This article seems suspect in its sensationalism, not for the facts presented, but for the ones not addressed. Greek yogurt is widely eaten in lots of countries (called labneh most of the middle east).
If we were to address this seriously we would have to ask: What do they do with the strained byproduct? The article doesn't seem to give any thought to the countries that already consume a lot of labneh.
My (Lebanese) grandmother used to make it by hanging a cloth above the sink, so her solution was merely down the drain.
edit: Woah! Sorry, I don't mean to imply that it isn't a problem. I mean to imply that many other countries may consume as much per capita as the US, but if lots of it is home-made, the waste problem might not be as visible, even if it is just as real.
~~~~
> one expert calls a “dead sea,”
The proper term for oxygen-deprived waters is actually "dead zone", to reduce confusion with the (merely very saline) Dead Sea:
> My (Lebanese) grandmother used to make it by hanging a cloth above the sink, so her solution was merely down the drain.
Which is exactly what companies would do, on an industrial scale, if it weren't illegal. But in a sense what your grandmother does is wrong. Even if we assume that there is no inherent value to healthy oceans and rivers, it robs, in nickles and dimes, fisherman whose catches are affected by the acid in household wastewater. Your grandmother saves a few cents on proper disposal while costing other people a few cents to deal with the problem she created.
If every household (instead of buying a factory product) is pouring homemade whey down the sink, it's not "in small amounts." It's simply distributing the source of the pollution.
That's still a very small concentration, because it's distributed.
Acid whey is not a pollutant. It's something you don't want high concentrations of, but low concentrations can be literally harmless. And it doesn't build up over time.
So all the industrial producers should do is get massive amounts of water, mix their acid whey with it, then use that mixture to irrigate the larger area around their plants? Maybe just inject their whey into irrigation systems at the point they pump up their water? (hint: no that is not a solution)
Of course the whey is not the pollutant, it's the acids in it. Low concentrations of anything are harmless.
That is a true and useless statement. By the same token high concentrations of anything are harmful but nobody is going to call water a pollutant. The question is about why and how something is harmful and whether it builds up. First off, why are you saying the acid is the problem? From my reading, talking about decomposition sapping oxygen, it sounds like it's the sugar and the fact that it's a food. And food isn't a pollutant. You leave it alone, it rots, nobody is harmed unless you dump large amounts of it in one spot. Now let's contrast with an actual pollutant like smoke. A whole lot of people emitting small amounts of smoke does build up, and it lingers. It causes direct harmful effects.
Do you mean to argue that the laws that govern industrial food safety and waste disposal ought also to apply to homemade food? (I hope not, since I've been known to grill and eat a medium-rare burger!)
It's reasonable to hold large commercial operations to stricter standards. I doubt that any homemade byproducts are disposed of "properly," but the impact of homemade Greek yogurt must be a tiny fraction of the commercial impact, and I don't think anyone is prepared to regulate what individuals do with milk after they buy it.
In my case, it's easy: All the 'stuff'
from the kitchen or bathrooms flows through
big, white plastic pipes to a concrete tank
buried in my back yard. Out of the tank
are some tube, tile, rock or whatever
ways for the water to flow. Done.
I never see the stuff again. The
water from the tank adds water and
plant nutrients to my backyard.
It's all the courtesy of some wonderful
'bugs': Once I had a sore on my foot,
applied some Wal-Mart triple antibiotic
cream, washed my socks, and a few days
later way in the back of my backyard
saw 'stuff' bubbling up, stuff I didn't
want to see again! Sure: That Wal-Mart
stuff was POWERFUL and sterilized my
septic tank! Solution? Sure: There's
a box, Rid-X or some such, can buy at
the grocery store. The box has some
dry beads with no odor. So, flush the
beads and, presto, the septic tank is
working again.
For milk, I've poured old, sour milk
down the kitchen sink with no evidence
of a problem.
The focus on New York makes it suspect in my mind... NY is going through an era of very extreme environmental activism regarding waste water -- mostly centering around gas fracking.
