Golden Opportunity
Organic Recovery of Pompano Beach, Florida, is converting Publix supermarkets’ food wastes into a liquid plant food for farmland, crops and golf courses. The company expects to divert about 17,000 tons of food scraps a year from local landfills. Launched earlier this year by 40-year-old cofounder and CEO, Jeffrey Young, Organic Recovery began by collecting about 166 tons of food scraps weekly from 56 Publix supermarkets in Broward County. By mid-2009, the firm expects to work with all the Publix stores in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties.

A Publix spokesperson said that participating stores expect to boost their recycling rate to 80 percent, up from 47 percent last year. Even leftover grease is recycled into biodiesel to fuel Organic Recovery’s trucks. Customers buying Organic Recovery’s plant food pay less than for chemical fertilizers, and it doesn’t produce greenhouse gases.

Primary Sources: South Florida Sun-Sentinel and OR-dev.com/technology.html