CHICAGO — A unique climate change fighting machine is being used to divert thousands of pounds of food waste from landfills, as well as feed people and heat city homes in a clean and sustainable way.
The anaerobic digester sits on a former nine-acre dumping site on Chicago’s South Side.
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An anaerobic digester breaks down organic matter without the use of oxygen. There are thousands of them across the country, but none quite like the one inside the Green Era warehouse, which sits in a food desert in the Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood.
“What’s unique about our digester here is that we’re food waste only,” said co-founder and CEO Jason Feldman. “So this is off-spec, expired or contaminated food waste that would otherwise be going to a landfill. “
Years in the making, Green Era’s anaerobic digester is now fully-operational. And it’s creating two biproducts: Biogas and nutrient rich compost.
Trucks are driving in daily, carrying hundreds of tons of food waste, some still in its packaging. It all gets dumped into a giant pit.
“This is the mouth. It’s sort of chewing up, spitting out the packaging and then swallowing that liquid food waste that kind of goes through sort of the intestines or the piping into the digester,” explained Feldman. “It’s almost exactly like what’s happening in a cow’s stomach that we are replicating here.”
It’s almost exactly like what’s happening in a cow’s stomach that we are replicating here.
That stomach or digestion stage happens outside the warehouse in a huge tank.
Erika Allen, the CEO of the Urban Growers Collective which is a partner to Green Era, has been working together with Feldman to make the digester a reality.
“[Liquid food waste] lives in there for about 20 days. Little microorganisms are eating it, just like our digestive systems are doing the same exact thing,” Allen explained. “And then after a while, there’s digest, there’s the food’s being digested and it’s releasing methane and that rises to the top of the tank. It’s sort of siphoned off and then goes through some filter filtration and then gets injected into the into the gas pipeline.”
“We actually inject that renewable energy into the local gas grid so into the local People’s Gas gas grid,” said Feldman. “So when you’re boiling those noodles, that gas coming off could be Green Era carbon negative, renewable, natural gas instead of fossil fuel.”
The other biproduct of the digester is a fancy and organic compost called anaerobic digestate. It gets sent to several offsite community gardens that more than 120 Urban Growers Collective interns and teens help run.
“We are literally creating energy and then recirculating that energy back into growing food and doing that in a way that that we’re educating and creating a new industry that is prepared for climate change,” said Allen.
Green Era said it’s officially debuting the digester at a ribbon cutting ceremony in the fall.
In the meantime, they’re working to raise more money to continue building a greenhouse and educational center.
This story is part of our Climate Ready series – a collaboration between ABC News and the ABC Owned Television Stations focused on providing practical solutions to help you and your family adapt to extreme weather events and the current challenges of climate change.
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