The interests that fund these groups are rich NYC types who are modern day land barons, buying up defunct farmland and building vast landholdings. Things that make farm business difficult are good for these people.
I didn't think that the article was sensationalist at all. It briefly identified a problem and then discussed solutions used currently, possible future solutions, and interviewed plenty of people in relevant fields. Your grandmother's solution was even addressed (pouring the byproduct into rivers is environmentally harmful).
I literally can't see how you found the article sensationalist. It's practically a textbook example of proper journalism.
first great response covered a few points I wanted to say about the article...
To add more my family is of Greek and Turkish heritage, I live in NYC and make my own yoghurt (super easy)... I also strain a batch. The water that gets strained you can drink, in fact, its actually the same water that remains in yoghurt when you take a deep scoop and leave higher ground yoghurt relative to the remainder.
Yoghurt has a Ph level of around 4.5-5.0 making it low acidic (for comparison orange juice has a ph of 3.5). This article refers to it as acid whey and makes it sound as if its hydrochloric acid. In all honestly there are much more serious problems to the environment than yoghurt water. How about when excess or spoiled OJ is dumped in Florida? By default its ph is an order more acidic so the impact should be too...
Plus yogurt water is drinkable and is actually good for you (proof by induction).
The article states that "the resulting whey is roughly as acidic as orange juice", so the industrial process probably creates more acidic waste than what you make at home (because they're using a different process that results in less dilution, I would assume).
The article specifically explains why acid whey is harmful to the environment - it's decomposition robs streams and rivers of oxygen and kills fish.
The point is that your personal experience making a small amount of yoghurt at home does not make you an expert when it comes to large scale production and the problems resulting from the waste produced.
>>The article states that "the resulting whey is roughly as acidic as orange juice", so the industrial process probably creates more acidic waste than what you make at home (because they're using a different process that results in less dilution, I would assume).
"roughly" is a pretty general term when there is an order difference. The difference between 4.5 and 3 is pretty significant. Unless they actually tested the Ph and publish the number in the article they should not be making claims as "roughly".
>The point is that your personal experience making a small amount of yoghurt at home does not make you an expert when it comes to large scale production and the problems resulting from the waste produced.
>The article specifically explains why acid whey is harmful to the environment - it's decomposition robs streams and rivers of oxygen and kills fish.
yes that is evident.
my point was that there are much more harmful things going into rivers and oceans rather than yoghurt juice.
Suppose greek yogurt hadn't taken off in the US & remained a niche product for some health-freaks, then Dannon & Chobani would also throw it down the drain & we'd be none the wiser. The product has taken off in a way no one imagined. At the supermarkets, I see not just athletes but positively obese masses loading up on greek yogurt in some mistaken belief that it can compensate for their other excesses with soda pop & candy. Greek yogurt sells out even after they price it at $6! Clearly, we need an industrial solution to get rid of the byproduct, if we are going to manufacture the damn thing on an industrial scale.
Why is so much of it non-fat?! The 2% milk fat Greek yogurt is so much richer, adds a trivial number of calories, and requires almost no sugar to taste "good".
Because most people are poorly educated about diet. They think fat makes you fat. While fat has higher calories per gram than protein or carbs it also has a high satiety factor.
But I just googled '0% fat greek yogurt ingredients' and the top four brands (Fage, Total, Liberté and Chobani) contain only skimmed milk and bacterial cultures.
Even if it did have gelatin (which it doesn't), why would that be a problem? If, as a society, we're going to kill animals for food, then I'm all for making sure we at least make full use of the animal and let nothing go to waste. Anything less than that would be doing the animal a disservice, don't you think?
No, that's vacuous and "spiritual". The disservice is in killing it.
I doubt you'd be okay with being mugged just because I also sold your shoes and organs.
Another problem with gelatin in your food is that it's empty filler, used only because having already killed the animal it's nearly free. You pay for yogurt and get worthless hoof squeezings.
It's not vacuous nor "spiritual", just pragmatic -- but I respect your opinion that killing animals is wrong on principle. I'm not trying to persuade you otherwise! I just disagree that gelatin is worthless (it's put in food for a reason), and I don't like unnecessary waste. Given that the animals are being killed anyway (which they are), what would you suggest is done with the hooves?
