Arla launching pilot project fueling milk trucks with methane produced from farmers’ cows

October 5, 2020 |

In the UK, Arla is getting in gear with its sustainability efforts and transforming cow manure from its farms into vehicle-friendly fuel in a major new trial.

Arla’s initiative will mean that for the first time, farmers will send their cows’ poo to a nearby anaerobic digestion plant where it will be broken down into different components, including clean bio-methane, and converted into usable fuel.

The trial makes Arla the first UK business to use waste from its own farms to generate power for its fleet. The process will also create nutrient rich, natural fertilizer which Arla farmers can put back on to farms, making it an entirely closed loop, something that hasn’t been done before.

The three-month test will involve two special Arla tankers that have been adapted to run on biofuel transporting milk between dairy processing sites.  Together they are expected to cover around 90,000km and help reduce Arla’s carbon impact by 80 metric tons – the equivalent to 23 car journeys around the world. Proving that muck is just as important as milk, Arla will use manure from 500 cows – that’s around 190 tons of slurry each week – to create a staggering 27,000kg of biofuel to power the trial vehicles.

Category: Fuels

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