How the Use of Anaerobic Digesters Can Help Meet the Challenges of Organics Recycling
While Providing a Local Renewable Energy Solution

According to The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. food loss and waste
accounts for over 170 million metric tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The processes
involved in its production, transport, storage, preparation, and disposal result in more GHG
emissions than 42 coal-fired power plants. In addition, up to 40 percent of the United States
food supply is never purchased or eaten, translating to almost 90 billion meals’ worth of food
waste, contributing to landfills.

Landfills produce harmful pollutants like carbon dioxide, nitrous, sulfur, and methane. According
to the United Nations Environment Program, methane released into the atmosphere is the
primary contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, a hazardous air pollutant and
greenhouse gas, exposure to which causes 1 million premature deaths every year.

Despite those facts, trucks load a million tons of food waste every week and haul it off to be
incinerated or landfilled, where it is combusted, buried, or left in fields to decompose.

Project Drawdown, a leading resource for information and insight about climate solutions,
reports that food waste has a carbon footprint equivalent to all passenger, commercial, and
military air travel in the U.S. The researchers project that reducing food waste would have the
most significant impact on addressing the climate crisis.

Reducing Food Waste with A.D.

Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a proven, holistic climate infrastructure solution that can divert food
waste from harmful disposal methods such as landfilling, incineration, and land application.
Addressing the local and national challenge of carbon and GHG emissions is imperative, and
anaerobic digestion can help us reduce unmitigated methane emissions from harming our
planet.

A commercial-scale anaerobic digestion facility can process as much as 115,000 tons of organic
waste in a fully-closed circular loop system. The facility replicates a naturally occurring process,
using microorganisms to break down organic waste. The closed-loop system reduces
greenhouse gas emissions that would otherwise be discharged into the atmosphere – the
equivalent of approximately 70,000 acres of forest.

The process produces two naturally rich products that can be returned to a circular food
economy: an organic soil amendment equivalent to compost without the odor and renewable
natural gas.

Turning Organic Waste into Renewable Natural Gas

The product of the AD process can be harnessed as biogas and used as a clean, renewable
energy source to provide heat and electricity for homes or alternative fuel for our vehicles.
Today’s next-generation anaerobic digesters master all aspects of food waste breakdown:
content, density, consistency, volume, flow, moisture level, temperature, and microbial activity.
In addition, it produces renewable natural gas, which lowers CO2 by the same amount as
removing more than 18,861 gasoline-powered vehicles from the road for a year.

Can supply meet demand? The American Biogas Council thinks so. It calls for the construction
of 13,500 new A.D. projects. Meanwhile, federal agencies also want to ramp up A.D. systems,
which “help reduce carbon emissions, displace fossil fuels, recycle organic waste, and replace
synthetic fertilizers with the macro and micronutrients already present in our waste.”
In addition, renewable natural gas may be produced right where required, lowering
transportation costs and pollution and transforming into energy, hydrogen, or nitrogen-based
fertilizer.

AD facilities have been widely operated in Europe for over 20 years. North America is quickly
catching up in developing AD, driven by surging demand for renewable energy, strict
government emissions guidelines, and the need to recycle growing volumes of organic waste.

Anaerobic digestion is a sustainable, circular, and economically viable solution to our organic
waste problem, using natural microbial processes to recycle this material – at scale. We can
solve our organic waste problem – by building more anaerobic digesters and focusing on
recycling our food waste.

by Shawn Kreloff, CEO of Bioenergy Devco