InSinkErator Makes Environmental Impact at Midwest’s Near-Zero Waste Music Festival
InSinkErator, a manufacturer of food waste disposers, enabled more than 7,000 attendees at Milwaukee's Rock the Green festival Sept. 18 to "give back" by sending approximately 1,200 pounds of food scraps to the local wastewater treatment plant to be converted to renewable energy and fertilizer.
Racine, Wis.—InSinkErator, a manufacturer of food waste disposers, enabled more than 7,000 attendees at Milwaukee’s Rock the Green festival Sept. 18 to “give back” by sending approximately 1,200 pounds of food scraps to the local wastewater treatment plant to be converted to renewable energy and fertilizer. Attendees were encouraged to eliminate unnecessary landfill waste and help create renewable energy by tossing leftover food scraps into special bins, which were then taken to four garbage disposal stations, specially designed by InSinkErator. The concert-goers’ ground food scraps were converted into slurry and housed in 300-gallon holding tanks. The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District will use the resulting slurry to create fertilizer for the treatment of Veterans Park, the concert venue.
The environmental benefits of food waste disposers are backed by a recent Life Cycle Assessment about the impact of various food waste disposal systems. The study states that food scraps processed through a wastewater treatment plant with anaerobic digestion and cogeneration can result in reduced global warming potential. It also concludes that processing food scraps at these advanced wastewater treatment facilities requires a lower demand for energy–less than landfills, incineration and centralized composting.
