Factory Farming Stinks
Managing literal tons of hog poop gets tough for Smithfield Foods

The Problem
Disposing of waste is costly, either to the business or the environment

At Smithfield sites, the only way to process the manure at their scale is the method pictured above, an anaerobic lagoon, which basically mixes chemicals and water into the waste and lets it process over time. The produced wastewater usable as fertilizer. Only as fertilizer.
But there are two big reasons as to why this is terrible for the business:
- Smithfield, as a pork producer, barely uses fertilizer. Transporting liquid fertilizer to market is insanely expensive, so they can’t sell it either.
- When it rains, the full lagoons flood and the toxic wastewater leaks into water sources, causing environmental damage and big fines.
And so, the problem is essentially that Smithfield’s waste management system is neither sustainable nor competitive because the only methods of disposal it offers are either unethical or at a major cost to the business.
The Solution
Break down the waste, and process each component separately

Waste is comprised of many parts, but you can think of it as useful liquids, useful gasses, and useful solids.
The solids are much cheaper to transport than the liquid waste, so they’re profitable to sell. The liquid waste perfectly meets Smithfield’s own needs, and the gas can actually be used for electricity to make the entire system self-sustainable.

The solution we proposed was an entirely new waste management system that had almost no risk of runoff and would pay for itself in 16 years.
The full details are in this 76 page brief, but essentially the useful gasses are extracted in the biogas digester, the solids in the belt filter press, and what’s left are the useful liquids. Voilà!
Impact

The three biggest selling points are that it:
- Massively reduces wastewater
- Generates value, so it’s not just a cost.
- Significantly reduces environmental risk
With specific numbers in the chart above.
The Team
We didn’t really specific roles, and switched around most of the time. Generally, however, James Tsui and I acted as the PMs as well as prototyping leads, Andrea handled documentation, and Ibraheem and Rachel functioned as our research leads.
Ibraheem Alinur | Andrea Cardona | Rachel Connors | James Tsui | James Xie