100 tons of burgers per week taken to Biffa site in horse meat scare
Up to 100 tons of potentially contaminated burgers a week were sent to Staffordshire for disposal at the height of the horseburger scare, it has emerged.
Cannock-based waste plant Biffa was inundated with calls from supermarkets who cleared their shelves of burgers.
The company says their burger intake spiked at between 50 to 100 tons a week after the story broke last month. The burgers were recycled in the firm's £26 million anaerobic digester, designed for food waste.
But bosses said they had to disappoint many firms because the digester has to maintain a certain ratio of waste materials and could not be overloaded with any one product.
Last month it was revealed some frozen beef burgers from Tesco were made up of 29 per cent horse meat. Similar products from Iceland, Aldi, The Co-operative Group and Lidl were also found to contain horse DNA.
Biffa's director of engineering Dr John Casey said: "We were inundated with calls from retailers who wanted to get rid of their potentially contaminated burgers, both existing customers and others.
"But we had to say no after a certain point because we have got a responsibility to maintain a particular mix of waste. We took the burgers we could and reset the biology within the anaerobic digester the week after."
He said that the extra burger deliveries lasted for around two weeks and levels had now returned to normal. At the height of the scare, the burgers made up only a twentieth of the overall waste food mass.
The giant food digester, which opened in July 2011, processes up to 120,000 tons of food waste every year. Digesters are hailed as the answer to the country's energy crisis with the food slops being converted to electricity which is fed into the National Grid.
