When talking about food waste circularity, the conversation usually defaults to energy. We picture massive anaerobic digesters churning out renewable natural gas to power trucks and heat homes. But according to Ben Kuethe Oaks, senior vice president of commercial for Divert, focusing solely on the gas means we are leaving half of the value on the table.
At scale, food waste isn’t just fuel; it is a source of trapped water and vital agricultural nutrients. As Kuethe Oaks says, when food waste goes to a landfill, it is a missed opportunity.
“If we look at the traditional pathway of food waste to landfill ... what are all the valuable resources that we’re losing as part of that? It’s data, energy in the form of carbon, nutrients such as nitrogen and water,” Kuethe Oaks says. “So, we’ve built our infrastructure very purposely to be able to extract and recover all of those components.”
Renewable Energy Blindspot
Why does clean energy get all the press while soil and water get ignored? According to Kuethe Oaks, it comes down to historical infrastructure and investor dollars.
“Historically, you either have your energy recovery or your nutrient recovery through compost,” Kuethe Oaks says. “The RNG [renewable natural gas] side ... when you look at investors and where they’re able to fund these types of operations, that’s really where a lot of this comes from is in the energy sector, so I think that’s where it gets the attention. But when you layer on this nutrient recovery and water recovery, now you’re really starting to create a closed loop that’s far more impactful than we’ve seen.”
By bridging the gap between energy, water and agriculture, Divert’s vertically integrated facilities process 100,000 tons of wasted food per year per facility, proving that these outputs can coexist at scale.
The Secret to Clean Soil: Front-End Depackaging
Contamination is one hurdle in returning grocery waste to agricultural soil. Grocery waste arrives commingled with plastics, cardboard and stickers. If a facility processes these materials incorrectly, plastic contamination can end up in the final fertilizer, polluting fields and clogging up downstream infrastructure.
Divert says it solves this by using a proprietary, front-end “wet process” high-recovery depackaging system. Instead of attempting to screen out plastics at the very end of the cycle, it gently separates and isolates the packaging material up front. Kuethe notes that this design choice is a major differentiator in the market.
“Through this technology, it’s a wet process where we’re able to screen and filter out the contamination from the organics that go into our anaerobic digestion,” Kuethe Oaks says. “This ensures we aren’t having any downstream impacts from plastic contamination getting back into our soil or agriculture.”
Benefits of the process include:
- Clean digesters — Eliminating plastics early prevents digesters from filling up with debris, which is a common operational failure across the U.S. that limits energy yields.
- High-grade fertilizer — Once the carbon is extracted for RNG, Divert uses membrane reactors to pull out a highly concentrated liquid nitrogen fertilizer.
- Disrupting synthetics — This process produces 450,000 pounds of nitrogen annually per facility, serving as a renewable alternative that can directly compete with highly volatile, synthetic commercial fertilizers. What remains is a clean, solid digestate cake with “0% contamination that goes on the fields ... [as] a soil amendment or [for] structural integrity,” Kuethe Oaks says.
- Fertilizer and amendment yields — At full capacity, each of these facilities can produce 500,000 gallons of liquid nitrogen fertilizer and 10,000 wet tons of soil amendment per year.
Harvesting Net-Positive Water
Perhaps the most undercovered element of food circularity is water recovery. Fresh grocery perishables are incredibly heavy, largely because they mostly consist of water. In traditional landfills, this moisture turns into toxic leachate; in open compost fields, it evaporates or runs off wastefully.
Divert’s industrial process treats food waste like a water resource.
“We’re actually at net positive water because food waste — especially with grocery perishables — is 60% to 70% water. What happens through alternative pathways is we lose that, either through leachate or because it’s not properly distributed or irrigated in the field. This is just a more industrial way to harness all of those different components,” Kuethe Oaks says.
The facility recaptures this moisture and loops it right back into the company’s proprietary wet-depackaging hoppers to process incoming loads. The excess water undergoes intensive processing via membrane bioreactors before being safely discharged back into local municipal networks.
Closing the Loop for Upstream Grocers
Ultimately, capturing data, energy, nutrients and water allows Divert to provide a holistic circularity report to retail partners. While individual stores receive weekly operational data to help reduce product shrink and optimize ordering, corporate teams receive comprehensive annual environmental, social and governance metrics.
By looking beyond carbon footprints and accounting for the water and nutrients returned directly to the agricultural ecosystem, grocers are finally getting a clear picture of what a true, multidimensional closed-loop supply chain looks like.
