What Waste Management is Doing to Tackle the Challenges Posed by Organics Waste
By Arlene Karidis, Waste 360.
Waste Management has had stakes in organic waste diversion for years, but those stakes are climbing as new regulations across the country are upping the ante on diverting food and yard waste from landfills.
Years of trial and experimentation have led the industry’s largest firm to back a particular strategy for processing waste: diverting food waste to local wastewater treatment plants where it can be processed as part of existing biogas production processes.
Through the process, which involves anaerobic digestion, plants in some cases are cranking out 10 times the biogas, per volume of water, as when they generated energy from treated wastewater alone, according to Eric Myers, Waste Management’s director of organics recycling.