California has required people and businesses to separate food and kitchen scraps from the rest of their trash for almost two years hoping to keep organic waste out of landfills. In spite of good intentions, organic waste is still contaminated when it’s picked up, says Mark Grady, area director of recycling operations for WW. “If your trash container fills up, some people just overflow into the next container and you’re further contaminating that recyclable waste stream,” Grady says. “It’s a challenge that we face and we want people to recycle, right? But we also know people need to get rid of material at their house and we see the challenges with that.”
In the past, tossing plastic bags, glass or metals in with your food waste made it useless, but Waste Management in Sun Valley now has OREX, technology that works like a garlic press and is able to remove plastic film and grit from mixed solid waste so the extracted organic waste can be used to produce renewable natural gas.
“This is transformational…what’s happening now in organics is what happened in recycling in the ’80s and ’90s and what’s prompting all of this infrastructure and all this investment and all of these jobs that are being created is a desire to try to attack and address climate change and mitigate methane emissions,” says Shayne Petkiewicz, business development manager for Anaergia.