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For Maria Perez, joining a project to reduce food waste in Washington wasn’t just a job. Her journey with the Duwamish Valley Sustainability Association (DVSA) began when she was 14 and enrolled in a youth program that sparked her interest in fighting climate change. Six years later, the association hired her to manage a program that turns waste from a Seattle neighborhood into a type of liquid plant food.

The innovative program in the South Park area was launched by the DVSA in 2021, in partnership with nonprofits including Food Lifeline, Sustainable Seattle, and Black Star Farmers, as well as the company Chomp — which builds the initiative’s small-scale biodigesters. 

Perez spent hours learning about how the sealed container uses bacteria to reduce emissions while growing food for the predominantly Latino neighborhood. She spoke with residents, teaching young people who stood where she once had. Her enthusiasm for the project was impossible to miss — she talked about it constantly, sharing details with everyone in her life. “It was just really exciting [to see] how everything came into a circular economy,” Perez said.

Slightly smaller than a shipping container, the sealed bins function much like a cow’s four-chambered stomach — introducing microbes that every year can turn 25 tons of rotting food into 5,400 gallons of fertilizer. It also creates biogas, a renewable energy source that can be used for electricity or fuel.

“We started to develop a new project [focused on] organic waste, because when we worked in the South Park area, we saw a lot of garbage on the street,” said Edwin Hernandez, the association’s executive director. In a series of community meetings, DVSA asked local residents and businesses how they wanted to tackle the neighborhood’s waste problem. The answer that emerged was a biodigester, whose added benefits included providing sustainable infrastructure and green jobs, Hernandez said.

The idea got underway with support from an EPA grant, along with money from the City of Seattle. Faculty from the University of Washington helped shape the project’s feasibility study. The coalition later received support from the state, including being selected to participate in the state’s new sustainable innovation program, NextCycle Washington, along with seed funding from the Department of Commerce. 

The value of the biodigester, according to Hernandez, is in how it can transform trash like eggshells and banana peels into a resource that can help grow food locally. 

More than a third of the food supply in the U.S. becomes food waste, according to estimates from the United States Department of Agriculture. “There are other better ways of dealing with food waste than sending it to our landfill,” said Adrian Tan, policy and market development manager at King County Solid Waste Division, who supported the project. “Could the food waste in our garbage be prevented, donated, composted, or put to other beneficial uses?”

While Seattle is in King County — the largest county in the state — the city has its own waste management system, Tan explained. It collects food waste and other organic waste through a compost service, which it sends to two commercial composters. However, food waste that is put in the garbage gets transported by rail to a landfill in Oregon. The emissions from moving across state lines are compounded by the fact that when food waste decomposes in landfills, it releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas. 

Biodigesters, in comparison, keep waste local. Jan Allen, the CEO of Chomp, was inspired to start the biodigester company because he wanted to eliminate the need for diesel trucks and their associated pollution — a common way to transport garbage.

“Chomp is based on the aspiration to eliminate trucking of food into the community, and eliminate trucking of waste out of the community,” said Allen. “So we’re really trying to make a circular economy out of food, food waste, energy, and growing fresh food locally.” 

Allen says working directly with local communities to address shared challenges sets his company apart from other technological fixes. Their biodigesters draw on biomimicry, designing with inspiration from nature. “We try to keep it as simple as possible, [with] minimal moving parts,” said Allen. “We actually have figured out a way to have the microbes compress the gas for us, so we’re doing innovative stuff to not have too much machinery.” 

As a manager of the project, Perez gave local restaurants trainings about the biodigester, along with other city waste reduction programs so they could learn how to turn their trash into resources. Every Tuesday, Perez and the young volunteers would split up into groups. “We would weigh the compost of participants, and accumulate the data,” said Perez. When the biodigesters were done processing, Perez explained, “we would give the liquid soil amendment back out to the community.” 

DVSA also gave trainings to the neighborhood’s residents in Spanish, English, and Khmer, the official and national language of Cambodia. Hernandez says the main challenge facing the project now is distributing the liquid soil amendment, and “securing a free area where we can install more biodigesters,” increasing the amount of biogas that can be created. So far, over 30 residents and 5 restaurants have signed up to participate in the program. DVSA is eager to sign up more. 

Although Perez has recently stepped away from the project to focus on attending college, she’s encouraged by what has been accomplished, and takes pride in knowing it continues to benefit the community. 

“I feel happy that this happened, because there’s a lot of people that now know about this project, and how it’s affecting South Park,” she said. “It just brings everyone together.”

This story was produced in partnership with Communities of Opportunity, a growing partnership that believes every community can be a healthy, thriving community. Communities of Opportunity is a unique community-private foundation-government partnership that invests in the power of communities in King County, Washington.