Capro-X

Capro-X puts small biorefineries next to food plants and ferments their waste into caproic acid and related fatty acids: ingredients for flavors, fragrances, animal feed, cosmetics, and bioplastics. Dairy production alone trucks away billions of pounds of fermentable byproduct each year at real expense, while the consumer goods industry sources the same class of molecule from palm oil, which means deforestation.

The usual fate of wet food waste is anaerobic digestion, which turns something valuable into biogas, roughly the least valuable thing it could become. Capro-X's fermentation runs continuously, open-culture, without sterility control, which is what keeps the capital cost low enough to site a unit at a single plant rather than needing a regional facility fed by a fleet of trucks. Two bad outcomes, waste hauling and palm oil, get solved by the same reactor.