Cennatek believes there’s money to be made in discarded mushroom compost — and a host of other agricultural feedstocks. A $1.4 million pilot plant will provide the proof.
Every week, 52 weeks a year, the Highline Mushrooms plant in Ontario’s Prince Edward County discards 600 tonnes of spent mushroom compost. And while local farmers are happy to use the nutrient-‐rich waste as fertilizer, that’s only a seasonal activity.
So Highline turned to Cennatek. The London, Ontario company has developed technology to extract minerals from biomass — including the wheat straw in mushroom compost — and turn them into high-‐value liquid fertilizer.
Cennatek founder and president Mohammad Rahbari lists the advantages of their product: long shelf life, good stability, no organic contaminants or microbes, and competitive pricing.
Best of all, recycling non-‐renewable minerals makes good environmental sense.
“Your nitrogen comes from petrochemical processes,” he explains. “Your potash is mined. So is your phosphate rock and so on.”
It started when Rahbari, a chemical engineer, began investigating the possibility of creating fuel pellets from crop residues and other agricultural biomass. He quickly discovered that it required removing most of the potassium, phosphorus and other minerals, abundant in agricultural feedstocks. And if you remove them, you might as well turn them into something useful.
Rahbari got to work. Lab experiments and field trials proved highly successful, but setting up a pilot commercialization plant would require $1.4 million.
While Rahbari could design chemical processes without breaking a sweat, wooing investors was a whole different ballgame.