Wastewater treatment generates about 20 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent in the U.S. every year. A few water utilities are offsetting some of those emissions by leveraging their existing infrastructure to turn food waste that would otherwise be landfilled into renewable natural gas (RNG).
Victor Valley Wastewater Reclamation Authority (VVWRA) is the first facility of its kind in California to go this route. Working with renewable energy company Anaergia, VVWRA is co-digesting postconsumer food waste with the wastewater biosolids that it was processing all along in its anaerobic digesters (AD).
