Focusing on sustainability

CONSTANTINE, Mich. — Construction is coming along in southwest Michigan at the upcoming Dairy Distillery Alliance facility, where a milk byproduct known as permeate will be converted into ethanol.

The facility comes as a result of conversations between the Michigan Milk Producers Association and Dairy Distillery in Canada. Ground broke at the beginning of August and the project has an estimated completion date of summer 2025.

“It really started years ago when we were looking for a solution for permeate once we made some investments into the facility in the Constantine area,” said Joe Diglio, the CEO and president of MMPA.

MMPA had invested in ultrafiltration technology. The Constantine-based plant handles roughly 2.5 million pounds of milk per day. The ultrafiltration process concentrates the proteins found in skim milk and filters out the milk sugar, or lactose, by passing the milk through a series of flexible spiral filters. The concentrated solution of milk sugar, a byproduct of the ultrafiltration process, is known as milk permeate.

“Today, liquid permeate is hauled away from the facility and mixed in with some other additives to help feed livestock, which in turn didn’t necessarily generate significant value back to our member-owners,” Diglio said.

While the MMPA team has been utilizing permeate in this format, they began looking at other solutions, Diglio said.

The team considered different ways to use the permeate, which led to connecting with Dairy Distillery in the Canadian market, Diglio said.

Dairy Distillery takes the lactose-rich permeate and transforms it into vodka, marketed as Vodkow, and hand sanitizer, according to the Dairy Distillery website.

“(MMPA) reached out thinking about vodka as well and we said, ‘Well, that’ll make 47 million bottles of vodka, so let’s look at biofuel.’” said Dairy Distillery founder and CEO Omid McDonald. “They have a big mission on sustainability and making low carbon fuel was something of interest.”

After conversations, exploratory research was completed and came back positive for the southwest Michigan site, Diglio said.

“Once the feasibility study came back that Constantine was going to be a good location for an ethanol plant, we jumped on it and have had nothing but really good support behind it, good momentum and certainly notoriety within the industry and even those outside the industry,” Diglio said. “It’s been very positive and it’s something we feel is a great example of a commitment towards a solution that helps us in our sustainability efforts.”

McDonald said many entities, from farms to facilities like the one in Constantine, are involved in undertakings to reduce their carbon footprint.

“There’s a lot of really neat projects going on in dairy,” he said. “We can’t compete against corn ethanol, the volume of corn ethanol is so large, but in turning a waste product into ethanol we get very low carbon ethanol. When that is blended with transportation fuel, that creates a sizable carbon reduction for the fuel and that is what’s really interesting about what we are doing.”

Diglio said part of the intrigue in creating ethanol is the company’s focus on being good stewards of the land, environment and community.

“This is just a great example of the commitment that the industry as a whole and certainly that our organizations have towards helping promote sustainability,” Diglio said. “We’re really proud of where we’re heading. We’re excited about getting this project up and going, and we look forward to seeing the results associated with that.”