CHICAGO– A unique machine designed to combat climate change is keeping thousands of pounds of food waste out of landfills while providing people with food and heating urban homes in a clean and sustainable way.
The anaerobic digester is located on a former three-hectare landfill in south Chicago.
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An anaerobic digester breaks down organic matter without oxygen. There are thousands of them across the country, but none like the one at Green Era’s warehouse, located in a food desert in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood.
“What’s unique about our fermenter here is that we only process food waste,” said co-founder and CEO Jason Feldman. “So it’s off-spec, expired or contaminated food waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill.”
After years of development work, Green Era’s anaerobic digester is now fully operational. And it produces two byproducts: biogas and nutrient-rich compost.
Trucks arrive every day with hundreds of tons of food waste, some of it still in its packaging. Everything is dumped into a huge pit.
“That’s the mouth. It chews, so to speak, spits out the packaging and then swallows the liquid food residue that passes through the intestines or the pipes into the fermenter,” Feldman explained. “It’s almost exactly what happens in the stomach of a cow, which is what we’re replicating here.”
It is almost exactly what happens in the stomach of a cow that we are recreating here.
This gastric or digestive phase takes place outside the camp in a huge tank.
Erika Allen, CEO of Urban Growers Collective, a partner of Green Era, worked with Feldman to make the fermenter a reality.
“(Liquid food waste) lives there for about 20 days. Little microorganisms eat it, just like our digestive system does exactly the same thing,” Allen explained. “And then after a while, digestion takes place, the food gets digested and releases methane, which rises to the surface of the tank. It gets sucked out, so to speak, and then goes through a filter filtration and then gets injected into the gas line.”
“We’re actually feeding that renewable energy into the local gas grid, so the People’s Gas local gas grid,” Feldman said. “So when you cook that pasta, the gas coming out could be carbon-neutral, green-era renewable natural gas, not fossil fuel.”
The other byproduct of the digester is a high-quality organic compost called anaerobic digestate, which is sent to several off-site community gardens run by over 120 interns and youth from the Urban Growers Collective.
“We are literally generating energy and then putting that energy back into growing food. And we are doing it in a way that educates and creates a new industry that is prepared for climate change,” Allen said.
Green Era announced that the fermenter will be officially unveiled at a grand opening ceremony this fall.
In the meantime, they are working to raise more money to build a greenhouse and an education center.
This story is part of our Climate Ready series – a collaboration between ABC News and ABC-owned television stations focused on providing practical solutions to help you and your family adapt to extreme weather events and today’s climate change challenges.
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