Approximately 40 percent of the food we produce in the U.S. goes to waste, and only 5 percent of that waste is being recycled. In other words, there is a lot of room for positive change.

For this segment of the Perennial Plate, we followed along on garbage trucks in Boulder (a zero-waste city) and went behind the scenes at the Heartland Biogas Project near LaSalle, Colorado. The project is a collaboration between EDF Energy and A1 Organics and it combines food waste and animal waste in an anaerobic digester system to produce biogas for the region. And while creating energy from food waste will never be as sustainable as preventing waste in the first place, as Scott Pexton of A1 Organics describes it, it’s “one rung up the ladder from composting.”