This Maine farm converts truckloads of food waste to electricity. It still could be taking more

Open a rubbish can in a Maine residence, and also you’re prone to discover some icky surprises: banana peels, espresso grounds, moldy bagels, chunks of hen.

Uneaten meals makes up nearly 30% of what Mainers throw out day-after-day. Apart from stinking up the trash, that’s an enormous drawback for the planet. Landfilled meals releases methane, a dangerous greenhouse gasoline that considerably contributes to world warming. That’s on high of the power and sources already spent to develop or elevate it.

Altogether, meals waste causes 8-10% of the world’s greenhouse gasoline emissions, making it an even bigger contributor to local weather change than the aviation trade.

Now, a rising variety of Maine residents, communities and teams try to waste much less meals — and when not attainable, to get rid of their leftovers in higher methods. Whereas lots of these restoration efforts contain composting or donating to meals banks, maybe the largest takes a unique method.

This story is a part of our sequence “Local weather Pushed: A deep dive into Maine’s response, one county at a time.”

A few decade in the past, a fifth era dairy farm in Penobscot County put in a system for managing the huge piles of manure produced by its 1,000 cows. By loading the manure into massive, heated tanks stuffed with microbes, they may generate electrical energy utilizing a way known as anaerobic digestion.

It was a choice made primarily for enterprise causes — to chop the farm’s power prices and convey new earnings from the surplus electrical energy it generates. However quickly, the farm realized it might get much more bang for its buck by including one other natural materials into the combo: leftover meals.

“We realized that the economics had been rather more enticing,” stated John Wintle, who manages the Exeter facility and is a part of that household that owns Stonyvale Farm. “You may make much more gasoline per pound of meals waste than you may from dairy manure, as a result of the dairy manure has already been digested by the cow. So with the identical footprint, if we took in meals waste, we might make much more gasoline, much more electrical energy.”

Inside a number of years, Stonyvale Farm grew to incorporate a set of firms, together with its digestion enterprise, Exeter Agri-Vitality, and an offshoot, Agri-Cycle Vitality, that vehicles in lots of tons of meals waste from Maine and past to combine with the manure.

After investing closely in upgrades over a seven-year interval — sponsored by round $3 million in authorities grants — they now function three digesters and a depackaging machine that, when working at full scale, can energy 2,500 houses.

Whereas many farms throughout the nation have put in anaerobic digesters to deal with their manure in current a long time, it is much less frequent for them to function at that scale or so as to add meals waste to them. No different farms in Maine achieve this, and the federal authorities is barely conscious of some dozen related operations — together with a number of in Massachusetts and Vermont. Nonetheless, one other farm in Clinton, Maine is now working to put in a digester to transform simply its cow manure to pure gasoline.

The trouble at Stonyvale Farm has introduced quite a few financial and environmental advantages, together with shoring up Maine’s second-biggest dairy farm and boosting the potential for Maine to scale back the greenhouse gasoline emissions from its meals waste — the overwhelming majority of which has historically gone to the landfill or incinerator.

Nonetheless, whereas the Exeter farm has quickly expanded the capability for Maine to recycle its meals waste, it’s nonetheless an underused useful resource within the state.

Room for enchancment

Maine generates greater than 200,000 tons of meals scraps every year, and the statewide capability for recycling all that materials grew by about 4 occasions between 2014 and 2017, reaching nearly 90,000 tons per yr, in accordance with a 2018 report from College of Maine researchers.

A lot of that progress got here from Agri-Vitality, which might settle for 80,000 tons of meals waste yearly. However the quantity of leftover meals and different natural materials truly being recycled hasn’t stored tempo, judging by numbers from the Penobscot County facility.

Agri-Vitality has acquired a mean of 43,000 tons of waste every year since 2018 — simply over half its processing capability — up from 14,800 tons in 2016 and 27,000 in 2017, in accordance with knowledge it stories to state environmental regulators. And solely about half of the fabric it does obtain comes from inside Maine.

It’s exhausting to get a extra full image of the state’s meals waste drawback, for the reason that Maine Division of Environmental Safety has not persistently tracked it through the years. In its most up-to-date waste report masking 2018 to 2019, the company did observe that a big portion of scraps nonetheless gave the impression to be headed for the landfill or incinerator.

Banning meals waste from landfill? 

For the previous couple of years, environmental teams and a few trash handlers have unsuccessfully pushed for Maine to take a more durable line on meals waste going into the landfill. That included a meals waste ban that was proposed within the Legislature final yr and, in 2019, a invoice directing state officers to report again on mandates and incentives for reinforcing composting.

At the least six states have handed some form of ban on meals of their landfills, together with New York, California and each different New England state apart from New Hampshire. Lots of the restrictions apply to companies and establishments, whereas Vermont has gone additional and banned houses from trashing meals scraps. The restrictions have prompted a spike in composting and donations to meals banks.

“We’ve confirmed and efficient methods which might be higher for managing this: composting and anaerobic digestion,” says Peter Blair, a employees lawyer on the Conservation Legislation Basis, who known as Vermont’s method “the gold-standard.” “Maine is actually lagging behind different states which have carried out packages that actually concentrate on lowering massive portions of meals waste.”

Thus far, Maine environmental officers have opposed adopting related restrictions. They observe that Maine is taking steps to maintain meals out of the landfill, reminiscent of awarding grants to help recycling and offering help to composting packages.

In 2015, lawmakers established a hierarchy of meals restoration choices to information future laws, which prioritizes lowering meals waste, adopted by donating it to meals banks or livestock farms. It ranks composting or changing meals to gas because the fourth choice, simply above burning or burying it.

And in 2020, Gov. Janet Mills’ administration made a passing nod to lowering meals waste in its Maine Gained’t Wait local weather motion plan.

Paula Clark, the director of Maine’s division of supplies administration, has stated that restrictions is perhaps warranted sooner or later, however that for now, the state doesn’t have sufficient haulers or services to help necessary meals recycling, particularly exterior the I-95 hall.

In testimony in opposition to the 2019 invoice requiring a research of meals waste bans, Clark particularly highlighted Agri-Vitality as a promising answer.

However she stated that the laws “wouldn’t lead to new or helpful data at the moment, and would divert our very restricted employees sources from the organics administration work we’ve already deliberate and prioritized.”

Whereas the anaerobic digester at Stonyvale Farm has allowed many Maine colleges, hospitals, supermarkets and communities to separate meals scraps from their trash, its house owners say that it’ll take greater than good intentions to considerably enhance the state’s meals recycling charge.

In written testimony for one of many current Maine proposals, an official from Agri-Cycle argued that different states’ restrictions have performed a “massive” position in creating the market.

“I feel the overwhelming majority of Mainers — , sort of exemplified by our clientele — they wish to do the best factor and are proactively doing the best factor with out being pressured,” stated Holden Cookson, Agri-Cycle’s model supervisor, throughout a current tour of the Exeter facility. “However with any neighborhood, there are going to be individuals who will solely act if pressured, basically, or incentivized to take action.”

Esta Pratt-Kielley, Emi Verhar and Isabelle Lockhart contributed reporting.