More than a million fans will descend on Phoenix this weekend for Super Bowl LVII and all the events that accompany it. While they get ready to cheer on the Eagles or the Chiefs, they’ll be contributing to an estimated 2,000 tons of food and packaging waste from all the concerts, food festivals and competitions that take place around town.
Knowing this, the city is working with Denali, a company to remove organic waste from landfills. It will use its new “depackaging” technology to capture that organic waste and produce compost that can be applied to dry Arizona soil. This is the company’s largest deployment of the technology to date, and will help the city achieve its goal of making the Super Bowl and its supporting events zero waste.
[Photo: courtesy Denali]
There will be many sources of that waste. The Phoenix Convention Center is hosting the Super Bowl Experience, a five-day party expected to attract 180,000 visitors. Described by the NFL as an “interactive theme park,” it will give guests a glimpse of the Vince Lombardi Trophy and let them compete in games such as the 40-yard dash and the combine obstacle course. Food concessions will be served throughout.
[Photo: courtesy Denali]
Rihanna is headlining the Super Bowl halftime show, but the city is hosting a music festival over the weekend with performances by Paramore and Imagine Dragons. Meanwhile, the Taste of the NFL food event will feature celebrity chefs like Andrew Zimmern and Carla Hall, serving up dishes like root-beer-glazed wings, crab and artichoke dip, and sweet and sour meatballs.
Denali, which has been around for more than 20 years, works to convert food waste into valuables; It has converted bakery scraps into cattle feed, and other scraps into nutrients to regenerate vegetation on old strip-mining sites. In 2021, it plans to manage 600,000 tons of organic waste, working with Fortune 500 companies and local governments from Staten Island to Phoenix.
Denali has worked with Phoenix for six years, separating the city’s food waste from packaging waste and turning organic material into compost. The infrastructure is already in place, with a composting facility in town that this year was equipped with a 30-foot-tall Turbo Waste Separator (or “depackaging” tool).
[Photo: courtesy Denali]
The “depackager” would be fed all leftover wings, ranch sauce, fries, and beer and their packaging. It will all be dumped into a “hopper” that tapers down, which is a machine with large and small holes, before passing through a “trommel screen,” explains Oscar Rodriguez, Denali’s Arizona general manager. facilities, The paddles press against the waste to compress the food, and it is “mashed” through the screen; The bones are also pulverized by the machine’s grinder and added to the pile of food.
“Attendees should toss as many chicken wings and hot dogs into the compost bin as they can,” says Sam Lieble, Denali’s director of sustainability and communications.
The packaging material enters another bin, is separated, and then shipped to one of the city’s facilities for processing. Rodriguez estimates that up to 97% of the waste will be successfully segregated.
Once cleaned, the food waste is mixed with other green waste such as grass and leaves make compost. “Before we had this technology, there wasn’t much we could do with it,” Leble says. “But now we’ve been able to come up with a clean stream of biological material.”
[Photo: courtesy Denali]
After 40 to 60 days, Denali markets the manure in bulk, mostly in the Southwest. Companies that buy the material use it in landscaping or mix it into soil that is sold to consumers. In 2022, Phoenix will sell approximately 25,000 cubic yards of compost. Lieb claims this is enough to cover 11 football fields with a 1-foot layer.
Compost has a lot of moisture, which is helpful in markets like Arizona where soils tend to be dry. Compost aids in water retention, keeping plants healthy and full of nutrients, which, Liebl explains, reduces reliance on fertilizers, sprinklers and rainfall in dry conditions.
[Photo: courtesy Denali]
The Depackager is a relatively new tool for Denali. It currently has six operations in four states, but this will be its largest ever, and will be a test of whether municipalities can handle waste of that magnitude. If successful, “there’s no reason it couldn’t be implemented in stadiums year-round for things like concerts”. [or] A full season of football games,” says Lebel.
Along with other city partners, such as Direct Pack, which will handle recyclable bottles and cans, Denali’s operations will be a big part of making this the greenest Super Bowl ever. Phoenix aims to divert 92% of its waste, which would qualify as “zero waste” under the Environmental Protection Agency’s definition. NFL Green, the league’s environmental program, is helping move toward that goal by eliminating some single-use plastics and donating uneaten food to local food rescue organizations.
Notably, the game itself would be played at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, a Phoenix suburb with a different waste infrastructure. Jack Groh, director of NFL Green, points out that Glendale doesn’t have commercial composting, so if fans mix their various trash items with food scraps instead of separating them, local recycling companies treat the waste streams as contaminated and send them to landfills. Sends in
To mitigate this, crews would scour the entire stadium for trash after games, and separate recyclables from non-recyclables by hand. The leftover portion of the food will be donated to a local farm for animal feed. “It’s a simple, low-tech strategy, but it works very well for creating a clean stream of recyclables,” says Gro.
Back in 2018, Minneapolis successfully hosted a zero-waste Super Bowl, eliminating 91% of the 69 tons of waste generated on game day. Coincidentally, that Super Bowl was the last time the Eagles competed in the big game – and they won.
Source: www.fastcompany.com
