Productive Waste

Waste Makes Watts!

By definition, the manufacturing of products creates waste. And ice cream manufacturing creates dairy waste too intense to send to the local wastewater treatment facility. Instead, our Hellendoorn ice cream plant sends it back to The Chunkinator, a magical reactor that turns ice cream waste into energy. The Chunkinator’s real name is the BIOPAQ®AFR Biodigester and, as you probably already guessed, it’s an anaerobic flotation reactor. It has a tank that holds 24 billion natural micro-organisms whose job is to turn waste and wastewater into biogas that helps run the plant.

Our manufacturing plants commit to measuring and reducing their environmental impacts in four performance areas: water, solid waste, energy, and CO2 emissions.