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Food Processing
Brian Kiepper samples wastewater at a poultry processing plant.
Food processors in Georgia produce everything from gourmet jams and jellies to meat products. Georgia's food processing sector's total value of shipments tops $16 billion annually and employs over 59,000 Georgians. Food processors must face the environmental challenges of water conservation, by-products recovery and wastewater treatment. Outreach aims to assist these facilities by monitoring and sampling water and wastewater streams and teaching ways to conserve valuable natural resources.
Services Provided to the Food Processing Industry
Water Conservation
Outreach provides technical assistance to Georgia food processors on ways to conserve water and save money throughout their facilities. Water conservation techniques can be simple as "dry clean-up", with brooms, pans, or compressed air prior to washing down areas with water. Water conservation also focuses on leak detection and elimination, water pressure regulation, identification of inefficient equipment and machinery, reduced clean water use and greater water reuse.
By-product Recovery
Using the guiding principal of "don't wash your profits down the drain", Outreach provides on-site educational programs for Georgia food processing workers to aid in understanding both the environmental and fiscal impact of how efficiently the do their jobs each day. In most cases, food processing raw materials either end up as finished products for sale, or waste. By educating Georgia's food processing work force, the resulting increased efficiency means less waste and more profits for Georgia businesses.
Wastewater Treatment
Every manufacturing system leaves clues to inefficient operations. When it comes to food processing - the process wastewater stream often holds the clues for Georgia companies. Using expertise in wastewater treatment systems and the latest technology in monitoring and sampling equipment, Outreach investigates on-site wastewater treatment systems problems that often lead back to inefficient in-plant operations. By coordinating activities with industrial pretreatment plants and local municipal systems, Outreach can help solve what was originally perceived as a wastewater treatment problem by modifying an inefficient in-plant system.