You probably don’t feel like you’re polluting by eating fries or boiled eggs. And yet, these two foods alone produce a lot of waste. So that consumers concerned about their environment do not have to give up these little pleasures tomorrow, young entrepreneurs are thinking about solutions.
This is how a group of students from ECAM EPMI in Cergy won the second prize in the student category of the Foodtech Challenge 2022, organized in Cergy-Pontoise (Val-d’Oise) in April. This competition, open to start-ups and schools, focuses on the theme of food in the broad sense. With their project, called 100 Fries, these young people propose to recycle frying oil within small territorial units and transform it into biodiesel that can be used by farmers working on site.
“According to our calculations, in the Val-d’Oise, we would use around 21,000 liters of oil per week”, detail Louis Fresquet, Florent Schuyer, Armand Wils and Bharath Sangar, young creators of 100 fries. ” It is enormous ! » Inspired by this reality, the students thought that it would be appropriate to treat this waste locally, rather than transporting it to these large treatment centers very far away as is currently practiced by multinationals.
Collect biofuel on one side and glycerin on the other
“We have developed our own cleaning-filtering process, detail the members of the team. The water acts as a filter and the reagent we use is methanol, a compound made in France. The treatment will make it possible to recover at the end, on the one hand the biofuel, and on the other hand glycerin which can be resold to the pharmaceutical industry. this is what would allow each unit to be profitable. “These small units could be declined almost everywhere “to develop the autonomy of each territory”. The young people plan to continue developing their project next year as part of their studies.
These hopefuls of tomorrow could take as an example the great winner of the Foodtech Challenge, start-up category: the company Circul’egg has set itself the task of developing eggshells in order to transform them into raw materials for the cosmetics, food supplements and pet food. Justine Lecallier and Yacine Kabeche, the two founders of the start-up based in Clichy (Hauts-de-Seine) intend to set up in Cergy-Pontoise and are currently looking for premises to set up a factory.
