(Radio Iowa) – An organic waste recycling center in Muscatine is working to double its production of methane in the next year using federal grants. The facility takes in some four-thousand tons of food waste each year and uses two anaerobic digesters to generate enough methane to power 13-hundred vehicles. For now, the methane is being burned off, but facility director John Koch (Cook) wants to see the eastern Iowa city harvest that potential.

“What we’re trying to do here is, we’re trying to capture that methane, that food waste that would have been in a landfill, off-gassing that methane into the atmosphere,” Koch says. “We now are capturing that with these digesters and making renewable energy and fertilizer out of that.” Workers remove packaging from hot dogs, palettes of snack packs and drums of liquid cheese and dump it into the digesters which capture the methane. While there’s no infrastructure yet to do anything with that gas, Koch wants to change that.

“Whether that’s electricity or whether we pump it right back in the gas pipeline, natural gas pipeline or whatever we do, there’s a couple of options we have,” he says. Koch hopes federal grant money can help seize on the energy source that’s now being vented into the atmosphere and wasted.

(by Zachary Oren Smith, Iowa Public Radio)