Miller Park executive chef Seth VanderLaan with the ballpark’s biodigester. (Courtesy Delaware North Sportservice)
When Delaware North Sportservice installed a new BioHiTech Global biodigester at the Milwaukee Brewers’ Miller Park for the start of this year’s Major Legue Baseball season, Seth VanderLaan figured it might be used a couple of times a week.
As the regular season drew to a close, VanderLaan, Delaware North executive chef at the ballpark, was pleasantly surprised to find that his estimate was far too low. The biodigester runs nearly constantly — fed up to twice a day — and has digested more than 26,000 pounds of food wasted since being installed.
The result proved to the venue, concessionaire and team that the effort to divert food waste from landfills and add an environmentally friendly component to food operations was feasible.
The biodigester works by using enzymes to break down organic matter over 24 hours or less. The higher the moisture content, the faster the food breaks down, so lettuce and tomatoes will break down much quicker than chicken bones or watermelon rinds. Cooks monitor the machine’s readout to know how much of the 200-pound capacity is available.
The machine turns the waste into wastewater that runs to the local treatment facility full of nutrients available to help with production in energy or fertilizer.
As one of a few locations within Delaware North piloting the technology — Miller Park represents the largest example — the Delaware North team wanted to test how well it could integrate the technology into operations and see what kind of difference it really did make. The Brewers were open to increasing green initiatives, and food waste was a big point of emphasis for the chef, so the biodigester became a natural fit.
“The beautiful thing about having this right on site,” said Debbie Friedel, director of sustainability for Delaware North, “is it helps us to better measure our food waste.”
The biodigester connects to an app that tracks in real time how much has been digested since it started, how much was done in the last 24 hours and plenty of other details. That information can convert to showing that the 26,000-plus pounds equates to saving 7.6 acres of forest, 22 barrels of oil or 1.9 garbage-truck loads of waste. This information is then shared with the Brewers.
At $8,300 a year to lease the machine, Delaware North doesn’t recoup any disposal fee savings — those are paid by the client — but VanderLaan said he thinks the future pros would outweigh the financial cons. Saving money “wasn’t the goal of it,” he said. “It was just the right thing to do.”
Because of the changing seasonal staff of the ballpark, ease of use was a requirement. “You do need to have something very easy to use that didn’t disrupt the food production chain,” VanderLaan said. Upon collecting scraps, a limited number of cooks and chefs have leeway to operate the machine, simply to make sure no foreign items clog it. Chefs collect waste in bins and deposit the waste in the machine on the way out the door each night. “It has been very smooth to operate and hasn’t added any noticeable labor,” he said. “We could, in the future, expand on this and include more waste.”
Delaware North handles waste from select kitchens. An expansion could include more sites and potentially post-consumer waste.
Having a digester on site has led to a new type of waste awareness within Miller Park and among Delaware North chefs and a resulting shift in food operations.
VanderLaan said the entire process has made lead cooks more environmentally conscious, with some now leading a bigger initiative in recycling or finding less wasteful ways to prep food. “That has been a great added benefit, something I wasn’t expecting,” he said. “It was a great surprise.”
By having food waste returned to the kitchens instead of thrown out, cooks can see more of the operation cycle. The all-inclusive areas offered a great lesson, where chefs were consistently seeing two or three pans of hamburgers returning to the kitchen, for example.
“We looked at a number of things in the all-inclusive areas and found we have been overproducing,” VanderLaan said.