Waste from Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Factories is now Powering the Vermont Grid
At the Ben & Jerry’s factory in St. Albans, Vermont, thousands of gallons of ice cream waste are now being turned into biogas, creating energy for the state’s electric grid.
When factory workers start to produce a new flavor and switch the machinery from, say, Cherry Garcia to Chunky Monkey, they have to push all the leftover ice cream out of the pipes and rinse them with water so that the flavors don’t intermingle. That creates a lot of waste that can’t be sent to wastewater treatment plants.