The Finest Digester Power

It’s amazing how much technology is involved in delivering the humble tomato to the Great British Public’s salad bowl.

A fact that Hitech Instruments recently discovered when asked to supply a solution for monitoring biogas on a new, anaerobic digester (AD) system, designed by Biotech Services and supplied to A. Pearson and Sons, a UK tomato grower for a major UK supermarket.

A. Pearson and Sons currently have 5.2 hectares of glass houses at their Alderley Edge site which produces 33 million tomatoes p.a. along with 15 to 20 M³ of waste vegetation per day which, in years gone by, would have been disposed of by landfill with its inherent carbon footprint and commercial costs. Now however, with the help of this new, state of the art, multi-phase anaerobic digester system, the tomato plant waste will be producing biomethane of sufficient quality to power vehicles. It will also produce electrical power, heat and carbon dioxide for the cultivation of plants in glasshouses. As well as these benefits, the 14,000 litres of nutrient rich waste liquor produced every week as a by-product of the digestion process is used as a fertiliser. Thus recovering water and nutrients which would otherwise be lost out of the tomato plant growing cycle.