Member Spotlight: The Next Step in Managing Food Waste
January 30, 2025 | Carolyn Berninger and Trista Martinson | Events

Photo credit: Kanadevia Inova
This fall, members of the Bioeconomy Coalition of Minnesota (BCM) gathered at the Ramsey/Washington Recycling & Energy (R&E) facility in Newport, Minnesota, for our quarterly member meeting.
Coalition members reviewed the coalition’s strategic planning process for the coming years, heard from Ecostrat about their Bioeconomy Development Opportunity Zone Initiative, and discussed prospects for the 2025 legislative session.
We also spoke with Minnesota Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Aric Putnam about opportunities for Minnesota to lead in the bioeconomy sector—including by investing in technologies like sustainable aviation fuel and anaerobic digestion—and policy options to support that leadership.
Following the coalition meeting, BCM members toured the R&E facility to learn about the work R&E is doing to divert waste from landfills to produce electricity, recover recyclable metal, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The R&E team is building upon the work they’re already doing to sustainably manage waste by building a regional anaerobic digestion facility that will produce renewable natural gas and biochar. Read more about this exciting project below.
Advancing anaerobic digestion in Minnesota
R&E is taking the next step in moving Minnesota toward a future where the waste we generate becomes a usable resource. Through a public-private partnership with Dem-Con HZI BioEnergy, 65,000 tons per year of food waste and other organic-rich materials are proposed to be managed using anaerobic digestion.
Anaerobic digestion is a biological process that breaks down organic material like food waste with the help of microbes in a large, airtight tank or container, creating valuable products:
- Renewable natural gas: A clean energy source that can be used to power vehicles or utilities.
- Biochar: A material that can be used for soil amendment, remediation, filtration, and carbon storage. Additionally, the process of creating biochar has shown promise in substantially reducing the PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances)—a class of chemicals that are notoriously difficult to manage—present in organic waste.
The new anaerobic digestion facility would produce 10,000 tons of biochar each year and 170,000 metric million British thermal units of renewable natural gas, the equivalent of heating 4,500 homes annually. The renewable natural gas from digestion would flow into a Minnesota utility pipeline.
This means carbon-negative fuel from food waste would displace fossil fuels in Minnesota’s energy system. Greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 31,914 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually compared to if food waste went to a landfill, an equivalent of taking 7,444 gas-powered cars off the road for a year.
This effort is made possible by the innovative Food Scraps Pickup Program, now being rolled out across Washington and Ramsey counties. When fully operational, the program will allow all households in the two counties to recycle their food scraps easily from home.
The program uses specially designed BPI-certified compostable bags, collected with trash and separated using AI technology at the R&E Center in Newport. The recovered food scrap bags, along with other organic materials recovered from the trash, would then be processed through anaerobic digestion.
Looking ahead to a greener future
R&E is excited by the possibilities presented by this new project. Using waste to create energy and other usable products like biochar increases recycling, diverts material from incinerators and landfills, and creates a sustainable, clean energy source that benefits Minnesota.
We are the first in the Midwest to explore this technology, and we look forward to creating a greener future for everyone.