A recent UKWIR Report on options for charging UK food service establishments based on the fats, oils and grease (FOG) content of their wastewater raises many fascinating questions. Alongside the practical and economic challenges of implementation, it notes our limited understanding of how these materials pose a risk to sewerage and of the difficulties they present at wastewater treatment plants.
This is a continuing area of interest for EBNet since an initial webinar on FOG/Fatberg Mitigation followed by attendance at the European FOG Summit 2021.
A recent paper by Dr Luca Alibardi and his colleagues also focuses on FOG properties and treatment.
Dr Alibardi, who is Co-Lead of EBNet’s Anaerobic Fermentation WG, said āAs well as affecting physico-chemical processes at the wastewater plant, these materials are a problem for biological treatment because of their slow biodegradation, high organic load and link to filamentous microbes implicated in foaming. With this work we identified how separation processes at wastewater plants affect the properties of these materials, and this can inform management practices, with bioenergy recovery remaining a viable option in some conditionsā.
The report canĀ be read on UKWIR’s Research Reports page, and is free to download for UKWIR members.
Details of the paper are below. The full dataset is also available here via the FAO’ AGRIS database
Characterisation and anaerobic digestion of fat, oil and grease (FOG) waste from wastewater treatment plants.Ā Alibardi, L., Strazzabosco, A. and Cossu, R., 2025. Journal of Environmental Management, 375, p.124193.