AGAWAM – In a nondescript, green building on Main Street in Agawam, food that would once have been sent to an incinerator is getting a new life as it takes its first steps on the road to becoming fertilizer.

The Vanguard Renewable Organics Recycling Facility was “powered up” on Dec. 3 with help from Chairman and CEO John Hanselman, Agawam Mayor William Sapelli, state Rep. Nicholas Boldyga, state Sen. John Velis, and City Councilors Mario Tedschi, George Bitzas and Rosemary Sandlin.

When walking into the building, the first thing one notices is the smell of sour milk and how it doesn’t extend past the building’s doors.

“We want to be a good neighbor,” said Hanselman. He pointed to the web of ductwork that runs along the 40-foot high ceilings and leads to a separate room in which 15 tons of activated carbon filter out odors. “There should be no odors outside.”

Hanselman explained how the plant uses a few key pieces of equipment to separate expired food and beverage items or those that are no longer safe to sell from their containers and turns it into a slurry. Trucks from supermarkets, college campuses and hospital cafeterias drop off pallets of food waste. They are run through the Mega THOR Separator which crushes containers of food and sends them through a chute to two giant augers which help pull out the packaging. That packaging is recycled or incinerated as appropriate. The food is then sent through a “hammer-mill,” which expresses the organic material and creates a slurry.

The facility can process up to 250 tons of food waste per day. Three times each day an 8,000-gallon tanker is filled with slurry from the facility’s large holding tanks, which transports it to the five farms in Massachusetts and one in Vermont with which Vanguard works. The slurry is what Hanselman called, “a nice, balanced meal” for anaerobic digesters at those sites to finish the food-to-fertilizer process.

Employee Abraham Marciniec explained to Reminder Publishing that aside from the food that is recycled there, such as dairy, ground beef, chocolate and soup, the facility also receives beer from Anheuser-Busch, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and Hillenbrand Farmhaus Brewery. The facility can process eight kegs of beer every 12 to 13 minutes.

“We’re very fortunate. There’s only a few of these [facilities] in the state and this is the most advanced one. Being a green community, it really goes hand-in-hand with what we’re trying to do here,” Sapelli said. “And it creates jobs and those people will spend money in Agawam, and, despite the mayor, maybe they’ll move here,” he added with a laugh. “During COVID, it’s very difficult with the closing of storefronts, and we are fortunate to have you coming in here,” Sapelli told Hanselman.

Jennifer Forbes, vice president of marketing for Vanguard Renewables, said that plants such as the one in Agawam provide a recycling service for the food and beverage industries. Hanselman said that companies have to pay to have the items recycled because the 2014 Massachusetts law prohibits commercial entities with more than 1 ton of food waste per week from throwing it in the garbage.

Forbes explained that the organic recycling locations play a part in a cycle that involves businesses all over the state. She gave an example in which milk produced on farms in Hadley is sent to an Agri-Mark location in West Springfield to be turned into butter. Any butter that cannot be sold is sent to the organic recycling facility in Agawam, and from there back to the Hadley farm’s digester so that it can be used as fertilizer.

Velis noted, “At a fundamental level, this is about taking something that’s bad and turning it into something that’s good and green.” Likewise, Boldyga touted the “phenomenal job” Massachusetts is doing in spearheading renewable energy and sustainable practices.