Converting Food Waste to Energy [Video] | Civil Eats

Converting Food Waste to Energy [Video]

food waste truck

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.”

newsmatch 2023 banner - donate to support civil eats

We’ll bring the news to you.

Get the weekly Civil Eats newsletter, delivered to your inbox.

Daniel Klein is a chef, activist, and filmmaker living in Minneapolis. He has cooked in the restaurants of Thomas Keller, Heston Blumenthal, and Tom Colicchio. For his current project, Daniel has been documenting his culinary, agricultural and hunting explorations on film in a web series called The Perennial Plate. Every week he covers a diverse set of sustainable stories from squirrel hunting to community gardens. Follow him on Twitter @perennialplate or Facebook. Read more >

Like the story?
Join the conversation.

  1. It's good to see how waste is being put to good use. Sad how much food is wasted when there are people world wide starving.
  2. Jennifer
    I'm cringing at the shot of the waiter dumping half-eaten meals in the garbage when there is so much starvation around us. If you think about that one scenario multiplied across thousands of restaurants across the country, that's a lot of wasted food. I wish that portion sizes at restaurants were smaller so that people didn't end up leaving half their meals on the plate to be thrown in the garbage!
    • Vincent Albanese
      We bring restaurant food home all the time as leftovers. There are too many welathy people who have never known a paycheck to paycheck existence...and don't think much of the 75% of America who must live that way.
  3. Vincent Albanese
    Stop subsidizing farming. Make prices go up. Then we will stop wasting food..and quickly. It will help improve the health of the nation, also.

More from

Food Waste

Featured

Volunteers from DTE Energy pack prepackaged boxes for delivery to churches and homebound seniors at Focus: HOPE, a local agency located in Detroit, Michigan that operates the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) in a client choice model so that participants can select the foods they want. (Photo credit: Preston Keres, USDA)

The Government Spends Billions on Food. Who Benefits?

In this week’s Field Report: A push to improve federal food purchasing heats up, the first food-focused COP kicks off, dust storms accelerate, and new evidence suggests that fair-trade certifications are failing to protect farmworkers.

Popular

With Season 2, ‘High on the Hog’ Deepens the Story of the Nation’s Black Food Traditions

Stephen Satterfield and Jessica B. Harris watching the sunset at the beach, in a still from Netflix's High on the Hog Season 2. (Photo courtesy of Netflix)

Building a Case for Investment in Regenerative Agriculture on Indigenous Farms

Jess Brewer gathers livestock at Brewer Ranch on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. (Photo courtesy of Intertribal Agriculture Council, www.indianag.org)

Walmart and EDF Forged an Unlikely Partnership. 17 Years Later, What’s Changed?

Aerial view of cargo containers, semi trailers, industrial warehouse, storage building and loading docks, renewable energy plants, Bavaria, Germany

Relocalizing the Food System to Fight a ‘Farm-Free Future’