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Recycling News
Pompano Beach recycler gives food waste second life
Company takes grocer's waste, turns it into fertilizer
By Arlene Satchell | South Florida Sun-Sentinel
August 27, 2008
One South Florida company is attempting to turn food trash into treasure through a partnership with Publix Super Markets Inc.
How? Organic Recovery of Pompano Beach is converting the grocer's food waste into a liquid plant food for farmland, crops and golf courses.
The company expects to divert about 17,000 tons of food scraps a year from local landfills.
Launched this month, Organic Recovery collects about 166 tons of food scraps weekly from 56 Publix supermarkets in Broward County. By mid-2009, it expects to work with all the Publix stories in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
The food — deli meats, fruits and vegetables — is still fresh but no longer fit for human consumption. Organic Recovery collects the food and transports it in refrigerated trucks to Pompano where it's given new life in about four hours.
"We recycle just about everything there is a market for, yet we never really saw a market for our food waste until now," Publix spokeswoman Kim Jaeger said.
Through this venture, Publix expects to boost its recycling rate to 80 percent, up from 47 percent last year, Jaeger said.
The leftover grease from Publix also is recycled into biodiesel, which Organic Recovery uses to fuel its trucks.
It's about taking this waste material and turning into something useful, the company's co-founder and chief executive officer Jeffrey Young said. No stranger to waste recycling, Young, 40, co-founded Advanced Marine Technologies, a Massachusetts company that makes fertilizer from seafood scraps, in the 1990s.
The customers buying the recycled Publix food waste from Organic Recovery pay less for it than chemical fertilizers. And when the plant food is used on crops or spread over golf courses it doesn't produce greenhouse gases.
While Organic Recovery remains focused on working with the supermarket chain, demand for its food recycling is growing.
Young said he's received calls from local restaurants and food processors wanting to recycle their food waste.
Gov. Charlie Crist, speaking at the firm's grand opening, commended Organic Recovery for its environmentally friendly efforts.
"Recycling is something people have really caught on to," Crist said. "There's gold in green, there's no question about it."
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