News

Denali announces strides in sustainability

Organic recycling company Denali recently announced it has converted more than 10 billion pounds of organic byproducts into animal feed and fertilizer.

Vice President of Commodity Trading Will Clark tells Brownfield…

“Our sustainability team has estimated that last year we recycled and collected about 1.7 billion pounds of food waste which helped us avoid over 850,000 tons of CO2 emissions that would have been released if gone to landfill.”

Denali utilizes de-packaging technology which automatically separates food from its packaging materials like plastic and cardboard, for a cleaner stream of organic material to be converted into animal feed or compost, which is distributed to farmers at no cost. The process has enabled farmers to offset some of their feed and fertilizer costs.  

Clark says the process converts starch and protein heavy food materials into animal feed.

“We’ll heat treat it and we’ll make sure that our total mix is correct and we’ve got a product spec that we sell it to and essentially what we try to do is create a 1-to-1 replacement for corn in the ration of a feeder or dairy cattle,” he says.

Clark says Denali also processes industrial food manufacturing waste by taking bio solids from wastewater streams and converting it into fertilizer for farmers.

“It allows them to avoid synthetic fertilizer application where they can. It’s got pretty high quality, natural nitrogen composition to it and also some phosphorous and potassium as well,” he says.

According to Denali’s 2023 sustainability report, the company produced enough fertilizer to support more than 100,000 acres of farmland and manufactured enough animal feed to nourish over 40,000 cattle across five states.

Photo courtesy Marika Kelly, Denali