By Katie Pyzyk@_PyintheSky, Waste Dive

A Chicago community group in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood recently received the funding commitments needed to move ahead with a project to transform a nine-acre brownfield site into an urban farm. Construction on the $32 million project, which will include an on-site anaerobic digester (AD), begins next month and is expected to be complete by spring 2022.

Green Era Sustainability will manage the AD facility, which is expected to process 85,000 tons of food waste and organic matter each year. The facility will produce material that can be used as compost for the urban farm and renewable natural gas that will be sold through an agreement with BP.

Following a $10 million award from the Pritzker Traubert Foundation, a final $3 million in state funding helped close the deal. This includes $2 million from Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s Rebuild Illinois capital plan and a $1 million loan from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s Brownfield Redevelopment Loan Fund. Additional project financing comes from a range of other sources, including a U.S. EPA brownfield cleanup grant.

The urban farm will grow an estimated 26,000 pounds of food per year for distribution in the community, which is considered a food desert. It is described as an example of working toward environmental justice in a low-income area that sustained a disproportionate impact from decades of disinvestment and industrial pollution. The site will also have an educational element to teach community members about growing their own food, healthy eating and organics recycling.

“The potential to provide environmental justice is huge,” said Patrick Serfass, executive director of the American Biogas Council. “Communities that have suffered from environmental justice issues don’t have a lot of trust for industry coming in and providing solutions because they’ve been burned so many times. One of the starting points here is to help everyone — from community members to leaders — understand the benefits that biogas can provide… The opportunity is incredible but education needs to come first.”

Green Era Sustainability Co-Founder and CEO Jason Feldman said the project was initiated with the nonprofit Urban Growers Collective, which does agricultural projects in disadvantaged neighborhoods and will oversee the urban farm portion of the site. When they couldn’t get enough compost for their community food growing projects, they started examining AD technologies, and momentum grew due to support from neighborhood groups. This project is getting a lot of attention because it is an example of a multi-benefit circular economy project to improve a traditionally underserved neighborhood, Feldman said. 

“We want to show folks in a tangible way that it’s worth taking the extra step to separate food waste,” Feldman said. “It will be recycled locally, which creates jobs, but then it also creates the great byproducts of renewable energy to strengthen infrastructure and nutrient-rich material we can use to grow more food… We’re trying to connect some of those dots. The linear economy right now is pretty unsustainable.”

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