"This is not just theory; it's what we've put in practice in three breweries: one in Fiji, one in Tanzania and one in Namibia. When you make beer you have solid waste, C02 waste, heat waste and liquid waste. In solid barley waste you have 70% fibre and 26% protein, plus a few other things.
"In our three breweries we're growing mushrooms on the fibres. In collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Hong Kong Chinese University, we've developed a system to grow mushrooms on the spent grain. You can have up to five harvests of mushrooms in one batch of spent grain, and we've even succeeded in producing high-priced mushroom delicacies like shiitake and miyatake.
"None of the mushroom experts around the world ever thought of growing them on beer. As a systems thinker; I asked: what can we do with the fibres? We discovered that fibre is a mushroom feed, and so we use our fibre as mushroom feed.
"Now, with the 26% protein waste, we're cultivating earthworms. Earthworms like hot, sticky, wet environments, in which they convert vegetable proteins into animal proteins. To give you a figure, a middle-sized brewery with an annual production of 100,000 litres of beer will give you 10 tons of solid waste a day. 70% of that you can use to grow mushrooms.
"But what I found even more interesting is that with one ton of solid waste, you can produce about 130 kilos of earthworms. Therefore, a mid-sized brewery will produce about 1.3 tons of earthworms a day. That's a lot of earthworms. We feed them to chickens. So now we also have a chicken farm linked to our brewery.
"What this means is that there's no need to have any aid programmes for food in Tanzania. Just convert the sixteen breweries into chicken farms, and mushroom farms. You can create massive amounts of food. On top of it, the food is extremely healthy.
"In addition, the mushrooms convert lignin cellulose into carbohydrates. These carbohydrates, the waste from the mushroom farm, are given to the cattle. The cattle used to get food that had only 2% carbohydrates; now their food has 45% carbohydrates, thanks to the good work done by the mushrooms. So now we have a 45% carbohydrate feed stock for cattle, which is high quality feed.
"The cattle and the chicken produce much less methane with this type of feed, but they still do produce a lot. We catch all their droppings in a digester, which then generates steam. The largest digester we have is in Beijing, in a brewery that produces 800,000 litres of beer a year. It's one of the largest breweries in China. All the steam they need in the brewery comes from the digester; from the waste of the chickens and cattle. It's a very efficient process.
"So our chickens and cattle become a source of energy. We are not used to looking at a chicken as a source of energy; we look at it as the source of eggs and food. But a chicken is also one of the most efficient methane generators in the world. With three chickens and one cow, you can have electric light all evening in your home.
"Now, the digester also generates waste, called slurry, which has a very high BOD (biological oxygen demand). This is considered a problem by environmentalists, because of the large amount of oxygen that has to be added. The Chinese and the Vietnamese have worked with very high BOO slurries before.
"They put them into fish ponds on which they have floating gardens, so the roots of the flowers and ryes and tomatoes extract all the food. It's like floating hydroponics. Within twenty- four hours, the BOO of 1,000 (which is what our digesters give us) is broken down to a BOO of 25, without adding oxygen. So we have floating gardens and seven kinds of fish are bred in the ponds, which is the traditional Chinese way of dealing with slurries. This is nothing new; it's what the Chinese have been doing for thousands of years. We are now applying this at our industrial site which means that we have six or seven ponds the size of a hectare, one next to another, and we treat all our slurry that way.
"So, I'm asking my beer brewers, "In which business are you? Are you in the hydroponics business, the fishpond business, the chicken-farming business, or the mushroom business, while you happen to make some beer on the side?" From a systems point of view, it doesn't really matter. Nobody tries to maximize anything here; this is all optimization. That's the beauty of industrial clustering. The principle of the natural cycle is applied here as an industrial cycle. No more linear thinking.
"Let me summarize our results. First of all, in terms of output of nutrients, of fertilizer and of energy, we're doing seven times more than a brewery. This is the second Green revolution! We're producing seven times more food, fuel, and fertilizer. This means we've completely changed the economics of a brewery. It is also important to realize that you can't do this with a two-million-litre- a-year brewery. You can only do it with a small brewery.
"The second result is that we generate four times more jobs than in a normal brewery. We have four times more people employed, because all that clustering requires workers. However; every single component of the cluster is tested against the market. Our great advantage is that every resource comes free, because it is what was considered waste. From the brewery's point of view, everything is waste. Our additional expense is on the infrastructure, all of which is located around the brewery. That means we have eliminated transportation costs completely, which is a major advantage. The brewery is always located close to a consumption centre, which means the mushrooms are sold, the chickens are sold and the fish are sold locally. ~"
AJ
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