TRIA partners with Yara International to develop circular fertilisers from urban foodservice waste
SINGAPORE. Local enterprise TRIA, a forefront provider of circular foodservice packaging solutions, explores a long-term partnership with Norwegian based Yara International, the world’s leading crop nutrition company and a provider of environmental and agricultural solutions.
- TRIA and Yara International announce a partnership to develop circular fertiliser solutions from urban foodservice waste. This involves the extraction of valuable nutrients in foodservice waste from the food retail and hospitality sectors. Such nutrients can be developed into commercial-grade fertiliser to nourish food crops, instead of being sent as waste to incineration or landfill facilities.
- The ambition of the partnership between TRIA and Yara International is to provide a scalable, commercially viable closed-loop offering to global foodservice companies, allowing them to (1) recycle their foodservice waste and related nutrients, including single-use packaging, making sure food never creates waste, (2) regenerate soil health to cultivate more nutritious food, ensuring there is plenty to feed the future, (3) reduce the end-to-end carbon footprint from farm-to-food-to-waste by avoiding incineration, paving the way for a low-carbon food ecosystem. This system-wide circular approach can be one that truly exemplify the future of sustainable consumption.
- TRIA’s closed-loop solution for packaging has been making waves with the world’s first pilot with fast food giant KFC Singapore. TRIA continued the momentum with yet another pilot at the Formula 1 Singapore Airlines Singapore Grand Prix (Singapore GP) last September. Single-use foodwares and food waste from the event were turned into farm-ready fertilisers for food crops. This effectively allowed Singapore GP to close the loop on waste.
Foodservice waste from the hospitality and food retail sectors is a sizeable problem for the environment. Globally foodservice waste amounts to an estimate of 240 million tonnes of food waste1 and 140 million tonnes of plastic packaging waste2 each year. The recycling of these foodservice waste is proving to be difficult, requiring resource intensive and tedious source segregation – the reason why it usually ends up at the incineration or landfill at significant financial and environmental cost.
With TRIA’s patented Rapid Depolymerisation (RD) technologies, foodservice waste packaging (made with TRIA’s proprietary NEUTRIA® material) and food waste itself can be recycled together as a single organic waste stream, without the need for source segregation. This effectively allows the organic recycling of mixed foodservice waste, which would otherwise be too difficult to be handled by conventional recycling methods.
TRIA and Yara have embarked on a Proof-of-Concept (PoC), with the objective of deriving a range of commercial-grade circular fertilisers from various foodservice waste feedstocks through organic recycling.1 UN Environment Programme. (2021). UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2021, (pp. 70) 2 Geyer, R., Jambeck, J. R., & Law, K. L. (2017). Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made. Science advances, 3(7), e1700782.
The PoC will assess the viability of each waste feedstock and deploy proprietary techniques in depolymerisation, digestion, and hygienisation to harvest nutrients, organic matter, and carbon. Appropriate nutrient formulations will be further developed to attain bioequivalence on par with industry standards. The goal is to realise a stable nutrient pool that results in sustainable, healthy, productive soil, while maximizing crop health and yields in commercial agriculture at scale.
“Yara is extremely pleased to announce this partnership with TRIA in Singapore. The current geopolitical crisis has resulted in global fertiliser shortages, which is directly creating widespread food insecurity. Even without the current situation, food security has always been vulnerable, because everything we produce ultimately depends on the health of our soil. If our soil is not healthy, our ability to grow nutritious crops in a sustainable manner will be compromised.”
“Our partnership with TRIA will help Singapore manage its organic waste, while transforming it into commercially-viable fertilisers. These crop nutrition solutions will enable smallholder and commercial farmers to improve soil health sustainably. This is a vital part of ensuring that initiatives like Singapore’s 30% domestic food production by 2030 can be achieved.”
“We welcome and invite Singaporean and global food value chain businesses to join us, and to explore possible areas for collaboration on this important project.”
