As The Milk Roadmap - designed to make the Britain’s dairy sector more sustainable - reaches it first review stage, one leading dairy equipment supplier has highlighted increasing interest in technology which can help meet its environmental targets.
The Roadmap, launched in May this year, is the work of the Dairy Supply Chain Forum’s Sustainable Consumption and Production Taskforce.
It sets environmental targets for all sectors of the industry and most major dairies already have to comply with tough regulation including the Environment Permitting Regulations, which require use of the ‘best available techniques’
It also sets out medium term targets (to be achieved by 2015), which include a 20% reduction in chemical oxygen demand (COD) for discharged effluent.
Biological oxygen demand (BOD) will also be benchmarked. COD and BOD indicate the polluting power of effluent and one of the reasons why dairy effluent has such a high COD is that it contains residues of milk in water from the wash cycles.
Finding an effective method of taking the milk back out of the water reduces the strength of the effluent and means the milk can be used for further manufacture, as Keith Goodby, Tetra Pak Processing’s category manager for dairy, explains: “New technology provides an effective means of treating the water [contaminated with milk] through the process of reverse osmosis.
“Although the basic process is not new, our latest systems make it a viable part of any dairy and the recovered milk can have a similar composition to the original natural product.” The milk could then be sold for secondary manufacture, such as drying, and dairies could obtain an income from what was previously a waste product with a high COD, he said.