For nearly 50 years, Luke Lukoskie and his team at Island Spring Organics have been making tofu on Vashon Island, near Seattle, Washington.
Lukoskie: “We’ll make a couple of million pounds of tofu this year. We’ll make 15 different varieties.”
And now, they’re using waste from the production process to help power the operation itself.
The company is partnering with the Seattle-based energy company Chomp, which installed what’s called an anaerobic biodigester behind the factory.
Lukoskie: “Imagine it’s like a compost bin, but it’s enclosed.”
Any type of food waste – in this case, damp soybean pulp and leftover liquid called whey – can be put inside the biodigester’s large sealed tank, where bacteria break it down in an oxygen-free environment.
The process creates fertilizer that can be sold to farmers, as well as renewable biogas that can be used for energy in place of natural gas – a fossil fuel.
Lukoskie: “We receive the … organic renewable natural gas and feed that into our boiler, which is then used to cook the ground soy pulp to make the tofu.”
So Lukoskie is able to use the byproducts of tofu production to make more tofu, while reducing his use of fossil fuels.
Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media
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