NEWPORT, Minn. (WCCO) – A Minnesota recycling company plans to break ground this fall on a project that turns food waste into fuel.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of trash moves through the Ramsey-Washington Recycling and Energy Center each year.

Melissa Finnegan said the goal is to keep as much of it as possible away from the landfill

“We have programs to help people upstream, but also we’re looking at what can we pull out of the waste stream,” she said.

Out of all of the trash households tend to throw away, food waste makes up about 24%, making it more than any other single material that ends up in a landfill.

If the food waste rots, it decays and emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

This is why the Newport, Minnesota, facility hopes an ambitious new project will cut down on

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