By Cole Rosengren, Waste Dive.

Under the Tobin Bridge on the waterfront outskirts of Boston, Waste Management has been scaling up the latest example of its urban organics technology for nearly a year.

The Centralized Organic Recycling (CORe) facility is currently accepting about 50 tons per day of the region's residential and commercial food waste, with capacity for up to five times that much as demand increases. This is the third of four such facilities owned by the company — two are operational in New York and California, one is under construction in northern New Jersey — and more are expected in the future. Each is designed with a small footprint and the goal of extracting contaminants to create a bioslurry for digestion at regional wastewater treatment plants.

"People often underestimate the cost associated with collection of source-separated organics," said Eric Myers, Waste Management's director of organic recycling. "This is just another way to try to economically solve for what we as a society have decided is important and what our customers are asking for."