Anaerobic digestion and oysters cleaning up whisky distillery’s water

Anaerobic digestion is playing a pivotal role in a ground breaking environmental project that has seen European oysters returned to the waters of the Dornoch Firth on Scotland’s east coast.

Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, whisky distillery Glenmorangie and the Marine Conservation Society have pioneered a project to return oyster reefs to the Dornoch Firth to enhance biodiversity, something a Heriot-Watt University statement dubs ‘an environmental first’.

Oysters are renowned for their ability to filter water. The plan is that they will act in tandem with the Glenmorangie Distillery’s new anaerobic digestion plant to purify the water that the distillery releases into the Dornoch Firth.

Called the Dornoch Environmental Enhancement Project (DEEP), the partnership between Heriot-Watt University and the Marine Conservation Society has seen oysters returned to the Firth more than a century after they were wiped out by overfishing.

Work is now under way to secure funding for the project’s second phase, which aims to build an established reef within five years, according to the statement from Heriot-Watt University.