By Alice McFarlane

Agriculture Roundup for Friday January 21, 2022

Jan 21, 2022 | 12:34 PM

MELFORT, Sask. — The semi-finalists in the Food Waste Reduction Challenge have been determined.

Agriculture and Agri-Food minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said 18 projects have been selected.

The semi-finalists’ entries range from green chemistry to the creation of natural additives, edible coatings, or bioplastics. Each semi-finalist will receive $100,000 and move on to the prototype development stage. Over the next eight months, semi-finalists will build or complete an existing prototype of their technology and report on their solution’s effectiveness.

A total of six finalists for the Novel Technologies Streams will be selected, each receiving up to an additional $450,000 with finalists competing to win one of two grand prizes of up to $1 million.

The list of the Novel Technologies Streams’ semi-finalists can be found at the Food Waste Reduction Challenge website.

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A researcher is looking into using canola meal as a heat source.

Dr. Ajay Dalai with the University of Saskatchewan (USask)’s College of Engineering has been exploring the use of canola meal pellets as an eco-friendly alternative to coal and natural gas for both heat and energy.

“Eventually, the world is going to phase out coal because of pollution,” he said.

The next phase of his work will move to scaled-up pellet production and commercialization.

The research has been looking at turning leftover materials from crop production, like canola meal, into biocoal.

In 2019, Canada produced over 18 million tonnes of canola and 10 million tonnes came from Saskatchewan. The oil extraction process leaves behind canola meal, which is about 60 per cent of the original crop by weight.

Some canola meal is exported and about 40 per cent is fed to livestock. The remainder is what Dalai sees as potential biocoal.

The challenge is to produce high-quality pellets suitable for storage and transportation to facilities where it can be burned to produce heat and power.

Dalai said the team will also investigate alternative, lower-cost additives and apply their recipe to other biomaterials, including canola hull, mustard meal and hull, and oat hull.

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alice.mcfarlane@pattisonmedia.com

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