And for the record, as radio4fan said, greek yoghurt doesn't contain gelatin anyway, at least in the UK (where I am).
Perhaps we just look at these things in different ways -- as an analogy, when I die, I'll be happy to know my organs will be donated to those who need them so that some good can come from my death. Even if I had no knowledge that my organs were being donated, it doesn't change the benefit they'd make to someone in need; likewise, an animal may have no knowledge of the fact it'll be of benefit to people after it dies, but that doesn't change the fact it will be. The manner of my death (and whether some other person is responsible) doesn't change the fact that something good can come of it. That doesn't justify my death, of course, or forgive anyone who may be responsible! If someone had murdered me, they'd still be guilty of murder. But that doesn't mean my organs weren't useful, and money doesn't even come into it.
But I'm not trying to change your mind here, just offering up an alternative perspective.
I'm glad you brought that up. Sweetened yogurt is one of the worst pseudo health foods on the market. Chobani's strawberry has 20 gm of sugar (4.76 tsp), and Yoplait is worse at 33 gm (7.86 tsp). That's a butt-load of sugar for such a small container.
Hijacking for personal benefit. I'm a long time cold cereal breakfast addict. I eat the store brand equivalent of Life cereal (has actual sugar!) mostly, along with other things like apple cinnamon cheerios. I don't eat anything with a strange color that dies the milk, contains hardtack marshmallow or has a cartoon character on the box.
In an effort to substitute something more nutritious and dense, I was considering trying the Greek yogurt breakfast approach for a few weeks based on some Cleveland Clinic advice I read about better breakfast habits--I don't have time to make omelettes in the morning.
I'm going to be buying this stuff at the grocery store. What am I looking for? I don't like overly sweetened stuff and usually don't like fruit/yogurt. I'm also looking for the real thing. Not any non-fat crap. May add my own granola if I find it too boring over time. I've seen some that comes with honey. Are there any good "common" brands I should look for beyond reading labels? Sounds like you've looked into this and I would appreciate your and anyone else's advice before I hit the store this weekend.
I just get the normal kind, I don't like low-fat or non-fat versions of pretty much anything. I get store brand granola for $2-3 a box to put on it, and will occasionally add a tiny bit of honey if I feel like something faintly sweetened.
- 1.1 cup of plain greek yogurt (brand doesn't matter for me, I just make sure that it has only milk and bacteria),
- 1 oz of granola (currently it's Pumpkin Flax Granola from Costco),
- 5 oz of fresh berries.
- 1 cup of milk or juice.
Get's me about 500 Cal with 30 g of protein. And I actually like this stuff. But I am big on yogurts, had it for breakfast every day for last 20 years.
Also, I don't really care about fat levels. 0% fat is Ok for me as long as they don't substitute it with some crap.
If your local supermarket has Fage get the "Total Classic". Basically stay away from anything that says 0% or 2%. If you have a Trader Joes nearby their Greek yougurt is good as well. I like granola in mine. I have also put craisins in it. Or add your own fruit at home. My faves are raspberries and strawberries.
There's way less sugar in fruit than there is in HFCS and/or table sugar laden jam. (ex: 1 tbsp of smuckers has 12g sugar, vs approximately 0.08g of sugar per every 1 actual raspberry.)
If you were to put a small dollop of jam on 1 cup of yogurt, then that'd be comparable to putting 150 actual raspberries in, at which point you'd definitely have more raspberries than yogurt to the point of hilarity/incredulity.
That's an odd way to count. So fruits are bad pseudo health foods too? 8oz of pure, fresh squeezed orange juice has 22 grams of sugar. It wouldn't make sense to say that is "~5 tsp of sugar".
As Dr. Lustig (the "sugar is poison" guy) says, when nature delivers a poison it often provides the antidote. For fruits, the antidote is fiber. Juice removes much of that fiber.
