Integrated Technology Systems Approach

Generate Upcycle combines established sorting technologies used in material recovery facilities with its anaerobic digester to increase its diversion capabilities.

Generate Upcycle is prepared for almost anything to show up at its many facilities.

The firm, which operates 12 locations throughout North America and the United Kingdom, uses anaerobic digestion to process food waste into biogas, which is used to produce either renewable natural gas (RNG) or electricity. The feedstocks it processes through its network run the gamut from soft drinks to meat scraps.

“There’s all sorts of reasons why material might show up at our at our door, but we’re able to process it,” says Generate Upcycle President Bill Caesar. “What makes food waste much harder than the dairy world—where it’s the same material, just a different day—is, for us, it is a smorgasbord, and it’s different every day depending on what’s coming in and what we have to manage.”

All those different foods come in a variety of packaging materials—metals, cardboard and plastic, to name a few—so the firm turned to material recovery facilities (MRFs) for inspiration, installing technology at its Cayuga Digester and Biogas Plant in Auburn, New York, to help it seamlessly capture and recycle those materials while processing the food extracts in its anaerobic digester.

The National Waste & Recycling Association, Arlington, Virginia, named the site Organics Management Facility of the Year in 2025.

“Even with things that sounds sort of simple in face value, the amount of different ingredients and forms and steps that it takes to produce the products that you see on the store shelves is very broad, and there’s a wide variety of types and configurations that you need to be able to adapt to and access to be successful in the food waste space,” Vice President of Operations Dan Meccariello says.

Come together

Generate Upcycle was formed out of Generate Capital, its San Francisco-based private equity parent company. Generate Capital had acquired multiple assets in the anaerobic digestion space and originally sought to run digesters as separate units.

The company shifted gears in January 2023, instead rolling the assets together to form Generate Upcycle. It now consists of six North American operating sites and another six in the U.K. Eleven of them feature anaerobic digesters and one is a stand-alone preprocessing facility (though some of the 11 anaerobic digester sites also have preprocessing).

Generate Upcycle processes food waste from many different parts of the manufacturing chain to produce either electricity or RNG.

“Essentially, what the business was set up to do was to find a more sustainable way to manage food waste, the material that we process,” Caesar says. “In most cases, this waste otherwise would have gone to a landfill, possibly to a wastewater treatment plant, and any of the methane that would have been from the decomposition of material would have been off-gassed. It might have been captured by a landfill gas collection system. The same could be true in a wastewater treatment plant. But in an anaerobic digester, you actually get a more complete capture of that material.”

The material is fed into the tank, and the organisms consume a portion of it. Consuming the material creates biogas, which Caesar says is about 60 percent methane and 40 percent carbon dioxide. After the anaerobic digester finishes its process, some residual material remains. That digestate is repurposed with agricultural growers as a sustainable organic source of fertilizer.

“When you take materials and you put them into a landfill, it’s a dead end for all the nutrients that are in them,” Meccariello says. “The nutrients never come back out. Fertilizer is not a renewable resource, and many of those are fossil-based, so we’re able to produce a sustainable fertilizer product for growers local in the area that offsets their dependence or need for chemical or inorganic fossil-based fertilizers.”

Renewable advantages

When refined into RNG, the carbon dioxide is removed so it can be injected into the natural gas pipeline. At that point, the RNG is the exact same material that would have been produced from fossil-based natural gas production.

Caesar says RNG has a materially lower carbon profile than fossil-based natural gas.

“When you think about the carbon dioxide emissions, and from a life cycle assessment of the carbon dioxide that is emitted during a process, our RNG is materially less carbon-intensive than fossil-based RNG,” he says. “When companies buy our RNG, they can claim credit for reducing their own carbon footprint compared to if they had only used fossil-based gas. The same is true with electricity; if we were producing electricity, the carbon footprint of energy that we produce is lower than the fossil-based equivalent.”

Meccariello says a very broad variety of materials works with anaerobic digestion. Generate Upcycle processes just about any packaging or material that one would find in a grocery store, with glass being a notable exception.

The company also can process most of what one would find in food manufacturing facilities, like the bits of the chicken that don’t make it into a chicken nugget.

“Our key niche is focused specifically on food waste,” Meccariello says. “As far as the products that we receive, it is regionally dependent on the infrastructure that we have. Not all of our facilities can separate the packaging from the organics, so there are limitations on the profile based on the specific location and the type of infrastructure that we have built in those different geographies.”

MRF meets digester

Generate Upcycle took an abandoned, inoperable manure digester in Auburn, New York, and turned it into a food-waste digester with a custom-built depackaging system. The Cayuga Digester and Biogas Plant coverts 90,000 tons of organic waste per year into 150,000 million British thermal units of RNG and 20 million gallons of nitrogen-rich organic fertilizer.

The facility avoids the release of more than 57,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, and the MRF receives and depackages 45,000 tons of packaged food waste and highly contaminated, source-separated organics. The company says it also recovers 8,100 tons per year of cardboard, plastics and metals for recycling.

“We took an anaerobic digester and essentially combined it with key elements of a traditional recycling MRF,” Caesar explains. “When we do our depackaging in typical circumstances, the packaging winds up going out as a waste product. But what we’ve done is created a system where we can capture the cardboard, we can capture the aluminum, we can capture any ferrous metal that may be in that packaged material, and, on occasion, we can capture different types of plastics.”

Take a case of soda, for example. The soda itself is canned, stored in cardboard and wrapped in plastic. The system rips the plastic, strips the cardboard and squeezes the cans. The digester captures the soda, a set of screens pulls out the cardboard, and the aluminum is captured using an eddy current. Both the aluminum and cardboard are baled and resold as recyclable materials.

“This is just an example of how different the food waste sector is from the animal waste. Because we take all kinds of products, every day is [a] different product,” says Floriano Ferreira, vice president of engineering and business development at Generate Upcycle. “We have to create a blend. It’s a different depacking process that specific products have. We have to capture residuals that are different in type, where animal waste is always the same feed and always the same consistency, and it’s a lot easier to manage. That’s why it’s a lot more challenging to process food waste in anaerobic digestion.”

Looking ahead

Caesar says Generate Upcycle has the infrastructure to support a much larger business. It is actively looking for opportunities to expand its capabilities.

The company recently had six different projects under construction: two in the United Kingdom and four in North America. It’s currently in the process of adding the ability to receive additional types of materials at its New York sites in Buffalo and Niagara Falls.

Its London, Ontario, site is undergoing a second expansion, and the company recently enabled it to take 100 percent of the gas it produces and upgrade it to RNG. Previously, it was producing a combination of RNG and electricity.

In the United Kingdom, Generate Upcycle is in the process of expanding two of its sites, but Caesar says both projects should wrap up soon.

“We put a lot of money into these facilities,” he says. “We are still finishing up a little bit of that construction activity. Everything should be more or less done by the end of this year; all the sites in North America are now producing RNG. We just have a little bit of work left here and there to finish them up.”

By Chris Sweeney, Managing Editor

Learn More:

• The concept of integration highlights the importance of advanced recycling and resource recovery solutions working together as a unified system.
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• Proven examples of global recycling and circular economy projects demonstrate how integrated systems outperform standalone technologies.
• Explore latest market insights and analysis to understand how technology convergence is shaping the industry.

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