Sustainability is at the heart of everything we stand for at Quattro Foods. We love food, we love our customers and above all else we love our planet and its people. And so, when Zero Waste Week popped up in our diaries our interest was sparked and we decided that September 4th would mark a day when we redoubled our efforts to ensure that our production processes did as little damage to our precious Planet Earth as possible and that we tried to reduce waste even further.
The award winning Zero Waste Week was launched in 2008 to make us look more closely at how we support the planet every day. We may think we care and are aware, but it’s only when we pay close attention to our actions that we see how much more we could be doing to reduce waste.
How often do you chuck something in the bin and not give it a second thought? Ten, fifteen, twenty times a day? When we throw something away it goes to landfill or to the bottom of the ocean and ultimately into the stomach of a fish or animal. It doesn’t just go ‘away’ – it goes somewhere else.
Sustainability is a growing concern in the food industry. At Quattro we’re keenly aware that individuals and businesses must work together to raise awareness of the huge and damaging environmental impact of waste. Food manufacturing produces large volumes of mostly biodegradable liquid and solid waste but we have installed a wastewater treatment system to remove residues on-site including oils, fats and greases to ensure that the water that goes down the drain after food manufacturing use is cleaner.
Wastewater discharge is a critical environmental issue and it’s something that can be avoided, or at least minimised. Our system captures large amounts of solids, fats, oils and greases to stop them going down the drain. Solids are separated by balancing flow, flocculation and Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF), allowing us to achieve a consistently cleaner discharge from our factory.
If we clean and recycle the water we use for food production, we can help our environment and minimise the potential impact of our work. At Quattro Foods we are continually looking at new sustainability techniques and practical strategies to help us revitalize natural resources whilst producing healthy and delicious food for our customers.
We recycle our waste into electricity to power some parts of our Portsmouth factory and food waste is processed through an effluent plant which turns the slurry into animal feed. We package our foods responsibly and use recyclable material for many of our contracts which we press and bale on site, ready for recycling. We also changed every light fitting to reduce our electricity usage and carbon footprint.
We know we’re not perfect but we’re trying and we will continue to innovate, inspired by such initiatives as Zero Waste Week. So come on, reuse, recycle and repurpose. Let’s work together to make change.