Over the last few years, the IFSCC Policy Committee of the Illinois Food Scrap & Composting Coalition (IFSCC) has been scheduling tours at various compost facilities and locations in Illinois. Thank you, IFSCC Policy Co-Chair Liz Kunkle, for this recent tour recap.
On a beautiful but chilly day in early April, Illinois Food Scrap & Composting Coalition members were treated to tours of two impactful sister projects in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. We started at the Healthy Lifestyle Hub, where the Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corporation (GAGDC) centers its efforts to foster and promote revitalization of the low-to-moderate income communities it serves using comprehensive community development strategies. We then moved to the Green Era Renewable Energy Campus and Urban Farm, which is all about transforming food waste into energy, jobs, food, and healthy communities. They have a food waste processing capacity of 85,000 tons of per year, and in 2024, Green Era AD digestate* was used to grow 26,000 pounds of local produce by Urban Growers Collective.
IFSCC extends its gratitude and heartfelt thanks to Carlos, Norma and the team at Healthy Lifestyle Hub, Sunny, Katherine, Jason and the team at Green Era, and Erika, Raven and the team at Urban Growers Collective for this amazing experience.
*In this context, “AD” refers to Green Era’s anaerobic digester; “AD” may also refer to anaerobic digestion in general. Anaerobic digestion is a process in which bacteria break down organic materials in the absence of oxygen, resulting in biogas and “digestate”—solid and liquid materials that may be used as fertilizer among other possible applications. Anaerobic digestion is sometimes used as a strategy to process organic waste, including food waste, for a variety of reasons, such as a lack of composting infrastructure in a given location; distance from the point of generation to composting facilities that might make transportation of materials undesirable; because the amount of organic waste generated is more than can be accepted at existing composting facilities; etc. To learn more about anaerobic digestion, see https://www.epa.gov/agstar/how-does-anaerobic-digestion-work.