A Utah company wants to turn your food scraps into energy and fertilizer
By Shelley K. Mesch | Sep. 3, 2021
Wasatch Resource Recovery wants a lot more garbage.
Specifically, the food you plan to throw in the trash. They will take your rotten vegetables, dinner remnants, even chicken bones.
Operating since early 2019, Wasatch Resource Recovery (WRR) runs two anaerobic digesters — like giant mechanical stomachs — that break down all sorts of food waste.
About a quarter of all trash that heads to the landfill is food waste, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, so diverting food to the digester could make a big difference.
In the landfill, those food scraps would normally put off a lot of atmospheric greenhouse gasses during decomposition. Instead, the machines capture and clean the gas produced from food waste to sell as natural gas to energy companies.
You can drop off food waste at WRR in North Salt Lake, but now, with a grant from Intermountain Healthcare, the company will test out a curbside pickup program as well.