Santa Rosa is exploring how it will allow local companies to dispose of high-strength food waste at the city's wastewater treatment plant.
The City Council on Tuesday authorized the utilities department to spend $150,000 to design a receiving station for slurry from food processing companies.
Many local wineries, breweries and food processors currently truck their waste, which is too concentrated to dispose of in the normal wastewater treatment process, to the East Bay.
The goal is to treat that waste locally, keep those trucks off the highway, and boost the plant's energy output in the process, explained Mike Prinz, who oversees the Laguna Road treatment plant.
The plant operates huge digesters that break down human waste into gas that powers generators supplying up to one-third of the plant's summertime power needs. The city has been studying for years how it could use other waste materials to provide a disposal option that also would boost the gas production from its digesters.
The digesters have extra capacity, but there isn't currently a practical way to add food waste to them, Prinz said. The receiving facility would create a way for those wastes to be efficiently added to the digesters, he said. The types of waste material and costs are all yet to be determined.
"It's not a rocket-science type of project," he said.
But it is one that local the region's growing food and beverage production industry have been clamoring for. The facility could be operational by the end of the year, Prinz said.
The money is part of a $2.4 million rebate the utility won from Pacific Gas & Electric for its efforts to generate its own energy at the plant. Other projects to be funded from the rebate this year include $150,000 for stabilizing Pine Flat Road, beneath which the city's Geysers pipeline runs, $350,000 for the updating the plant's master plan, and $537,000 for various upgrades to the 40-year-old plant.
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