 |
| Parallel Product against the Rancho Cucamonga Skyline |
There is a
place in Rancho Cucamonga, California that turns all of the wastes of the alcohol and soft drink industries into fuel for your automobile. From a
vineyard in Napa, a bottle of red can travel to a five-star restaurant in
Manhattan, or a well-heeled dinner party in Tokyo. But for some unlucky vintages, it's a drive of
more than 400 miles south down the coast of California, to Parallel Products,
where, in a facility surrounded by scrub brush, scrap heaps and festering waste
ponds, a bottle of fermented grape juice can be dumped into modified stills and
converted into fuel-grade ethanol.
 |
| Huge Stills that Turn Waste into Fuel |
Commercial
distilleries have been churning out ethanol as far back as World War II, but
ones that turn our waste alcohol into fuel are relatively new. Those forlorn wines turn east at Los Angeles
and head 140 miles more down the San Bernardino Freeway ending up in Rancho
Cucamonga, on the outskirts of the suburban sprawl. This is an area filled with scrub brush,
scrap heaps, and festering waste ponds and the end of the line for the cast
offs of the beer, spirits and wine industry.
The Rancho
Cucamonga area is filled with car-eating steel separators and monolithic
humming electrical towers and fermentation tanks in a junkyard. This is the very reason for the facility's
existence, the last stop in a side of the Alcohol business world that nobody
ever thinks much about. This is the
home of Parallel Products, a company that might not manage the trick of turning
water into wine, but turns dead alcoholic beverages into fuel-grade ethanol on
a large scale.
"We
destroy some products here that the brands don't want people to know
about." This is a place that no
alcoholic producer would ever admit knowing about, but it provides a service
that is much needed by the industry. It
is one of two ethanol recovery facilities operated by 30-year-old Parallel
Products and where it turns the West Coast's distillery waste and unsellable wine,
beer and corn syrup-rich soft drinks into fuel.
The main products destroyed at Parallel are either waste
from the distilling process known as "heads" and "tails" of
each batch, this is the part you throw away unless you want to go blind, or
"distressed surplus" beverages. According to its website "Each
year, Parallel Products receives and recycles over 13 million cases and 3
million bulk liquid gallons of unsaleable beverage products." Parallel, a place that processes skunked
beer, tainted liquors and flat colas into gasoline additives, becomes an
attractive option for a perfectly palatable Pinot. Now you know what happens to a lot of the
waste from the production of alcoholic beverages along with the high sugar
content products that just didn’t make it into the “glamorous” world of the beverage
industry.
