Upstate company keeps food waste out of landfills

About 40 percent of food in the United States goes uneaten, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Food waste accounts for 21 percent of discarded material in the country, according to the most recent 2012 data from the Environmental Protection Agency.

According to the Duke University Center for Sustainability and Commerce, solid waste landfills make up the second-largest source of human-related methane emission in the country.

“We’re blessed and cursed in this country because we have so much land,” said Scott Harke, director of business development at Duncan-based Divergent Energy, which helps organizations make changes to keep material going to landfills.

Divergent Energy helps businesses by evaluating how much waste they’re throwing out and looking for ways to reduce the amount. The company helps some businesses with a machine that dehydrates and grinds food scraps into compost.

When food waste goes into a landfill it produces methane gas, and the water from the food causes contamination, Harke said.

The changes implemented by Divergent Energy not only help the environment, he said, but also make economical sense as well for organizations ranging from medium-size businesses to multimillion-dollar companies.

“We look at the economics of it,” he said. When he tells organizations that he can help them save money by reducing the amount of waste they throw out, Harke said, they become very interested. He was able to help one high school in Columbia go from four dumpsters to two.

The machine can help restaurants save on waste hauling costs, which are known to often have slim profit margins. “Pennies per plate make a difference,” Harke said.

The biggest dehydration machines can handle up to 4,500 pounds of food scraps a day, he said. The machines are shipped from South Korea, but he said the company is in talks to manufacture machines in the Upstate.

After about an eight-hour process, the material comes out looking like coffee grounds. It can then be spread as a fertilizer or used in vermiculture, a process of feeding it to worms. Harke said the machine can handle almost any type of food, including bones.

Although Harke is passionate about reducing the amount of waste going to landfills, he said sometimes installing a dehydrator machine won’t make economical sense because the business won’t save enough money to justify the cost of the machine.

“I can’t knowingly take somebody’s money when I know it won’t make economic sense for them,” he said.

Chef Alan Scheidhauer, head of the Culinary Institute of the Carolinas and the sustainable agriculture program at Greenville Technical College, said the machine has been very helpful in his department since they began using it about three years ago.

Thanks to the machine and other sustainability measures, the culinary department hasn’t had to increase its dumpster capacity even though the department size has increased by five times since 2008, Scheidhauer said.

He said about 200 pounds of food material from the culinary department is daily dumped into the machine and then used as fertilizer in the agriculture program.

“It certainly has helped us be sustainable in all senses of the word,” he said.