When we started our mission to reduce and eliminate landfill-bound waste, one of the areas that rose to the top of the list was our biodegradable waste. While our distillation process doesn’t generate much of it, the bar and restaurant in our Tasting Room are a different story. You should see the amount of citrus and fruit that goes into making more than 30 different types of cocktails every day!

Managing that waste has been a great lesson in the ever-changing nature of managing your environmental impact—solving a problem once doesn’t mean it’s solved for good. Staying the course requires creativity, patience and very often, great partners.

Solution #1: Commercial Composting

Just some of the citrus rinds left over after a busy night of bartending at Montanya Distillers.

In 2018, we were happy to discover a new commercial composter willing to take on hard-to-compost items like our squeezed limes, lemons and grapefruits rinds, along with all of our food waste. While some cities have municipal compost programs, this kind of service was a big score in a rural, mountain community where the dry, harsh climate and ever-present reality of wild animals (hello, bears) make composting a challenge. (For real… bears make regular trips down Crested Butte alleyways during warmer months and at least once a summer cause a stir among the tourists by taking a nap in a town tree.)

Unfortunately, we lost our composting partner when the company let go of its commercial clients and then shut down altogether. Due to our remote location, finding a replacement wasn’t an option and for all the aforementioned reasons related to climate and wildlife, we weren’t itching to start our own composting program.

Solution #2: An LFC Biodigester

Enter biodigestion. It didn’t take long for our owner and founder, Karen Hoskin, to zero in on the idea of an LFC biodigester from Power Knot as a way to divert our bio-waste from the landfill. It’s an enclosed, aerobic food digester that can handle up to 80 lbs of bio-waste every day, including things like meat and citrus. In other words, perfect for a bar and restaurant like ours.

How does it do it? The official answer is that a live microbe-enzyme mixture inside the machine digests and converts the bio-waste into grey water in a 24 hour cycle. That grey water can go down the drain or be used to fertilize the garden. The answer we prefer is that it’s magic. (At least, it feels that way when you fill up the biodigester with mounds of citrus and it literally disappears.). We like to picture lots of tiny fairies having a raucous cocktail party in there and waving their wands to make it disappear. But in reality, it is true science, and science is magic.

Head Distiller Renee Newton takes a break from bottling to load the biodigester.

The Environmental Benefit of Biodigestion

Power Knot is the true expert in this field, so we’re borrowing information from the company’s blog to explain why biodigestion is better than sending food waste to the landfill. As they explain, organic material in a landfill gets compressed, compacted and deprived of oxygen and natural pests. It decomposes anaerobically, a process that takes a lot longer than aerobic decomposition and releases biogas—a mix of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). In the United States, landfills are the third-largest source of methane, which in 2017 accounted for about 10.2 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.

We installed the LFC biodigester as part of our distillery expansion. In just two months, it broke down 1,442 lbs of citrus and food waste from our bar and restaurant. That’s 2.7 tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) diverted from the landfill and the atmosphere. In a world where it’s increasingly imperative that we address climate change (there are only radical solutions at this point), those are numbers we like to see. We’re also proud to be joining our fellow B Corps in this mission—in 2020, certified B Corps collectively diverted 207,000 metric tons of waste from landfills. We love knowing that our efforts are multiplied by being part of the B Corp community.