Ventura Foods installs wastewater recovery system to resell waste oil for biofuel production

30 Sep 2010

The California-based manufacturing facility for edible food oil company Ventura Foods, which produces Smart Balance margarine and Hidden Valley dressings, has added wastewater treatment company FogBusters’ technology for removing fat, oil and grease (FOG) from its wastewater.

The technology will aid the plant’s compliance with local wastewater regulations and recover waste oil from its wastewater streams in concentrated form for resale to companies to create biodiesel, thereby reducing chemical treatment expenses, it said.

‘Our challenge was to remain within the city permit limits to discharge wastewater into the sewage system, which kept our wastewater treatment systems operating at maximum capacity,’ said Tom Rochester, maintenance engineering manager for Ventura’s Ontario plant.

Rochester said that the company is projecting a payback on its investment in the technology in just over a year.

Ventura Foods’ director of safety and environmental affairs John C Brown said, ‘The recovered oil is key to our return on investment, because if you separate the oil without using chemicals, it more than doubles the resale value for recycling, and the Fogbuster is recovering oil of 95 per cent purity and in much greater volume than what we were producing previously.’

He said the company is considering expanding its use of the Fogbuster device at Ontario and at other Ventura facilities.

Tags: biofuel