NJ company transforms food waste into a commodity before it can reach a landfill – USA Today

NJ company transforms food waste into a commodity before it can reach a landfill.

-USA Today

You might think a warehouse filled with food waste would stink. But when visitors enter Jay Fischer’s warehouse, they are enveloped in the deliciously intertwined scents of coffee and chocolate.

Fischer co-founded Ag Choice, the only company in New Jersey with a relatively long track record of taking food waste and converting it into compost and topsoil. He sells it to landscapers, developers of brownfields and such iconic green spaces as the Presby Memorial Iris Gardens in Montclair.

“There’s no reason for this material to be in landfills,” Fischer said. “It’s not just garbage — it’s a resource.”

Since it started in 2008, the company has diverted 88,000 tons of food waste from landfills, and sold 145,000 cubic yards of compost and topsoil.

Ag Choice is New Jersey’s only commercial composting option for companies that want to divert food waste from landfills. Other companies have tried to get into the business, but New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection has shut them down because of complaints from neighbors about bad odors.

“Composting food waste can be done successfully, but the other companies all went after tipping fees and revenue and didn’t focus on the science of decomposition,” Fischer said. “They started really big quickly, and ended with too much material on site, and then you can get odor and leachate problems.

“We started small, as a research and demonstration project,” Fischer said. “Now I have a sustainable answer to landfilling food waste, and in the process I’m creating viable green jobs.”

Fischer collects food waste from an array of companies, including a New Jersey chocolate maker. So his warehouse in Andover, in Sussex County, becomes temporary home to giant tubs of chocolate rejected by the manufacturer.

Fischer also receives packages of used or rejected Nespresso coffee pods from across the country. He has a machine that can burst unused pods to capture the coffee grounds, and also collect the spent grounds from used pods. The colorful array of crushed aluminum pods gets recycled, and the coffee grounds end up in Ag Choice’s outdoor rows of decomposing food waste.

Ag Choice handles supermarket fruits and vegetables that have gone bad, rejected boxes of fruit snacks, dead animal carcasses from local farms, liquid waste from flavoring companies. The company takes in a combined 38,000 cubic yards of food waste a year and transforms it into compost and topsoil.

Food waste represents about 20 percent of all garbage that ends up in America’s landfills, and as it decomposes in a landfill’s oxygen-deprived setting, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide.

Some cities, such as Austin, Seattle and New York, as well as states, including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont, now prohibit large producers of food waste — such as hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, supermarkets and corporate cafeterias — from dumping that waste in landfills. New Jersey has a similar bill currently in the Legislature, and last year Gov. Chris Christie signed a bill to cut food waste in half by 2030.

“New Jersey is not alone in thinking about this,” said Lorenzo Macaluso, an expert in business waste reduction at the Center for Ecotechnology, a Massachusetts non-profit. “Regionally there’s a lot of momentum, so there’s a lot of opportunity for the states to share and learn from each other.”

Experts say food waste landfill bans on food waste work best when there is a lead-in time for infrastructure to be developed, such as new composting facilities or aerobic digesters, and outreach by regulators to help companies achieve compliance.

Macaluso said his non-profit has developed apps to help companies estimate how much food waste they generate, and then they work with companies to set up back-of-house logistics to separate food waste from other garbage.

A similar approach has been used in Connecticut.

“I have a person who goes out each week and meets midsized to large food waste generators to provide them an oversight of the law and walk through what to do to create food waste diversion programs,” said Chris Nelson, supervising environmental analyst with Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “Most are pretty interested in it and are quick to say they will get something in place. We’re trying to start out with compliance assistance.”

Fischer said he has always had an entrepreneurial bent. Growing up around Lake Tranquility, he had a grass-cutting business. By 18, he had bought a tractor-trailer. Then he started a sawmill that sold sawdust to horse farms. The mill also made survey stakes, and lumber for cabinet and furniture makers.

“By 2008, the sawmill turned off the light switch because it revolved around the housing market, and the housing bubble burst,” Fischer said.

Luckily, his wife, Jill, had stumbled on an old file Fischer had kept with research on food waste composting. By the time the mill had to shutter, they had already started Ag Choice.

The company operates its composting rows on 8 acres that Fischer leases on a 300-acre farm in Andover.

To create each new row for composting, workers layer ingredients like a lasagna. The first layer is wood chips, which add oxygen to the bottom of the pile. Next comes a layer of municipal leaves, which provide carbon. Then they spread a layer of food waste over the leaves. Next come more wood chips. And so on.

Twice a week the 8-foot high rows get turned by a giant machine on wheels with mechanical arms that straddles the piles and looks like something out of “Star Wars.” The turner’s arms blend the material to increase porosity and let oxygen into the pile. The rows are generally 2 or 3 feet higher once the machine has fluffed them.

Fischer and his staff monitor the oxygen levels, the nitrogen and carbon ratios, and the temperature of each row. One recent afternoon he dug his hand into a row of maturing compost and quickly pulled it out. A finger of steam floated into the air. “It’s so hot I can’t dig my hand in any deeper,” he said.

The centers of the composting rows typically reach 150 degrees, which kills off any parasites that may have been in the food waste.

The rows get so warm that during the winter, Fischer often sees wild turkeys resting on top.

It takes eight to 14 weeks for the piles to become marketable compost. Once the compost is ready, it gets filtered to remove any large sticks or other debris that might need further decomposition. And Fischer will mix in sandy loam from a local quarry to turn some of the compost into topsoil.

He said composting can be done successfully without creating odors, just as vegetation and animal droppings break down on the forest floor.

“I’m taking that same science and re-creating it on a larger and more accelerated scale,” he said. “We need to have the right porosity and moisture, and we can compost ostriches, chickens, goats and food waste without odors.”

Fischer would like to develop a pilot program to supply a food waste collection point for individual residents in Newton, which would be cheaper for them than paying to dump everything at the county landfill.

He said that instead of a few large composting facilities, the state should try to replicate Ag Choice’s success by promoting the development of 15 to 20 smaller facilities spread across the state, and to locate them in agricultural areas, so farmers could lease out land for composting and generate some extra revenue.

“New Jersey has a lofty goal to reduce food waste,” Fischer said. “But it’s a business like any other — the economics have to work.”

The USA TODAY NETWORK New Jersey team is tackling the issue of food waste, taking a look at the worst offenders and the innovators leading the charge to cut food waste. We’ll also show you how we can all stop wasting food in New Jersey, from farm to kitchen. Check back at NorthJersey.com this week for more in our #WasteNotNJ series.