Managing Food Industry Waste

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How can comparable food-processing plants with identical equipment, raw materials, and finished goods, generate different amounts of waste? Too often, the answer is that managers have not considered waste a function of plant efficiency. In Managing Food Industry Waste: Common Sense Methods for Food Processors, waste management expert Robert Zall shares his philosophy and techniques for monitoring and accounting for food processing waste.

About the book:

Plant managers too frequently recognize product recovery only in terms of finished food yields per ton of raw ingredients, or as a percentage of throughput amounts. Managers need to regularly measure waste as a separate and identifiable by-product. Improving in-plant waste abatement methods is less expensive, and far more productive, than end-of-the-pipe treatment and can substantially reduce a plant's waste load. Managing Food Industry Waste shows food processing managers how today's waste can become a managed resource for producing economic credits.

Drawing on his forty years of experience in managing waste, Zall explains how to identify the actual losses sent to drains and sewage treatment plants, how to pinpoint which unit processes generate these losses, and how to uncover hidden losses previously dismissed as "materials unaccounted for." An extra feature of the book is a "self-test" covering waste treatment technology; ideal for students or new employees studying waste management. Also included is a Glossary of terms used in water and waste management.

The book's common sense narrative is aimed squarely at food processing managers - this is not an engineering text about how to build and operate wastewater treatment facilities. Instead, Managing Food Industry Waste is a highly readable, management tool filled with invaluable waste management concepts and practical methods for implementation.

Contents:

Preface
Introduction
1. Who is watching the store?
2. Why waste flows need to be inventoried
3. In-plant monitoring
4. How to carry out a management scheme
5. Product loss and dollar equivalents
6. Improving the system
7. Management tools
8. Converting costs into credits
9. Economics of managing food-processing waste
10. Training
11. Unconventional techniques to deal with waste recovery or treatment schemes
12. Layman's overview of treating waste, wastewater, and solid waste
13. How to seek and gain help to solve waste problems
14. Self-Test
Appendix 1: Answers to Self-Test
Glossary
Index

About the Author:

Robert R. Zall, PhD is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Food Science at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. At Cornell, Zall taught courses in sanitation, food processing, and waste management. He is a member of the Graduate Faculty in two fields - food science and technology, and environmental quality. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty, he spent nearly 20 years in two major dairy industry firms as general manager and director of research and production.