New food digester unveiled at Food Bank of Delaware

MILFORD, Del. – A new food digester was unveiled today at the Food Bank of Delaware.

This new technology is being used to remove food waste from the equation.

“This particular product here is going to be located in both the Milford and Newark facilities of the Food Bank and it will allow them to keep a thousand pounds a day out of landfill of food waste,” said Julie Miro Wenger of Keep Delaware Beautiful.

Keep Delaware Beautiful partnered with the Delaware Solid Waste Authority to bring this new food digester to the Food Bank of Delaware.

“Very simple to operate, you have the hatch here which you hit a button to open that, everything stops for safety, and then you’re adding your food scraps from prep waste of the kitchen into the digester, closing the door and it goes back to operation,” explained Douglas Horner of Earth Bio Technologies.

The on-site aerobic digester uses a natural biological process to break down food waste prior to it being discharged in the sewer system.

“As hard as we work to make sure they have enough food, we also want to make sure that we are not wasting any of it and this enables us to put it through a process the expired food, spoiled food, whatever it might be, so that it does not end up in the landfill and is actually handled very environmentally safely,” said Cathy Kanefsky with Food Bank of Delaware.

The digester helps divert organics from landfill and avoid fuel use that comes from truck pickup and delivery.

“We’re fortunate to have a lot of community support and the ability to have this paid for for us really helps us eliminate food waste here at the Food Bank, so as hard as we work to get donations of food here so that we can make sure that we’re providing food throughout the state to people that are hungry, it’s also really important for us not to waste food,” said Kanefsky.

So far, the Food Bank has been able to divert close to 6,000 pounds of food from the landfill.