В пригороде Лос-Анджелеса запущен один из крупнейших в стране заводов по переработке органики в топливо

And there’s a particularly spectacular case of anaerobic digestion taking place in one of the waste facilities located in the city of Perris, about an hour away from Los Angeles. CR&R Environmental probably isn’t the household name you’re familiar with. However, it's a Southern California waste-hauling company that has built, almost in secret, what has been called one of the largest food-and-green waste digesters in the country. What's actually happening in Perris The facility processes the yard and food wastes collected through curbside collection programs, those materials we typically discard without giving them a second thought. This is achieved through an "anaerobic digestion high solids" system. BioCycle's on-site reporting found that the facility was developed in four stages, with each stage able to process about 83,600 tons of organic materials per year for a total capacity of over 330,000 tons per year upon completion. This is not backyard composting we're talking about here. Trash in, truck fuel out Here's the part that actually matters for your commute and your grocery bill, even if you've never set foot in California. The organic waste gets broken down by microbes into biogas, which is then refined into renewable natural gas, or RNG. Energy Vision's case study on the project puts the fully built-out facility is designed to convert its waste stream into enough RNG to displace about 4 million gallons of diesel fuel a year, while also producing roughly 260,000 tons of nutrient-rich fertilizer as a byproduct. Discarded food waste being processed for anaerobic digestion. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons The catch you may not know about The EPA's biogas report puts a number on how far behind most of the country still is: about 94 percent of the food waste that is discarded across America is still getting landfilled and combusted rather than digested. Perris may well be an exceptional case, but then again, it is just an exception, not the norm. Building such projects is costly, and pipeline interconnections would cost millions of dollars. That said, Perris isn't entirely alone. South San Francisco's Blue Line Transfer facility runs a smaller food-and-green-waste digester that fuels its own collection trucks, and New York City's Newtown Creek plant co-digests food scraps alongside wastewater sludge to produce biogas. But facilities like these remain rare: most U.S. cities still lack this kind of infrastructure, and scaling it up to Perris's size is a different order of investment. Why this should matter Not living in California does not negate the relevance of the situation. Wasted food is one of the only environmental issues for which every person in the world is responsible for contributing to multiple times a day. Leftovers which are wasted before being consumed, spoiled spinach in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator, and additional french fries which were not eaten are all contributing to a tremendous greenhouse gas problem in a very visible way. Garbage dumping. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons (Catch all the US News, UK News, Canada News, International Breaking News Events, and Latest News Updates on The Economic Times.) Download The Economic Times News App to get Daily International News Updates. (Catch all the US News, UK News, Canada News, International Breaking News Events, and Latest News Updates on The Economic Times.) Download The Economic Times News App to get Daily International News Updates.