– Werner Prinsloo, Director – Sustainability & Food Chain, Yara Africa & Asia
A regenerative agriculture approach builds and revitalizes soil health by introducing organic matter to support better agricultural systems. This approach provides multiple benefits to soil health, such as improve soil’s water holding capacity, its organic carbon content and improves the nutrient density for crops. This is a dynamic and holistic approach, including conservation tillage, cover crops, crop rotation, composting, mobile animal shelters and pasture cropping, to increase food production, farmers’ income and especially, topsoil. It contributes to healthy soil which is capable of producing high quality, nutrient-dense food, while simultaneously improving – rather than degrading – lands. This ultimately leads to productive farms and healthy communities and economies.
The partnership between TRIA and Yara signifies a milestone for the circular food ecosystem, where industry partners across the food value chain co-develop and co-create new value, and to take ownership to help close the loop.
“TRIA crossed a couple of key milestones recently, they included our pilot with KFC Singapore as a world’s first and also empowering Formula 1 Singapore Airlines Singapore Grand Prix to close the loop with their foodware and food waste.”
“Continuing our momentum to form collation partners along the value chain, I’m very excited to have this joint announcement between TRIA and Yara International on a partnership that allows us to create new value from foodservice waste which will otherwise be disposed of.”
“From unwanted waste to world-class fertilisers, resulting in nutritious vegetables back on our tables, this is the new circular economy for food!”
– Ng Pei Kang, Chief Executive Officer, TRIA
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About TRIA
TRIA is an award winning close-the-loop company for packaging, offering a range of sustainable packaging solutions from product, services to end-to-end ecosystem.
TRIA is at a crucial juncture of scaling up her closed-loop solution to address the non-recyclability of single-use food packaging. With her patented technologies based on organic recycling, both packaging (made with TRIA’s proprietary NEUTRIA® material) and food waste can be recycled together as a single organic waste stream without source segregation. This enables foodservice brands like KFC to recycle their packaging and food waste.
TRIA’s solution has been showcased in over 176 global media channels including Packaging Insights, Plasticity Thailand, Asian Development Bank, Eco-business, Tech in Asia and Channel News Asia. TRIA was also mentioned in the 2019 Singapore Budget by Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister HENG Swee Keat and in 2022 by Minister of State LOW Yen Ling for how TRIA drives circularity with innovation.
Over the past years, TRIA has won multiple accolades such as the Emerging Enterprise Award, Pentawards, ASEAN-Korea Excellent Design Award, and Singapore Packaging Star Awards. Her CEO NG Pei Kang is an honouree on Eco-Business’s A-list for Sustainability Leadership and a juror for the second time in the year for Singapore Good Design Award for sustainable solutions.
TRIA is a Singapore enterprise backed by venture capital funds, with mandates to accelerate food system circularity with deep tech and decarbonisation efforts to cut carbon emissions and fight climate change.
www.tria.solutions | www.triafoodware.com
About Yara International
Founded in 1905 and headquartered in Oslo, Yara International ASA is the world’s leading crop nutrition company and a provider of environmental and agricultural solutions. The company has 18,000 employees and operations in more than 60 countries.
Supporting Yara’s vision of a world without hunger and a planet respected, the company pursues a strategy of sustainable value growth, promoting climate-friendly crop nutrition and zero-emission energy solutions. Yara’s ambition is focused on growing a nature positive food future that creates value for its customers, shareholders, and society at large, while delivering a more sustainable food value chain.
Yara Africa & Asia (YAA) was formed in June 2020; it is one of three key geographic business units within Yara International. Headquartered in Singapore – and with more than 1,800 employees – YAA provides smallholder and commercial farmers in 22 market economies across Africa and Asia with the knowledge, crop nutrition solutions, and best practices to sustainably improve soil and crop health, yields, and economic livelihoods.
Media contacts:
Gracia Yap
Head of Communications, TRIA
+65 90270572
gracia.yap@tria.solutions
Dom LaVigne
Director, Public Affairs and Corporate Communications – Africa & Asia
Yara International
+65 9862 7791
dom.lavigne@yara.com
