Let’s set the stage. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that 30 to 40% of the yearly US food supply goes to waste. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) adds insult to injury, reporting that 60% of that food waste ends up in landfills (rather than in compost, at foodbanks, etc.), where it takes up more space (24%) than any other waste category. The United Nations' Environmental Program published their “Food Waste Index 2024” last March, estimating that food loss and waste generates up to 10% of global greenhouse emissions––almost five times that of the aviation sector. You get it, humans waste a lot of food. 

Beyond radically changing worldwide consumption and production practices, it is vital that individuals and businesses adjust their approach to dealing with food waste. That’s the role of Wasatch Resource Recovery (WRR). Snowbird partnered with WRR in 2021 as part of its Play Forever Initiative to promote and demonstrate its environmental commitments. But what is WRR? Wasatch Resource Recovery is Utah’s first, and only, anaerobic food digester dedicated to diverting and converting food waste. 

Using regenerative waste disposal methods, like anaerobic digestion, directly impacts The Bird’s future snow levels. Companies like WRR divert millions of pounds of food waste from traditional landfill disposal, significantly lowering the amount of methane produced and released by landfills. Methane, infamously, is a highly potent greenhouse gas, the accumulation of which worsens air quality and will negatively impact snowfall over time. Long story short: pow days are in everyone’s best interest, Mother Earth included. 

Anaerobic digestion is the breakdown of organic matter, in this case via microbe, in an environment without oxygen. This process yields biogas and bio-based fertilizer. Basically, useless stuff in, useful stuff out. An anaerobic digester is the vessel in which anaerobic digestion takes place. In WRR’s case, this is an enormous heated metal tank equipped with an inflatable dome. As those microbes begin to chow down on the mushy organic matter, the methane they produce inflates the digester’s dome. That gas is pulled, via a series of metal pipes, from the top of the digester and forced back down to the dome’s bottom, where it’s released. The methane then bubbles back up through the organic matter, carrying liquids and solids with it as it rises, keeping the digesters mixed. 

“It is a rarity for a ski area to have access to a facility like WWR,” says Snowbird Director of Sustainability & Water Resources, Hilary Arens. “The anaerobic digestion process provides huge benefits to the environment.” Snowbird’s partnership with Wasatch Resource Recovery not only keeps food out of landfills, it supplies Salt Lake City with renewable natural gas.

How does this actually work? When Snowbird’s organic waste arrives at WRR’s facility, it is processed by a series of contaminant-removing sorting machines, ground down, liquified–– with the aid of secondary (non-potable) water––and passed through a large rotating screen to remove any leftover packaging. The sludge is slopped into several enormous tanks before it finally comes to rest in an anaerobic 2.5 million gallon digester tank, where special microbes break down the organic matter, resulting in: 1. Biogas and 2. Fertilizer. 

The biogas rises to the top of the tank where it is harvested, purified and converted into biomethane, a renewable natural gas. After purification, the biomethane is fed into a nearby gas pipeline, sold back to the market and used to heat homes in North Salt Lake. The second product, a bio-based fertilizer, is the nutrient-rich result of the microbes’ organic matter feast. The fertilizer’s precursor, biosolids, are compressed and dried until they can be used as fertilizer to aid in crop growth. WRR has an excellent illustrated guide to their process, found on their website. 

“Environmentally conscious companies, companies looking to lower their carbon footprint, contact me. [Wasatch Resource Recovery is] always looking for new partners,” says Elizabeth Barrett, WRR’s Director of Procurement, citing a plan to build a third digester to accommodate for increased demand. 

“For every 1 ton of processed food waste,” Arens explains, “6 decatherms of natural gas go back into the grid.” 

A decatherm is a unit of energy used to measure the total heat content of natural gas. A decatherm equals: 10 therms, 1,000,000 British thermal units (MMBtu), 1.055 gigajoules (GJ) and approximately 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas. For more tangible context, Arens says, “6 decatherms of gas heats 24 homes for a day.” 

Since partnering with Wasatch Resource Recovery in 2021, Snowbird has converted its food scraps, unfinished meals and expired food into roughly 1,350 decatherms of natural gas, heating 6,000 homes for a day.

All of this energy comes from Snowbird’s food waste–scraps that might otherwise have been moldering in a landfill. WRR also recently launched their residential public drop-off in North Salt Lake, where you and your neighbors can dispose of household organic waste for free.