ReFood opened their cutting edge anaerobic digestion facility in Dagenham last week, on the 7th of July. The facility was officially opened by Shirley Rodrigues and Norbert Rethmann. Shirley Rodrigues is the deputy Mayor for Environment and Energy, and Norbert Rethmann is the Honorary Chairman of the RETHMANN Group Supervisory Board.

The anaerobic digestion facility has will be operated by ReFood, which is a part of the SARIA Group, which is one of the three divisions of the RETHMANN Group. The facility will work as an industry-leading food waste recycling technology.

The Dagenham facility is considered to be one of the largest and most important investments into a single site that the SARIA Group has ever made. At this new state of the art facility, inedible food waste will be converted into inedible food waste that has been collected from customers in and around London. The food that has been collected will then be transformed into renewable energy and sustainable biofertiliser. The ReFood site the capacity to process more than 160,000 tonnes of food waste each year, which could mean that up to 14 million m3 of biogas is created. This biogas would be enough to power 12,600 homes each year.

With the development of this site and the energy that can be harvested, around 73,600 tonnes of CO2 could be displaced. This means that the benefits of using anaerobic digestion site to create power would be equivalent to taking 14,431 cars off the roads. This could have a great beneficial impact on the sustainability of power generation in the UK. If this Dagenham site is successful enough it could also lead to the opening of similar sites like it in other cities around the country.

The ReFood Dagenham site will be operating in support of the Transport for London Clean Air Action Plan and lead to the development of biomethane that can be used for gas powered vehicles.

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