My grandmother had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. I happened to be in the area and went to see her. When I got there, she was conscious but catatonic. I said hello to her, but she stared straight ahead, unresponsive. Her blood sugar had dropped really low, so the nurse brought in a cup of orange juice. She drank about half of it - maybe 4 oz. The nurse put the cup down, and a few seconds later my grandmother turned, looked at me, and said, "Hi Nick, what are you doing here?" I'm not trying to exaggerate, but it was like someone flipped a switch. I was amazed at how fast the sugar absorbed into her bloodstream. So I guess the point of my story is that you shouldn't underestimate the power of the sugar in an 8 oz. glass of orange juice.
Fruit juice is not the best example of a health food. There's as much sugar in most fruit juices than there is in an equal volume of Coke [1]. When we were kids, my brother had to get caps put on all his teeth because he drank too much apple juice, and even though we brushed 2x a day, the sugar rotted his teeth. Plain fruit is better because it has more fiber and about half the sugar in a serving than the juice [2].
fruit juice is indeed not very healthy, because of its enormous sugar content. you'd probably never eat for a single meal the number of oranges that go into a single orange juice glass.
I absolutely hate sweet food. I thought, for the longest time, that I hated yogurt, too.
When I discovered real, nonsweetened yogurt, I was mad that I'd been missing out all these years. There's so damn much of the sugared crap in the yogurt aisle that I never even realized that it didn't taste like that normally.
> some mistaken belief that it can compensate for their other excesses with soda pop & candy
I had no idea that the obesity epidemic could be solved by taking away soda pop and candy! Surely some nutritionist here is wondering, "why didn't I think of that?!"
I think that it's all a question of scale. The amount of whey produced by your grandmother is exponentially less than that produced by Chobani or Dannon. So, while she could just pour it down the drain, at industrial scale, that just isn't possible.
But, you do bring up a good point - what does the rest of the world do with their excess acidic whey? Is it produced anywhere else in the world at industrial scales?
I read the article, and saw something completely different. Whey is a potentially valuable byproduct, too nutritious to just throw away and they can't do it legally anyway. So these were some of the ways that the whey was being used. The food industry looking for ways to use the byproducts of an industrial process isn't exactly new, but it's also not something outside the industry thinks about.
Modern Farmer is doing some interesting work in the intersection between farming and how we're re-conceptualizing food in the last decade.
My wife works for Agriculture Extension in our state, so she is a bit in the know here. She says Greek Yogurt is the only growth dairy has seen in over 20 years. Because of that, everyone is going to (or already has) start making it. As far as being New York centric, I would venture to guess it would be because a lot of the research this is based on, is coming out of Cornell, which is the Land Grant institution in New York (Land Grants run extension).
It presents the issue as if it's a sudden surprise problem, when in fact there are established markets for whey and whey derivatives. The global market for whey protein is worth $3.8bn. To call whey (even relatively poor quality whey) "waste" is ludicrous - it's a byproduct with an established commercial value. Acid whey requires more processing than sweet whey, but it's an established and well-understood problem for the dairy industry.
The problem for the yoghurt producer is simply that liquid whey is right at the bottom of the value chain - it requires a great deal of processing to become $8/kg whey protein concentrate or $12/kg whey protein isolate. Yoghurt manufacturers may be extremely keen to move up the value chain and extract more profit from their whey byproducts, but there's no great market failure occurring here.
I don't understand what you're saying here. If the cost of processing the acid whey is higher than the market price of what it's processed into, then it's waste, right? I can't think of any waste that can't be processed into something that can be sold, providing you don't mind losing a massive amount of money on the transaction.
From a broad search, it seems that much of the downstream market for whey byproduct of yogurt and cheese production has plenty of uses. In this article by the USDA (http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/rbs/pub/mar08/whey.htm), it discusses dairy farm cooperatives turning the Lactose sugars, of which 5% of the "waste whey," is used for ethanol production. Whether there is a difference between acid or sweet whey, I am unsure, however there is certainly a demand for the byproducts of the dairy/cheese/yogurt industries.
Interesting, but some important facts are buried late in the article.
