Food waste from 3M Open PGA Tour stop will become electricity

The half-eaten burgers and fries and other food waste tossed by spectators at this week’s 3M Open in Blaine are not going to a landfill. Instead, they will go to Turtle Lake, Wis., and into a newly expanded plant that turns biowaste into electricity.

Viresco AD last week opened its new food liquefaction addition, in time to process about 10 tons of food trash from the PGA Tour event, which is expected to attract about 100,000 people to the TPC Twin Cities course by the end of the weekend.

“It’s only because of our new expansion that we can do that,” said Viresco CEO Joe Burke. “We’re excited. I can’t wait to get started.”

On Monday, a waste hauler will take the food trash from Blaine to Turtle Lake, where it will first be put in Viresco’s new food separator and then in an anerobic digester.

The plant will convert the food scraps into methane biogas and then electricity that will be sold to Xcel Energy. A detailed chemical and energy analysis report should be ready in a week, Burke said.

Viresco’s food-to-electricity factory is “one of only a few such facilities delivering power to our grid,” said Xcel Energy spokesman Theo Keith.

Last year, the 3M Open composted food waste.

The deal came together fast. 3M officials called Viresco for help with the tournament just days after the small Wisconsin company finished the expansion.

That expansion is like a “hammer mill,” Burke said.

Paddles inside the equipment’s vertical shaft slap and separate beverages and food from containers. Churned organic matter moves onto the anaerobic digester. Cans, plastics and packaging get baled and trucked to recyclers.

“It’s quite the cool piece of equipment,” Burke said. From Italy, it’s called “The Tiger” and will hopefully help Viresco double its capacity.

This year’s goal is to convert 65 million gallons of food and beverage trash into enough electricity to power 23,000 homes each year, the company said. That’s the equivalent of 100 swimming pools’ worth.

In addition to selling electricity to Xcel, Viresco also helps companies meet set state environmental goals and sells renewal energy credits to companies that like the idea of “green energy.”

Viresco generates more than $2 million in yearly sales, and it doubled its staff over five years. It just hired two more workers and will add more.

Burke and various partners started Viresco in 2017 after buying the crop-biomass technology firm Novus Energy. They bought a separate processing plant in 2019.

Viresco built up business by partnering with large grocery and food plants that somehow must dispose of tons of rotting produce, stale crackers and cheese, half-baked production runs and other waste.

Earlier this month, a Viresco forklift driver carefully loaded towering cases of expired beer into the de-packager and gingerly backed away as the beastly, multimillion machine got to work draining all the liquid into hoppers below.

“It’s a pretty slick way of creating a full-circle approach to creating food but also turning your waste into energy. That’s what we did with Viresco,” said Puris co-CEO Tyler Lorenzen.

It solved a big problem for Puris, which annually processes “hundreds of thousands of metric tons” of peas into proteins used to make cereal, protein bars and plant-based meats.

There’s a lot of leftover pea sugar, though, Lorenzen said.

However, Viresco lost Puris as a supplier last year when the pea protein maker idled its Turtle Lake plant and consolidated operations in western Minnesota.

So the 3M contract came at just the right time.