Auburn Gresham’s Green Era Campus transforming food waste into energy

CHICAGO — Located in the heart of Auburn Gresham is the Green Era Campus. What was once acres of contaminated land, is now fertile ground for the future as it aims to feed and build up the community.

The concept behind the Green Era Campus on West 83rd Street was born about 15 years ago when business partners Jason Feldman and Erika Allen posed the question: “What can we do with food waste, how can we keep it out of landfills?”

With a team of support, for about a year and a half now, the two have been doing just that on the Green Era Campus. It is the first facility in the nation dedicated exclusively to processing packaged food waste and transforming it into clean energy and nutrient-rich compost.

“We wanted to really demonstrate that in our community not only could we innovate around green tech, that we could be climate change prepared, but also build living growing economies through food waste,” Allen said.

Food is the largest form of solid waste in landfills across the country and each year, more than 55 million pounds of food waste from Chicago enters into those dump sites.

But with a piece of technology called an anaerobic digestor, Green Era has already diverted 40,000 tons of food waste from landfills, turning that waste into compost and renewable energy.

“When food waste breaks down, it breaks down methane as well, it creates. We capture that methane, and that’s actually the renewable energy we produced, inject that energy directly into the grid to create renewable energy to decarbonize the local gas grid,” Feldman said.

The State of Illinois supported the campus with a $3M Rebuild Illinois infrastructure grant. Prior to its development, the nine-acre plot of land was a contaminated field.

“I was here when we did the groundbreaking for this and here we are five years later this is a thriving anaerobic digestor that’s making a huge difference in the community,” Gov. Pritzker said.

Along with recycling waste, down the line, the Green Era Campus will include an education center and a farm.

Currently, 15 full-time employees work here and there are plans to expand that to 30.

“To have some of our staff say to me that their lives have changed because of the work that we do we want to see more of these kinds of projects, we want to see more community ownership,” Allen said.

Green Era anticipates eventually scaling up to about 85,000 tons of food waste per year recycled into renewable energy and nutrient-rich compost, taking a big dent out of waste going into landfills.