Morton’s Specialist Seed and Grain has now replaced its LPG-fuelled boiler with one fuelled by waste oat hulls.

"We process about 60,000 tonnes of oats each year, to make our instant, quick and rolled oats cereal products,” Morton’s managing director Jonnie Morton said.

“We separate the oat kernels or ‘groats’ from the hulls, and then the oats are either kiln dried or converted into rolled oat flakes.

“We were ending up with 20,000 tonnes of waste hulls each year - the hulls are of limited commercial value and disposing of them was causing us a big business headache.

“We went looking for a solution, and realised that we could be using this product to meet some of our energy needs.”

Mr Morton looked into what grants were available and, doing some surfing on the web, found that the Australian Government had announced a new environment-focussed grants program - the Re-Tooling for Climate Change Program.

He applied for the grant and the company received $115,000 to replace its LPG-fuelled boiler with one powered by waste oat hulls.

The Re-Tooling for Climate Change Program, delivered by AusIndustry, aims to help small and medium sized Australian manufacturers to reduce their environmental footprint, by improving the energy and water efficiency of their production processes.

“We’re hoping to save $400,000 a year by removing the need for LPG,” Mr Morton said.

“And things are changing, these energy costs were only going to rise.

“We’re also saving the cost of dumping the waste hulls.

“The grant helped us offset the cost of setting up the biomass boiler, fuelled by the oat hulls."