Lamont’s waste-disposal overhaul plan about to get its first test vote

By Mark Pazniokas The Connecticut Mirror

Cases of unsold foodstuffs arrive in bulk on pallets at

Bright Feeds, a high-tech startup that Gov. Ned Lamont sees as engaged in the next-generation alchemy of spinning dross into gold or, in this case, food waste into animal feed.

With reporters and television cameras in tow, Lamont toured the Bright Feeds plant last week, an odorless and brightly lit facility that opened six months ago in the Hartford suburb of Berlin and already processes 80 tons of garbage daily.

“What the rest of us see as garbage, entrepreneurs see as gold,” Lamont said.

The story of Bright Feeds and other companies vested in converting food waste to other products, or using it as the raw material to make natural gas and generate electricity, is central to Lamont’s advocacy for a waste- disposal and recycling bill that was to get its first test vote Wednesday.

His host at Bright Feeds was Scott Kalb, a one-time equities and hedge fund manager from Greenwich whose interests have shifted from global finance and sovereign wealth funds to responsible asset allocation and, yes, garbage.

Bright Feeds has the capacity to process far more waste than it is getting.

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“We’re the largest solution provider for processing food waste in the state and in all of New England,” said Kalb, a co-founder and chairman of Bright Feeds. “We have a permitted capacity of 450 tons per day, or 160,000 tons per year. ”

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Quantum Biopower tells a similar story. It uses food scraps and other organics in an anaerobic digester to produce natural gas that generates electricity at a plant in Southington. The residue is sold as compost.

Like Bright Feeds, it could handle far more food waste www.brilliantbasementwaterproofing.com

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Overall, the state estimates, the capacity already exists to divert more than half of the 500,000 tons of food waste that is annually shipped to out-of-state landfills or burned in one of four wasteto-energy plants.

“Yet, we’re only processing something like 15,000 tons a year right now with the food waste that’s being generated in our state,” Kalb said.

The problem is that a system to separate food from other waste in residential settings does not yet exist on any scale.

The

Municipalities, on average, pay $102 to dispose of

See Waste, A11