Football’s super amounts of food waste
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It’s “Super Bowl” time of year, and the national news is full of all your critical need-to-know’s such as psychic zoo animals predicting the game’s outcome. I’m about as clairvoyant as those creatures are – but there’s one thing about the game I could put money on: at the end of it, there will be lots of food waste to discard. That will be as true for households across America as it will be for MetLife Stadium at the Meadowlands, which is expected to produce several tons of food waste. Take a guess how many.
It should be roughly 7-8 tons. All due to one short game…think about it. Does that not make you wonder how much food waste the game of football is indirectly responsible for generating, from August to February? And what do stadiums do with all that food waste?
Used to be, it was all sent to the landfill though lately, more stadiums tried composting. But now there is another option, as undertaken by the Cleveland Browns at the end of the season just concluded. FirstEnergy field now has an organics recycling system that grinds food scraps into slurry and discharges it to a holding tank, which is pumped and hauled to an anaerobic digester for conversion into renewable energy and soil amendment. The Browns estimate they will produce enough methane to heat 32 homes for an entire month. Think of the energy that could be produced if all college and pro football stadiums used an organics recycling system. (I could come up with the calculation myself, but I need to get ready for the game now, which means a trip to the store for nachos ingredients, among other things.)
Full disclosure: the system installed at the Browns’ stadium is called Grind2Energy™ and it’s from InSinkErator, my employer. So I am not going out on a limb with this football-related prediction: by Super Bowl Sunday next year, there will be more football stadiums and sports arenas of all kinds converting food scraps into renewable energy. And to those who follow this blog and care about food scrap diversion — that will be something to cheer.
