The old, bruised, wilted, inedible rejects and left-overs arrive here from Stop & Shop stores all over Connecticut: nearly 20 tons a day of “food waste” that is now being biologically recycled rather than buried in landfills.
The company’s new “Green Energy” plant is also being fed from the chain’s supermarkets in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as hundreds of trucks bring in bins filled with overripe bananas, aging lettuce, stale bread, dead flowers and thousands of other un-sold and damaged food items.
“By 2020, we want to be landfill free,” said Phil Tracey, a company spokesman. “We’re 88 percent of the way there already.”
About 95 tons of food waste is now being processed daily by one of the nation’s largest “anaerobic digester” facilities, which uses wasted vegetable material to produce clean energy and compost for fertilizer. The plant, which opened in April, is on the cutting edge of a growing movement that aims to dramatically reduce the $218 billion worth of food Americans waste each year.
By some measures, as much as 40 percent of the food products raised in the U.S. gets thrown away. Experts estimate that Connecticut alone produces almost 322,000 tons of food waste annually, nearly all of it currently being disposed of in landfills or incinerated.
Connecticut now has a target of recycling 60 percent of its food waste by 2024 through the donation of unused but still edible products to food banks, using inedible food to power anaerobic digester plants similar to the Stop & Shop facility, or turning it into animal feed and compost for fertilizer.
“This is something that’s going to be on our front burner for a while,” said Chris Nelson, a supervising environmental analyst at the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
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