Testowy projekt

FOOD WASTE TO ENERGY

Transforming Sydney’s organic food waste into green energy and soil improver for local communities.

| The Challenge

As Sydney has grown, so too has the amount of waste it produces. It is estimated that Australia is the second-highest producer of municipal solid waste per capita in the world, at around 559kg per person, per year. It is estimated that up to 56% of this is food waste, which in Australia is categorised as putrescible waste and accounts for approximately 3% of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

| Veolia’s Solution

EarthPower is Australia's first food waste-to-energy facility, designed and licensed to accept solid and liquid food biomass from municipal, commercial, and industrial sectors in the Sydney region. 

Centrally located in Sydney’s suburb of Camellia, the facility processes organic food wastes to produce green electricity and a nutrient-rich soil improver from the byproduct. 

Using innovative anaerobic digestion technology, EarthPower significantly reduces GHG emissions while generating electricity and recovering the end product, creating new value from Sydney’s waste and diverting it away from landfill. 

This solution to food waste offers a sustainable alternative to fossil fuel-sourced energy and demonstrates Veolia’s resource recovery and circular economy capabilities. EarthPower’s feedstock is sourced from businesses involved in food manufacture or processing, food transportation, distribution, and storage, wholesale and retail food distribution and sales, commercial kitchens, and local government. By sending their food waste to EarthPower, customers are reducing both their emissions and disposal costs. 

EarthPower is designed to process both solid and liquid organic waste from five specific streams:

• Solid organic waste
• Grease trap waste
• Spadable sludge
• Organic liquid waste
• Selected packaged waste 

In 2024, the EarthPower facility underwent major technological upgrades to optimise its processing capabilities, increasing its feedstock capacity to 62,500 tonnes of food waste, which can generate enough electricity to power 4,000 homes. 

EarthPower’s innovative technology 

At the heart of the EarthPower plant are two advanced anaerobic digesters inside which bacteria breaks down food materials to produce a biogas, which is then captured and used to fuel cogeneration engines, producing green electricity. This process is comparable to natural gas, instead using a sustainable energy source in its place. 

This electricity produced at EarthPower is sold to the grid for distribution to domestic, commercial, and industrial clients. The facility runs self-sufficiently using its own electricity and gas production to power itself before distributing the excess to the energy grid. 

A byproduct of the anaerobic digestion process is a nutrient-rich sludge, which is dried using heat from the cogeneration engines, granulated, then sold into the agricultural and horticultural markets as quality soil improver.