Letter: Feedback Earth commits to being a good neighbor

Dear Grafton neighbors,

In the summer of 2021, FeedBack Earth bought the defunct Troiano Trucking property on Creeper Hill Road to build a next-gen facility that could convert up to 100,000 tons / year of landfill-destined food waste into high-quality animal feed for local farms. Since our plant’s startup at the end of 2021, we have converted over 16,000 tons of food waste into feed, making us already the largest feed ingredient manufacturer in New England. By eliminating the need to grow additional crops and avoid methane being generated in landfills, our single plant can prevent up to 150,000 tons of CO2 from entering our atmosphere annually – that’s the equivalent of removing 22,000 cars from the road or planting 4 million trees!

Fundamental to our mission is ensuring the utmost safety, health, and well-being of our neighboring community.

In pursuit of that mission, Feedback Earth has already invested heavily in upgrading and cleaning up the facility, including:

• Extermination of multiple rat colonies that have historically plagued the neighborhood (approx. 500 rats caught!)
• Cleanout of over 1,500 tons of illegally stored solid waste
• Installation of a new particulate capture system on our exhaust stacks
• Demolition and safe abatement of four dilapidated, asbestos-filled, structurally unsound buildings
• Installation of next-gen tech that reduces our energy consumption and carbon footprint by 70%
• Most importantly — hired an experienced team with a strong background in manufacturing and operations that grounds our culture in safety and community responsibility.

Odor control, however, remains an open issue, and it is one we are committed to resolving completely. In our commitment to being a good neighbor, we have already invested / put measures in place to address odors, including:

• Implementing multiple, naturally-sourced, non-toxic odor elimination technologies into the exhaust stacks.
• Implementing processes to ensure rapid conversion of fresh food into shelf-stable feed
• Completely stopping the acceptance of materials known to create particularly strong odors (e.g. tofu and other soy products)
• Implementing an odor hotline, where an independent odor consultant investigates and validates reported complaints in real-time.

This independent odor consultant, along with our latest odor-control technology, has revealed a promising path to holistically eliminating odors that emanate from our facility. Specifically, this consultant found that of 19 registered complaints to our hotline over the past five weeks, there was only one time period where FeedBack Earth was confirmed to be the source. This information empowered the MassDEP to identify, confirm, and take measures to stop other odor generators in the North Grafton area that were previously unidentified (illegal waste dumping, septic system practices, etc.)

Of course, we recognize that FeedBack’s system is still not performing at 100 percent. In fact, we suspect that our facility may have generated transient odors that the consultant was not able to validate even after being dispatched. For the confirmed event, we identified the specific processing conditions that gave rise to these odors and are implementing controls to eliminate their recurrence. Further, we are installing additional barriers inside the facility to limit the permeance of local odors even when the plant is not operating.

Our goal is to get to Zero. FeedBack will continue to work tirelessly to address the odor emissions issue comprehensively, in continued partnership with the Grafton Board of Health and with direction from state and local officials. We are committed to creating a sustainable food waste disposal site that the community is proud to host and that has a profound impact on Massachusetts’s sustainability goals. We greatly appreciate the community’s patience as we finish out this good work.

Sincerely,

Alison Greenlee, Chief Executive Officer
Feedback Earth, Inc.