Recycling company collects tons of food waste to turn into energy

NEWPORT, Minn. (WCCO) – A Minnesota recycling company plans to break ground this fall on a project that turns food waste into fuel.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of trash moves through the Ramsey-Washington Recycling and Energy Center each year.

Melissa Finnegan said the goal is to keep as much of it as possible away from the landfill

“We have programs to help people upstream, but also we’re looking at what can we pull out of the waste stream,” she said.

Out of all of the trash households tend to throw away, food waste makes up about 24%, making it more than any other single material that ends up in a landfill.

If the food waste rots, it decays and emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

This is why the Newport, Minnesota, facility hopes an ambitious new project will cut down on the impact on the climate.

“That’s a really exciting concept to us, to take something that would otherwise sit in a landfill and get a beneficial use out of it,” Finnegan said.

A $100 million project to turn food waste into renewable energy through a process known as anaerobic digestion is expected to be built on a new site.

Dem-Con Companies in Shakopee is taking it on in partnership with Ramsey-Washington Recycling and Energy and others.

“It reduces emissions by 30,000 tons of CO2 per year, and 900,000 tons over the 30-year life of the facility,” Dem-Con Companies President Bill Keegan said.

Le Sueur, Minnesota, has been practicing anaerobic digestion for decades.

Steve Grove is an asset manager with Hometown BioEnergy.

“We saw the opportunity with all the feedstocks that were in the community,” he said. “We saw the need and the importance of reducing overall carbon emissions from electricity. We want to really prove up that concept.”

Local farmers bring the company leftover animal feed, like corn silage. They then give the feed a new purpose.

“We fit into the natural life cycle of the agricultural community, all these products, these processes, already exist, right? We’ve inserted ourselves into the middle of it, and have been able to extract energy out of it,” Grove said.

Instead of the food waste languishing in a landfill, bacteria break down the organic waste in a large, airtight tank or container.

“The plant will, on average, process over 100,000 tons of feedstock every year,” Grove said.

Those several tons of nearby farm waste end up in a tank to get just the right recipe.

“It’s kind of like, like a hot tub temperature, actually, I wouldn’t recommend taking a hot tub in it,” Grove said.

The byproduct created roughly a month later is called biogas, which can produce electricity.

What is produced can be enough to power about 3,000 homes every year.

“The amount of carbon that would have been emitted from all these products,” Grove said. “We’re able to bring those down to less than what then less than zero. So we’re, in some ways, we’re better than carbon-free.”

Biogas is 60% methane and 40% carbon dioxide. However, the purification process can transform biogas into renewable natural gas, which can be used as fuel.

Professor Bo Hu at the University of Minnesota studies bioprocess development.

“So anaerobic digestion has so many environmental benefits,” he said.

Europe has been leading the way with anaerobic digestion, but Hu said Minnesota’s robust agriculture production primes it for expanding the process here.

Legislature approved a law providing a framework for utilities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions this way.

“So we are actually very pioneering among other states in terms of renewable natural gas development,” Hu said.

Dem-Con and Ramsey-Washington Recycling and Energy hope to be among the first to blaze that trail.

“It’s overall a winning situation, and a really great example of the amazing things that we can do with a pile of garbage,” Finnegan said.

Dem-Con will break ground on its anaerobic digestion site this fall.

It is expected to open in 2028.

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