In particular, as anyone in the U.S. who reads food labels knows, whey is a very common ingredient in processed foods. So what's the problem? A partial answer:
> The concept is roughly modeled on the success that cheese-makers have had selling products derived from their own byproduct — sweet whey. Sweet whey is more valuable and easier to handle than acid whey, as it has a lot more protein, and is easier to dry because it isn’t as acidic as Greek yogurt whey. Cheese-makers have developed a lucrative business selling whey protein for use in body-building supplements and as a food ingredient. And Greek yogurt makers are eager to follow suit.
----
EDIT: Another comment.
> Rejman’s workers take the shipments and try to find uses for the whey: mix it with silage to feed to the farm’s 3,300 cows; ....
Wouldn't most adult cattle be lactose-intolerant? (As human adults were until that wacky lactase-persistence mutation hit parts of Europe & Africa.) Adding whey to feed for adult cattle sounds to me like a good way to make cattle sick. OTOH, surely farmers would have figured this out.
Sounds like we've finally found a use for all those oceans we built.
The problem with liquids like this that use up oxygen when you dump them in water is that they use up all the oxygen when you dump them in the pond. Dump them in a place with plenty of water and they find all the oxygen they need and happily degrade without killing all your fish.
Back in my Environmental Engineer days, I worked on a study of Ethylene Glycol (the stuff they use do de-ice airplanes), and how it affected the local wetlands. The worry wasn't that it would get into the waterways. There's no stopping that if you spray thousands of gallons of it onto a runway. The worry was that those local waterways wouldn't disperse it fast enough for it to harmlessly degrade into weetabix and rainbows (or whatever similarly neutral stuff it turns into when you add water and oxygen to it) before it affected the critters in the pond.
So it seems like a nice solution to this, that definitely won't fly if you tell anybody with an easy sense of environmental outrage and a disinclination to read a chemistry book, would be to load up a big boat full of it, steam well out to sea, and open the cork.
Why don't they use it as a base for cooking biscuits?
Replace water with acidic whey and throw some baking soda in to produce CO2 to leaven dough. You'll get more tasty biscuit with proteins and minerals. You'll probably need to remove lactose, tho.
I was going to say—input for yummy baking. Probably not a realistic answer for the scale being discussed, but when we strain our homemade yogurt at home, I toss the drippings into the next loaf of bread I bake.
I think that all biscuits combined make for all greek yogurt combined. We're talking comparable output here. Of course, not all recipes win from using whey, but that will seriously soften the problem already.
The only problem with "Greek Yogurt" is that there is no separate thing as Greek Yogurt. It's just a western marketing name for strained yogurt. Yogurt is a food of Turkish origin and even the words Yogurt and Chobani are directly from Turkish language. Yogurt and its derivatives are very common throughout the former Ottoman geography, from Balkans to Arabic countries. Does that really matter? Yes, if culture and history has any importance.
Origins of yogurt in general go back much farther than the Ottomans though by at least 1500-3000 years. Though, you're correct that the word itself is Turkish. Also correct that it's basically called Greek Yogurt because marketers in the West thought it sounded better.
In ancient Indian records, the combination of yogurt and honey is called "the food of the gods".[17] Persian traditions hold that "Abraham owed his fecundity and longevity to the regular ingestion of yogurt".[18]
The oldest writings mentioning yogurt are attributed to Pliny the Elder, who remarked that certain "barbarous nations" knew how "to thicken the milk into a substance with an agreeable acidity".[19] The use of yogurt by medieval Turks is recorded in the books Diwan Lughat al-Turk by Mahmud Kashgari and Kutadgu Bilig by Yusuf Has Hajib written in the 11th century.[20][21] Both texts mention the word "yogurt" in different sections and describe its use by nomadic Turks.[20][21] The earliest yogurts were probably spontaneously fermented by wild bacteria in goat skin bags.[22]
This reminds me of a client I had a long time ago who sold silane gas, which is the byproduct of making metallurgical grade silicon. It is a byproduct of semiconductor production (among other things) and very scary to store because it combusts upon contact with oxygen. So as you can imagine if there is a leak... it's bad news.
