into the environment, so it’s not that great.
“Also, the only thing that is being produced is compost to be put into the soil. With an AD, it’s like composting without oxygen present so we put Nitrogen gas into these digestors and without oxygen it’s being digested differently, producing biomethane which can then be used to make electricity or sold on to energy companies.
“The market is there for this, the farmers are interested. At the moment ADs are massive, they’re only suitable for big plants, so what we’re trying to do is make them smaller and more viable. You can have them on individual farms, or farm co-operatives or a collective of housing estates might have one.
“At the moment, sufficient volume is measured in tonnes, but if we are able to make them smaller, then individuals can operate them or get waste management companies to operate them and share in the dividend.”
So, put rubbish in, get benefits out.

Lena adds, “We have funding from SFI and the project aims towards commercialisation, so we will work with individual farmers, food producers, food waste processors etc. We have started doing the large scale studies and see how we can adopt them for Irish conditions and attract partners this way.
“The idea is to make it circular,” she says. “It is difficult to eliminate food waste entirely, but if we are able to reuse most of it, we should.
“The next step, once we prove the technology works efficiently in Irish conditions, then we will be seeking partners, lobbying the government for grants to advance the project, because the technology is not cheap. So we will be moving to the capital investment stage, raising money.
“We want to create a new branch in the waste management industry, so it’s not just plastic and paper that is getting recycled. Compostable food, instead of just being digested, will be sent to an AD to have energy made out of it and not to damage the environment through uncontrolled disposal of digested materials.
“Farmers will still get fertiliser, but it will be balanced and when they put it in the field it won’t be damaging the ecosystem.”
Commenting on the project, Head of Research Projects and Technology Transfer, at LIT, Dr. Patrick Murray said: “The SFI-funded WAVA project is an example of transformative applied biosciences research at Shannon Applied Biotechnology Centre in LIT.  The research team will develop disruptive enabling technologies to reduce food loss and waste across the food supply chain from “farm to fork”. One example would be that the technology allows us to produce Carbon Dioxide from waste food so this can be used to ultimately grow new food and value-added commodities such as omega 3’s and antioxidants.”
In total, 15 teams were announced by Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris TD for the SFI Innovators Prize, which has called on research teams to develop innovative solutions to food waste and plastics.
SFI’s two challenge-based prize programmes, with a fund of €2 million each, seeks to support Ireland’s best and brightest unconventional thinkers and innovators to develop novel, potentially disruptive, technologies to address significant societal challenges.

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