Energy stems from school’s food waste
District’s goal is efficiency, less trips to landfill
High school students can eat a lot of food, but there’s something at Dublin Jerome High School that will consume far more.
It’s a Grind2energy machine that helps convert the school’s food waste scraps into renewable energy.
Dublin Jerome High School is the first K-12 school in North America to receive the machine, which helps turn food waste into natural gas and fertilizer.
Ashley Dulin-smith, environmental sciences teacher at Dublin Jerome High, led the project to obtain the machine. The effort was funded by a $69,646 grant from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and a 25% match ($17,412) by the district.
“Ultimately, our school is going to be making a significant difference environmentally,” Dulinsmith said.
Grind2energy — which is run by Insinkerator, a business unit of Emerson, a St. Louis-based company — collects food scraps, including fats, oils, bones and grease. Students and staff throw out their food scraps in designated trash cans in the cafeteria and the cafeteria staff collects food scraps as they cook.
The food scraps go on Grind2energy’s processing table with a 10-horsepower industrial garbage disposal. Once the machine is started, all the food goes down the disposal, which converts it into a food slurry.
The slurry then goes into a 3,000gallon tank, which holds the liquid. Cleveland-based Quasar Energy Group comes and sucks out the slurry to take to one of its facilities.
There, the slurry is fed into an anaerobic digestion facility, where the scraps are broken down and natural gas is collected so it becomes renewable energy. The remaining biosolids go to local farms so it can be used as fertilizer.
The goal of Grind2energy at Dublin Jerome High is to make the school more energy efficient and reduce the number of trips to the landfill, Dulin-smith said.
Solid Waste Environmental Excellence Protocol predicts the nation’s landfills will reach maximum capacity by 2035.
“We throw away a lot of trash to the landfill,” Dulin-smith said. “Right now the problem is we’re taking a bunch to the landfill, we’re running out of space in the landfills and landfills are producing gases.”
Dulin-smith first laid eyes on a Grind2energy system in 2017 at the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland.
“When I saw it I thought, “Oh my goodness, how amazing would this be (at Dublin Jerome)?’” she said.
She told her class about Grind2energy, and two of her students — Meghan Bartsch and Kyra Hanes — decided they wanted a Grind2energy system in their school.
“We saw how much food waste we were producing daily as we ate in the lunch room where the food waste happens. We were very observant and our eyes were opened, so when we heard about this company and saw what was happening in our school and that action needed to be taken, we wanted to start that action,” Hanes, a junior at the time, said.
As Hanes and Bartsch started conducting research for the project, their environmental science class ended up doing a trash audit to show the need for a Grind2energy system at the high school.
The students sifted through six trash
bags from the cafeteria and discovered 43 pounds of the trash were food scraps, said Bartsch, a senior at the time. They determined there was at least 344 pounds of food scrap waste per day, if the custodians emptied the trash once a day, Bartsch said.
“We found out we had a lot of food waste,” Hanes, now 21, said. “It is insane how much food a high school goes through.”
There are about 100 Grind2energy systems across the country.
“Grind2energy is designed to help
any type of commercial food-service operation efficiently manage its food waste to achieve landfill diversion and, of course, ultimately get turned into renewable energy,” said Heather Dougherty, a business-development lead with Grind2energy.
A handful of Ohio universities have a Grind2energy system, including Baldwin Wallace and Kent State. Progressive Field and Firstenergy Stadium in Cleveland also have Grind2energy systems, in addition to Whole Foods Market and various hotels.
“(Dublin Jerome) is probably maybe making more food scraps than some of the commercial buildings,” Dulin-smith said.
K-12 schools seem like a natural fit for Grind2energy, said Jessica Sarber, manager of strategic partnerships at Ohio Energy Project, which inspires students and helps educators with Stembased curricula and interactive training intended to promote energy conservation.
“From a simple logistics perspective, with a large gathering of students it makes a lot of sense to have a system that takes that waste and reuses it,” Sarber said.
There’s also an education aspect associated with it, she said.
“They can be used to show our next generation that the waste we generate doesn’t have to be thrown out, it can be reused,” Sarber said.
The district ended up submitting three different grant proposals to the Ohio EPA for the Grind2energy system before it was approved.
During that time, Bartsch graduated from Dublin Jerome in 2018 and Hanes graduated in 2019, but they continued to work on the project.
“We had to come up with different ways to get past those obstacles,” said Hanes, 21, who is now a senior at Ohio Northern University, where she is double-majoring in social studies and history.
When the grant proposal was initially denied, the team reworked the proposal and submitted it again in 2020 before COVID-19 hit. The grant went through the review process, but funding wasn’t going to happen because of the pandemic.
In October 2020, Dulin-smith received an email from the Ohio EPA saying there would be funding for the grant period, so she rewrote the grant in 2021 and submitted it.
“We have worked on this for so long,” she remembers thinking. “I can’t let these students down. If we don’t get it, then I’m going to step away. If we do get it, then we’ll celebrate.”
On the last day of school in May, she got a call from the Ohio EPA saying the grant was funded.
“This has been a long process, but it’s here and it’s really exciting,” Dulinsmith said. “This is persistence.”
The Grind2energy system was installed in October and the school started using it in November.
“I feel like Grind2energy is going to help so much with all the food they have to throw away nowadays,” added Bartsch, who is now a senior at Columbus College of Art and Design, where she is studying animation.
“We thought it was never going to come to fruition,” Hanes said. “It was so crazy and so surprising to see..”
mhenry@dispatch.com