In the 90s they had so much of this stuff and it was really expensive to store and not much could be done with it, by then they discovered it could be used to coat the glass exterior of entire skyscrapers to reduce glare, and to make solar panels, and many other things. I always think of this story when I hear about byproduct management problems, and hope they'll find a commercial solution - they just might invent something new and awesome out of necessity.
I actually was faced with the same problem a little while ago. I started making my own Greek yoghurt once a week at home. So I started having to throw out these big amounts of whey. That felt very wasteful, so I started to do some research into what I could do with the whey. It turns out to be a great substitute in many recipes that call for buttermilk (pancakes, mashed potatoes). It also is great in smoothies. Apparently you can even make ricotta cheese from it. Last weekend I actually still had enough yoghurt, but made yoghurt because I was out of whey! It's great stuff and I haven't even been able yet to make any ricotta, since I don't have enough left after all the other now mandatory use cases.
I am really surprised that the whey is so acidic. Mine at least doesn't taste that sour. I would like some explanation for that. However, cultures used by these big corporations also aren't real, sustainable greek yoghurt cultures. You can use the culture from commercial yoghurt as a starter for your own yoghurt and go from there. However, the culture will die eventually, since they are bred for maximum consistent result in a laboratory like environment. I wonder if that has to do with it.
The topic of fermentation is super interesting. I can throng lay recommend to everyone o read Sandor Katz's "Art of Fermentation". It's a great work about the history, culture and basic workings of fermentation.
I 'm more interested on why hackers are interested in this article. Somebody will come up with a good idea on how to process the whey further. Yoghurt production certainly hasn't destroyed Greece until now, so there is a bit of sensationalism here as well.
Here in Iceland we drink it and use it to store food in the traditional way (don't see that catching on anywhere else though).
The most interesting use of it though is in sports drinks. They've managed to make the whey taste ok and still keep the drink healthy. I'm sure we will see this elsewhere.
The presence of lactose made me curious as to whether all this whey could be used in ethanol production. It would help reduce the need for corn ethanol while taking care of this problem. Curiously, this possible solution wasn't mentioned in the article at all.
In my cursory search on the matter (and comment a few moments ago to another reply), ethanol production was my first thought when dealing with the excess lactose. It seems that there are a few cooperatives that own a facility in California & Minnesota. I am still unsure of the difference between "sweet" whey & "acid" whey, I believe that they should be able to convert the lactose into a useable ethanol.
The article said that the whey was
"toxic" because if put it in
a lake or stream it will consume
the oxygen and kill the fish. That's
mostly just FUD, hype, and nonsense:
The water treatment industry is very
aware of 'biologic oxygen demand' (BOD).
Basically, yes, decomposing some whey in
a lake will consume some oxygen from the
lake. Consume too much oxygen and then
will kill the fish. Sure. But that doesn't
make the whey "toxic". Indeed, lots of
things go into the streams, rivers, and lakes
that consume oxygen. If don't consume
too much oxygen, then likely fine. No problem
(at least about oxygen).
And, of course, what consumes the whey
is biologic activity that might make the
water better for plants, fish, etc.
Sure, go to a big city sewage processing
plant. What do they do? Sure, bubble
air through the dark liquid! Or, they
follow the recipe, "Add air and stir."!
Net, the article looks like traditional
newsie stuff -- claim the sky is falling
and get eyeballs and ad revenue. Smelly
bait for the ad hook. Make people feel
guilty from their 'sins' of their consumption
of thick yogurt and what they pour down
their drains. Deliberate, confused, nonsense
guilt trip. Bummer.
For over 20 years,
I've poured lots of stuff down my kitchen
drain. Too old, sour milk has been a
common item. Much worse, when I feed
canned cat food to my kitty cats, they
often don't eat all of it, and, being
smart little kitty cats, don't eat it
at all after it becomes old and dry.
So, then I have to clean out such
food dishes for them. To do this
I soak the dishes overnight in water
with detergent, rinse the dishes,
and flush the rest.
And I'm 'destroying the 100% all-natural,
pure, pristine, precious, sensitive,
delicate planet'? I don't think so!
