![[Solid Waste Resource Renewal Group]](http://njaes.rutgers.edu/_common/images/subheads/swrrg.gif "[Solid Waste Resource Renewal Group]"){kind=small}
Pulling Together the Pieces for a Local Industry Based on Food Waste Recycling
- Successful companies using economically and environmentally sound technologies for converting food waste and other organic wastes to bioproducts.
- Haulers who will make the commitment to food waste collection routes, including the commitment to new equipment and assisting generators with cost effective changes to their collection systems.
- Investors/members of the financial community who will support new and expanding food waste recycling companies financially.
- Generators who will commit to sending waste to food waste recycling facilities, including committing to making collection and hauling changes which will help make their individual food waste recycling more cost effective and committing to working with neighbors to create cost effective routes for neighboring generators.
- Governmental entities from the most local to federal levels, which will provide incentive programs and partnerships with both recyclers and generators to encourage both the development of a recycling industry and to encourage investors to invest in such an industry. Such incentives can range from local buy recycled ordinances to the WasteWise Program of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, which provides generators with free technical advice and conversions of their recycling totals to greenhouse gas reductions.
- Governmental entities which will work with each other and internally, within each entity, to coordinate and streamline permits and regulations for food waste recycling operations, assuring that regulation and permitting will be adequately protective of the public and the environment without being unnecessarily burdensome to recycling industry members.
- An educated and active community of stakeholders from all the subcommunities; this includes educated and active students, teachers and education administrators.
The traditional relatively low cost food waste recycling options, namely outdoor windrow composting and livestock feeding, will increasingly be limited to low population areas, where neighbors will not be bothered by e.g. odors. Large bioproducts facilities seeking to use food waste as a raw material, such as those looking at settling in New Jersey, will have substantial upfront capital costs in most of the United States, particularly in Region 2, the Northeast, and other particularly densely populated parts of the country. Successful facilities for food waste recycling in New Jersey and New York, which this project covers, will be in vessel or otherwise enclosed, and will cost from $20 to potentially as much as $80 million. Such substantial upfront capital costs will necessarily involve outside private and/or governmental investment, often with included risk premiums, since many of the technologies are new to the Region, and even new to the United States. Most of these potential investment sources know little about food waste recycling and its values, in both financial returns and environmental and social benefits. Moreover, these potential investors have not been brought into contact with businesses which can use food waste as a raw material for valuable products, and charge a tipping fee on the incoming waste.
Municipal and state governmental entities will also play a significant role in the investment cycle, sending a message of support which can help convince investors to lay out the significant dollars needed. Some of the various ways they can show such support are grants, loans, tax credits, tax zones, buy recycled ordinances, franchising of routes and other support mechanisms.
This is well illustrated with the example of Bayshore Recycling, which will host the state’s first major food waste to products facility, Converted Organics. Bayshore Recycling invests in its home community, Woodbridge Township, by providing voluntary host community benefits on each ton of incoming material it recycles. These monies can be invested in local public parks or even reinvested to promote more recycling, which in turn will act to reduce everyone’s climate change impacts.
Without recycling businesses which are ready and able to recycle food waste, generators will be unable to recycle that waste, regardless of their desire to do so. Without investment, we cannot have the recycling businesses. Accordingly, the SWRRG proposes to plan and implement an investment forum, to bring entrepreneurs who wish to develop food waste/organics recycling businesses together with potential investors. The forum and preparation therefor would also serve to train the entrepreneurs how best to plan and create a food waste recycling business, negotiating their way through business planning as well as through technological and regulatory hurdles. The forum and its preparation would also educate investors about food waste recycling, its realities and its enormous benefits to the state and to the investment community.
Because the Investment Forum will come within the context of an ongoing food waste initiative being conducted by the Solid Waste Resource Renewal Group (SWRRG), it will have more momentum. Indeed, involvement by Priscilla Hayes, Esq., Dr. Donn Derr, through the SWRRG in the area of food waste recycling has been intense since the inception of the SWRRG in 1997. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), recognized SWRRG expertise in food residuals by asking the group to complete a study and make recommendations concerning mechanisms to increase food residuals recycling in the state. Various recommendations from the SWRRG report were included in the most recent NJDEP Statewide Solid Waste Management Plan. The final SWRRG report, entitled Connecting Large Scale Generators And Markets Of Food Residuals: Study Of Success/Failure Factors For Food Residuals Recycling, discusses, inter alia, some of the pressing New Jersey policy needs food waste recycling can meet. Food waste recycling can meet the need for additional solid waste reduction, including the need for soil amendments, alternate fuel and energy sources in a time when oil supplies are increasingly threatened, as well as reducing greenhouse gases and air pollution abatement.
We are building awareness among all our stakeholder communities, including the investment community, through a series of county based food waste recycling forums across the state of New Jersey. Registration for each educational forum is free, and the forum typically runs from morning into early afternoon. Each forum provides nuts and bolts introductions on how to plan for and set up a food waste recycling program to receive the maximum economic and environmental benefits associated with food waste recycling. Speakers include recycling systems experts such as John Connolly, Steve Mojo, and Mike Manna who can prepare generators to do waste audits, contract with haulers, create teams and do training, choose bins and avoid contaminating the recycling with materials which cannot be accepted. Other speakers include representatives of each of the food waste recycling facilities now in development, what food and other organic waste they will accept and what products they will manufacture. Still other speakers describe actual case studies and how to have your greenhouse gas savings calculated for you for free. Each forum provides information for local governmental representatives on how to support food waste recycling within their jurisdictions and the benefits of doing so.
SWRRG has held forums in Middlesex , Mercer, Ocean, Gloucester, Bergen, Atlantic, Essex and Camden counties. For information on both past and future forums, click [here].
