Emerson's Insinkerator Business celebrates 75th year

Dubai, UAE [Sept. 1, 2013] – InSinkErator, a business of Emerson (NYSE: EMR) and the world's largest manufacturer of food waste disposers and instant hot water dispensers for home and commercial use, is recognizing its 75th anniversary with the production of its 150 millionth disposer. This milestone comes at a time when InSinkErator disposers are playing an increasingly critical environmental role in managing food scraps, and are gaining popularity on a global scale.

“The rich history of InSinkErator positions our company well for future innovations,” said Tim Ferry, president of InSinkErator. “We estimate that InSinkErator has helped divert more than 77.3 billion pounds of food waste from landfills. That's enough to fill train cars stretching from Los Angeles to New York and back – twice. As we celebrate this important milestone, we also are pursuing the opportunities that lie ahead for us.”

Many of those opportunities can be found outside the United States, as InSinkErator expands to new markets in Asia, India, the Middle East, and Africa. In 2010, InSinkErator opened its offices in Dubai to market its world-class environmentally friendly line of products across discerning consumers in the region. The Middle East is one of the fastest growing environmental technology markets where consumers have become more aware of the need to prioritize green and eco-friendly products. As the development of infrastructure advances in these markets, governments are increasingly looking at ways to better manage the volume of food waste, a topic that InSinkErator has studied closely.  

In fact, InSinkErator completed a Life Cycle Assessment study in 2011 to evaluate the environmental footprint of food waste management options. The intent of the study was to understand the impact of different food waste disposal processes such as wastewater treatment, landfill, incineration, and composting. The study found that managing food waste using a disposer has less environmental impact over other methods such as landfilling. Grinding food waste with a disposer and sending it via the wastewater stream to a treatment plant diverts it from landfills, and by using anaerobic digestion, the treatment plant can capture biogas in the form of methane. For instance, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District is able to generate electricity from the methane created by the digestion of food waste in its wastewater system. San Francisco, Philadelphia and many other cities also extract energy from wastewater.

“As we look forward to the next 75 years, and landfill bans on organic materials become more common, we're exploring ways to broaden the use of food waste to generate biogas,” said Ferry. “For example, we're looking at commercial institutions that manage large quantities of food waste, such as sports arenas, grocery stores, hotels, and academic institutions, and thinking about how best to process that food waste using an anaerobic digestion facility.”

On a different scale, InSinkErator disposers are being used to generate biogas for cooking in urban settlements and remote villages that do not have access to cooking gas or electricity. Dr. T.H. Culhane, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, is working with InSinkErator to install disposers and community-scale anaerobic digesters in cities and villages in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, the United States, Asia and Africa. In some places, people soon will be able to grind their food waste using InSinkErator-designed “bicycle disposers,” using human power in the absence of electricity.

For more information on InSinkErator innovations and the company's history, visit www.insinkerator.com.