Instead all the 'stuff' from the
kitchen and bathrooms goes through
big, white plastic pipes to a big
concrete tank sunk in my backyard.
The tank has some 'bugs' that reduce
essentially everything into clear
water, some methane gas, and a tiny
quantity of solids. The gas floats
off; the water goes into the drain
field in my backyard; and the solids
accumulate. The tank has been working
fine for over 20 years without cleaning.
For the water, the backyard loves it.
Net, no worries. So, I'm not destroying
the planet! And I'm not guilty.
Huh, apparently Greek yogurt doesn't fall under the Protected Designation of Origin scheme (and I don't think the US follows that anyway), so it doesn't actually have to be Greek to be called Greek. Interesting.
Since 2002, feta has been a protected designation of origin product in the European Union. According to the relevant EU legislation, only those cheeses produced in a traditional way in some areas of Greece (mainland and the island of Lesbos), and made from sheep milk, or from a mixture of sheep and goats’ milk (up to 30%) of the same area, may bear the name "feta".
That's not what the parent means. PDO legislation in Europe defines precisely which regions are allowed to sell products under a specific name. No other region is allowed to use that name ( hence Roquefort vs blue cheese)
The first thing which came to my mind was the argument against nuclear energy; it produces too much waste. The waste from yogurt seems to be a far bigger problem though. While not so long-term, it is massive. Interesting to draw parallels.
Over here there's a syrupy-like product called Calpis. It's slightly acidic yet milky and sweet. As far as I remember, it is made at least partly from this byproduct. Of course it's a small step to the solution.
Another ten cents, if it is largely water based, what about letting the water evaporate? Or does the acid go with it?
The problems with waste are clearly a short-term issue caused by unexpected growth. If they can absorb ~70% of their acid whey by product by mixing into nearby farms, then given the sheer amount of livestock in the US, you can definately absorb all of it if you solve the distribution/logistics problems.
Really, all of the solutions the come up with will work. None of really have a real scaling issue, but they do require capital and have lag-time, which apparently were not sufficiently considered.
The problem here isn't that 'oh, there's a river of this "toxic" waste that we don't know what to deal with'. The problem is 'oh, we've tripled our production without having a solid plan on waste disposal, and we don't want to pay more to truck this stuff to further farms'.
> .. the argument against nuclear energy; it produces too much waste.
??? Nuclear power produces less waste than any other energy source on earth - including solar and wind. And coal produces more nuclear waste (by volume, not intensity) than nuclear power does.
Nuclear power generates a large amount of waste heat - which, in turn, acidifies local waterways. Nuclear power, even with subsidies, to be profitable/feasible, requires a very large amount of fresh water (or de-salinated sea water).
It's actually a bigger problem than whey - there's no market to absorbe the waste output.
> large amount of waste heat - which, in turn, acidifies local waterways
Say what??? That makes no sense. Do you really believe that, or did you typo?
Yes, nuclear power does need a heat dump, but the waste heat has only a local effect on the water in the close vicinity.
You understand that it doesn't really consume the water right (except for a small amount that evaporates)? It just dumps heat in it, then sends it downstream, which isn't great for fish, but it's not terrible either - the effects are minimal, and local only, by the time the water flows a bit downstream it has cooled off back to the normal temperature.
And you can use sea water, the salt doesn't effect the cooling ability, but I don't think there are any plants near coastlines.
> Another ten cents, if it is largely water based, what about letting the water evaporate?
They could run it through reverse osmosis, which is already commonly done in industrial scale. This would not get rid of the all the water, but just take it down 90% would be enough.
I was thinking of letting it evaporate too. It seems this is the less costly option. No need to truck it anywhere, just dump it in big artificial pools. Once in a while, collect the solid waste from the pools (lactose, mineral, proteins). They say this waste is dangerous for the environment, but maybe not when it is in solid form?
Here are the following problems. Firstly, the sheer scale. One of the major producers makes 150 million gallons a year. Or half a million gallon a day, or roughly an olympic sized swimming pool. Or... lets go all out.
