Utah company turns food waste into fuel to power homes
By Dan Evans
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SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (KSTU) — Utah contributes about 1.2 billion pounds of food waste per year and one company is trying to use the trash to bring power to residents in the community.
Momentum Recycling has been gathering bins full of food waste since 2021 across Salt Lake City.
They have gained momentum with just under 500 customers and say their unique approach to reusing waste is becoming more popular.
“After the pandemic, we were able to start with a couple of small pilot neighborhoods just to test it, and make sure it would work for residential service,” explained John Lair, President and CEO of the company. “Happily it did. We’ve had a lot of inquiries, a lot of interest. And we’re now starting the process of expanding the service to the rest of the city.”
Individual homes, bars restaurants, grocery stores and event convention centers use the service.
“Our goal as a company is to divert as much material away from the landfill as possible, Lair explained. “So we can extend the life of the landfill, we can see the material put to its best use, in this case, energy.”
Food waste from Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and even California and Montana is brought to Wasatch Resource Recovery in North Salt Lake, where the process begins.
“It’s an anaerobic food process,” said Elizabeth Barrett with Wasatch Resource Recovery. “So we have microbes in the anaerobic digester that help break down the food, and we’re capturing the methane.”
The microbes take about a month to get their job done and produce methane.
“It’s then pulled off the top of the domes with these metal side pipes,” Barrett said. “It goes underground here and it goes all the way out to our gas conditioning, where we’re actually creating renewable natural gas here on property with the BP Dominion pipeline coming right into the facility.”
Right now, the gas that’s created provides enough fuel to heat all the homes in a city the size of Bountiful.
It provides more gas than they can use sometimes, which is burned off in the flames you see near the I-15 and I-215 North interchange.
But after the gas is produced, the process of making sure to get the most out of food waste continues.
“Then it comes out here, through our drying, building the smoothie mixture in our digesters, and it creates this biosolid which essentially you can put back into your gardens and it’s a full circle process,” explained Barrett.
There is a small setup fee to become a customer of the service and then monthly fees between 13-18 dollars depending on how much food waste you produce.
Momentum Recycling hopes to expand further West into Rose Park and other areas in the spring.
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