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Photo credit: Cole Rosengren

The company recently opened its latest farm-based anaerobic digester, with more on the way. CEO John Hanselman explains why his business works where others have failed.

Cole Rosengren reports for Waste Dive:

Up a steep dirt road in Haverhill, Massachusetts, past a set of old farm buildings, sits one of the newest anaerobic digesters in the country. It’s the fourth facility of its kind from Vanguard Renewables, with many more on the way.

On a bright and brisk December afternoon, a tanker truck has pulled up to empty its liquefied organic contents into the underground receiving pit. The system can process up to 120 tons per day, but it will take multiple days for the slurry to actually make it into the adjacent digester domes.
First, it will be held in a 15-foot-deep tank and screened for contaminants, adjusted for acidity and “blended” before getting fed into the system. Keeping the colony of methnoagenic bugs that feast on it even-keeled is key to the operation’s success — a crash could result in extended downtime.

 

Photo credit: Cole Rosengren

Walking around the site, you can barely perceive odors — and that’s by design. Following the expensive downfalls of other sites around the country, Vanguard has taken extra precautions.

“We may be overzealous, but you can’t underestimate the impact of food waste,” said CEO John Hanselman.

It also helps that Vanguard’s “farm-powered” model is designed to come with automatic community benefits. While Hanselman said the six-year-old company’s original plan was to focus on energy production, their scope has since expanded to include much more.

A small adjacent building contains a 1 MW engine capable of generating up to 7,700 MWh of electricity per year from the resulting methane. In addition to a 20-year power purchase agreement with the city of Haverhill, Vanguard is providing free heat to the multigenerational family business — Crescent Farms — that hosts it on their land. The AD facility also handles all of their manure, creates enough liquid fertilizer for them to swear off synthetic material entirely and makes an animal bedding byproduct that has reportedly led to higher quality milk yields among the cows.

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 Vanguard was named “Organics Recycler of the Year” by the NWRA in 2018 and enjoys growing regional recognition. However, it still has a relatively low profile on the national scale — something sure to change once the company opens a new digester in Vermont, three more in Massachusetts, three in New York and five de-packaging facilities throughout the Northeast.

Following the tour, Waste Dive sat down with Hanselman to discuss expansion plans, his outlook on industry competition and how Vanguard’s approach fits into broader national trends.

 Read Waste Dive’s Q&A here 


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