Half a million gallons is roughly 2 million liters, or 2 million kilograms of water. Assume air temperature of 20 degrees. To boil off the water, its going to take 4 kilojoules per kilogram per degree celcius.... so thats 640 GJ already. Ignore heat of vaporization.
Incident solar radiation at like ... 1000W per m^2. 12 hours -> 43200 seconds per day, so 1 m^2 receives 44MJ is a day... which means you need about 15000m^2 of surface area to evaporate off a day's worth of production in a day. Optimistically.
Actually, I think the heat of vaporisation is more than the energy to heat the water to boiling: 2.26 MJ/kg, which takes us to ~4TJ/day.
The 1000W solar radiation is also for the sun directly overhead without clouds, which obviously can't happen for 12 hours a day. I've found a source saying Bangkok gets something like 20MJ/m^2/day, and higher latitudes presumably have less. With those figures we're at 200000m^2 of evaporation area, and it's still optimistic (what about rain?).
Which really doesn't seem like that big a deal for a farm or large factory -- it's a 100m x 150m pad. Presumably you could keep it sanitary by using plastic sheeting over a concrete pad.
Why would it have to be farmers who make a capital investment to convert this stuff to methane? I would think the yogurt companies would just do it themselves and save on the shipping, nobody needs farmers to invest millions, just buy the manure (or I'm sure there's another way to do it).
From the article: "The resulting whey is roughly as acidic as orange juice. It’s almost entirely made up of water... and a very small amount of proteins."
If this is the same whey as in whey protein… Whey prices are THROUGH THE ROOF the last couple of years owing to inflation and large purchasers drying up supply.
> If this is the same whey as in whey protein... Whey prices are THROUGH THE ROOF the last couple of years owing to inflation and large purchasers drying up supply.
Whey protein is usually processed from whey that is a byproduct of cheesemaking; as the article notes, the acid whey from making Greek yogurt is much more acidic, and has much lower protein concentration; while it is probably possible to extract whey protein from it it is a much poorer source of it than the whey from cheesemaking (and given the apparently huge supply and the rather visible market for whey to supply the supplement, etc., industry, I suspect if it were even marginally economically viable for that use, we wouldn't have articles like the one here.)
I use whey from Greek yoghurt for baking in recipes that call for buttermilk. Probably not a large-scale solution, but it works brilliantly on a small scale.
The article describes that it already gets converted by non-engineered bacteria into a biofuel - called methane. it's just that building processing tanks and methane capture equipment is expensive. Not like nuclear power plan expensive, but a million bucks is a lot of capital investment for a farmer - note that some farmers already do this to process animal manure.
My tub of whey protein powder costs $50 for 5lbs. If this is becoming so endemic, please tell me where precisely to go so I can save barrels of money a year.
From the article: "Barbano, who specializes in filtration methods for separation and recovery of protein, has his sights set on the tiny amount of protein in acid whey. He believes it might be usable as an infant formula ingredient. But first Barbano has to figure out how to extract the protein in a cost-effective way, and his research is just getting underway."
My comment was tongue-in-cheek. That said, I've known bodybuilders ever since they forced us to start working out freshman year and they'd drink 20 gallons of highly acidic fluid if it meant some protein was in there.
Hell, you could market it as a miracle supplement.
If we were to address this seriously we would have to ask: What do they do with the strained byproduct? The article doesn't seem to give any thought to the countries that already consume a lot of labneh.
My (Lebanese) grandmother used to make it by hanging a cloth above the sink, so her solution was merely down the drain.
edit: Woah! Sorry, I don't mean to imply that it isn't a problem. I mean to imply that many other countries may consume as much per capita as the US, but if lots of it is home-made, the waste problem might not be as visible, even if it is just as real.
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> one expert calls a “dead sea,”
The proper term for oxygen-deprived waters is actually "dead zone", to reduce confusion with the (merely very saline) Dead Sea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)
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I found a paper that I think is much more interesting than the posted article:
Utilization of Labneh Whey Lactose Hydrolyzed Syrup in Baking and Confectionery, from the Pakistan Journal of Nutrition
http://www.pjbs.org/pjnonline/fin2285.pdf