You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
The surprisingly strong case for Mill.
Food waste is a climate disaster, responsible for twice as many greenhouse gases as the global aviation, shipping, and paper industries combined. The food system generates about a third of our emissions, and nearly a third of the food it produces never makes it to our stomachs, which means we waste nearly a third of the farmland, fuel, fertilizer, electricity, irrigation water, and deforestation that goes into producing our food. At the same time, the 40 million tons of uneaten food that Americans send to landfills every year can decompose into heat-trapping methane, which also isn’t great.
But maybe Harry can help.
Harry is a sleek white Wi-Fi-connected garbage bin in my family’s pantry, a “food dehydrator” that transforms our kitchen scraps into chicken feed. It was created by Mill, a San Francisco-area startup that has raised more than $100 million to try to keep more household waste inside the food system. Mill’s founders built the Nest thermostat that limits household energy waste, so they know something about using high-tech hardware to try to adjust consumer habits in climate-friendly ways. They’ve shipped thousands of bins since April, and they say they’ve got more demand than their Mexican factory can supply.
Every day, my family tosses banana peels, pizza crusts, eggshells, moldy salmon, wilted celery, and other leftovers into Harry. Every night, Harry spends about six hours heating, grinding and shrinking them into nutrient-rich feed that looks like a cross between coffee grounds and dirt. Food waste is about 80 percent water, and Harry dries it out; it takes almost two months before the bin gets full and I have to mail the grounds back to Mill.
It’s a seamless user experience, with no smell, no schlep, and so far, virtually no noise. The bin has a cool wood-veneer lid with a convenient foot pedal to lift it; Mill CEO Matt Rogers helped engineer the iPod and iPhone at Apple before he started Nest, so he knows something about good design, too. And the company has calculated that its bins will help the average household avoid about half a ton of emissions every year, not even including the deforestation that won’t be needed to grow the chicken feed Mill will replace.
Mill’s app prompts you to name your bin upon arrival, and we named ours after Mill president Harry Tannenbaum, an engaging climate wonk who charmed me with his frequent use of the word “putrescence.” (I initially wanted to name it Wastoid, but my wife informed me that was stupid.) Tannenbaum got the idea for Mill after learning that food waste is the largest component of U.S. landfills.
“That freaked me out,” Tannebaum said. “Not only are we disconnecting those nutrients from returning to the earth by entombing them in landfills, they’re creating methane that cooks the earth. And it’s all starting in our kitchens.”
Composting can keep food waste out of landfills, too, but only 4 percent of U.S. households compost, because separating and storing food scraps can be a time-consuming, odor-producing, rodent-attracting hassle. And unlike many composting programs, which have absurdly complex requirements about what can be used, Mill’s bins can recycle just about everything except big bones, liquids, and excessive sugar. But their real bonus for the planet is that while compost can be used to help grow food, Mill’s grounds are still basically food. This summer, the Food and Drug Administration and the Association of American Feed Control Officials cleared the way for their use as commercial poultry feed, a much higher use than compost on the EPA’s food recovery hierarchy. It’s the first step in getting those grounds into the hands of chicken farmers.
It’s nice that my family no longer has to take out our regular trash so often, now that we no longer dump food into it, and I get a kick out of leaving Harry like this at night:
and seeing this the next morning:
It’s real bio-recycling, and while Mill would only be able to feed 7 percent of U.S. chickens if every U.S. household had a bin, every soybean that Mill can replace is a soybean that doesn’t need to be grown in the Amazon. And Harry helps us notice what we’re not eating — Instacart, you’re sending us too many mushy grapes — so that we can buy less of it and avoid waste on the front end.
That said, Mill is letting me use Harry for free, because I’m a dork who writes about food and climate change. I might be less enthusiastic if I were paying the hefty normal-human rate of $33 a month for the privilege of using its bins. Some composting services cost almost that much, and Mill emphasizes that its bins can take the stink and ick out of the kitchen experience — no putrescence! — but realistically, they provide more benefits for the climate than for consumers, which will limit the universe of consumers willing to shell out $396 a year for them.
Tannenbaum says Mill makes more economic sense in communities with “pay-as-you-throw” garbage collection, because Mill customers can save money by stepping down to smaller trash cans; in a pilot program in Tacoma, Washington, those savings have often reduced Mill’s effective cost to $8 a month. Mill is also working on deals with apartment buildings to provide bins to all their residents, so they could have easier trash management and less disgusting trash rooms. And corporations looking to shrink their carbon footprints could shrink their janitorial costs as well by putting Mill bins in their cafeterias. Tannenbaum points out that at Nest, after early-adopting consumers proved that smart thermostats could reduce energy waste, utilities helped defray the costs of moving Nest into the mainstream.
But change is hard, especially behavioral change. And change is slow, which is a problem, because the U.S. has set a goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030. There’s no way Mill can scale up fast enough to make a serious difference without government help. And that’s true for all kinds of food waste solutions — behavioral approaches like Britain’s “Love Food Not Waste” marketing campaign; policy reforms like tax breaks for restaurants that donate leftovers; and technologies like invisible biotech peels that prevent fruit and vegetables from spoiling. Our species is not going to wake up one day and make a collective decision to stop wasting a billion tons of food every year. We’ll need shoves (and cash) to overcome our inertia.
In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced last week that it’s investing $25 million in avoiding food waste. That’s a nice gesture, enough to fund 60,000 Mill bins for a year. But it’s a pittance compared to the $23 billion that USDA is spending on “climate-smart agriculture” — mostly regenerative farming experiments that, to put it charitably, will have an uncertain effect on emissions — and especially compared to the $428 billion in the last five-year farm bill.
Until recently, climate policy was seen as energy policy. But the world is starting to understand that unless it dramatically slashes emissions from the food system — at least a 75 percent reduction by 2050 — it won’t meet its climate goals even if it stops using fossil fuels. Congress is now talking about a new farm bill, and history suggests its main thrust will be to keep shoveling big money to big farmers. But it’s also an opportunity to make real investments in scaling up climate-friendly agricultural innovations like drought-tolerant super-trees, meat and dairy substitutes, alternative fertilizers, and food waste recycling options like Harry. Our energy and climate problems aren’t getting better fast enough, but our food and climate problems are still getting worse, and we’re not going to fix them by doing the same things we’ve always done.
That’s just putrescence.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.