Future of the Waste Management in Distilleries for home Fruit Growers – Case from Slovakia

Abstract

Distilleries for home fruit growers play an important role in the Slovak spirits industry.  They represent from 5% to 15% of the total spirits production in the country. In this paper, businesses with a focus on waste management and its future potential were investigated. The investigated industry creates a significant amount of bio-waste when under 10% of raw materials used for the distillation process are transformed into the final product. The waste production in distilleries for home fruit growers based on the available annual production data was estimated in this research. Based on these estimations, distilleries for home fruit growers produce annually 37,407.07 tons of bio-waste on average. The median distillery produces annually around 211.4 tons of bio-waste. The bio-waste from investigated distilleries is used directly as fertilizer on the arable soil at this time. This option is the cheapest solution for distilleries for home fruit growers. The different reuse options for bio-waste from distilleries were compared. All of them were more expensive compared to direct use of bio-waste as a fertilizer. Due to the higher cost, there is no interest to reuse this significant amount of the bio-waste produced in small distilleries for home fruit growers at this moment.