Chuck Marble, president and CEO of New England Natural Bakers in Greenfield. Staff Photo/Paul Franz

Chuck Marble, president and CEO of New England Natural Bakers in Greenfield, with the barrels the company uses to collect food waste from the daily operations involved in producing granola, muesli and trail mixes. The barrels are shipped off to Bar-Way Farm’s anaerobic digester in Deerfield. Staff Photo/Paul Franz

New England Natural Bakers in Greenfield collects waste granola during the production process. The barrels are shipped off to Bar-Way Farm’s anaerobic digester in Deerfield. Staff Photo/Paul Franz

GREENFIELD — A local company has signed on as one of three founding members of a new sustainability program that diverts food waste away from landfills to be used to produce renewable energy.

New England Natural Bakers has joined Vanguard Renewables in its Farm Powered Sustainability Heroes Program, which promotes the elimination of food waste through anaerobic digestion. Through this program, New England Natural Bakers sends its food waste to Deerfield’s Bar-Way Farm, where it is recycled into renewable energy. Vanguard Renewables, based in Wellesley, is an organization founded in 2014 with the goal of using organic waste to create renewable energy and reduce carbon footprints of businesses and farms, its website states.

“It’s an amazing operation,” commented New England Natural Bakers CEO and President Chuck Marble. “We’re all about sustainability and giving back to the environment, and this was an ideal way of doing that.”

Vanguard Renewables CEO Neil Smith said the goal of the program is to create renewable energy by talking to businesses about where their food waste goes and how it could be used differently.

“It’s a pre-commercial, collaborative venture where we educate them on the benefits of taking their food waste to an anaerobic digester, instead of a landfill,” Smith said. “We throw away 40% of our food. … We’re trying to take that food waste and do something more positive with that.”

The Farm Powered Sustainability Heroes Program is a regional version of Vanguard Renewables’ national Farm Powered Strategic Alliance, which also promotes renewable use of food waste and features Starbucks as one of its founding member.

“We founded this to bring together large food manufacturers who want to do better things with their food waste, and we thought this was an opportunity for us to bring in some of the smaller or more regional operators into what was a more national-style movement,” Smith said. “We quickly learned that smaller and regional food manufacturers have the same ability.”

The process is straightforward. As New England Natural Bakers creates food waste from the daily operations involved in producing granola, muesli and trail mixes, it is collected and put into barrels, which are shipped off to Bar-Way Farm’s anaerobic digester. Bar-Way Farm’s digester is one of five in the state, with another in Hadley, along with ones in Rutland, Spencer and Haverhill.

From there, cow manure and organic food waste go into the digester, where microbes digest it to produce methane that is burned to generate renewable energy.

At the New England Natural Bakers’ manufacturing facility in Greenfield, blue barrels full of oats and other byproducts wait on a pallet to be shipped to Deerfield.

“You can see the waste on the floor — you can’t avoid it,” Marble said in the production room. As conveyor belts and machines shift during the production process, loose oats and dust fall to the floor and are collected. “Anything that hits the floor or one of the platforms gets segregated.”

Shipping to Bar-Way Farm, Marble added, “is cheaper than the landfill.”

“It’s giving back to the community and to the world we live in,” he said.

New England Natural Bakers joins Fancypants Baking Co. in Walpole and East Fishkill, New York’s Sloop Brewing Co. as the trio of founding members for Vanguard Renewables’ Farm Powered Sustainability Heroes Program and Smith expects it to continue to grow throughout New England.

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com or 413-930-4081.

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