Ring Bros. Marketplace - The Power of Produce

Chatham Fish and Lobster offers fresh Cape Cod seafood including fish, shellfish, live lobsters and clambakes.

Nata's Noodles offers freshly made pasta, prepared gourmet meals, delectable desserts and an extensive catering menu.

Ring Bros. Markets offers farm fresh fruit and produce, groceries, unique specialty foods, warm fresh breads, fresh squeezed orange juice, a healthy salad bar and of course our famous gourmet fruit baskets.

Spinner's Gourmet Pizza, Mexican & More!

The Power of Produce

Cape Cod Times
By Karen Jeffrey
Staff Writer
October 01, 2007

SOUTH DENNIS — A South Dennis market is taking the term "greengrocer" to new heights.

Rings Bros. Marketplace, which features a small grocery store, deli, fish market and pizzeria under one roof, produces as much as 130 tons of organic waste a year. The cost to dispose of all those food trimmings, vegetable scraps and wilted flowers runs about $80 to $100 a ton.

But with the help of a $195,000 grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative's Renewable Energy Trust and a small company in Boston, Ring Bros. hopes to recycle garbage into electricity and create organic compost at the same time.

Like many grocery stores, large and small, Ring Bros. pays someone else to haul away tons of food waste every year. It's not a cheap proposition. And like so many other grocery stores, the amount of disposable waste Ring Bros. produces includes a large percentage of organic waste — easily 100 tons annually.

Patrick Ring, son of the store owner, hopes to begin using that garbage to produce electricity to power not only his store, but also adjacent businesses. The money from the renewable energy grant will be used to develop an on-site system that will recycle organic waste, producing both high-grade organic compost and gas capable of powering a turbine, which in turn will produce electricity.

The design, testing and installation of the system could take a year or more.

"It's an economic decision, a long-term investment in cutting our costs and being environmentally responsible," Ring said.

Major sources of waste

According to the state Department of Environmental Protection, grocery stores are a major producer of food waste in the state. The 400 or so large grocery stores in Massachusetts produce an estimated 90,600 tons of organic waste material each year, according to a department spokesman.

Of this, an estimated 20,784 tons are now composted or shipped to pig farms. The rest is carted away by commercial haulers and often ends up at municipal landfills. Ring said he does not know exactly where the waste from his store ends up, but thinks it is probably the Dennis landfill.

"Anything we can do to cut down on the cost of getting rid of waste and help the environment in the process is a good thing," said Donald Fallon, general manager and director of marketing at the South Dennis business.

In addition to the garbage disposal cost, Ring estimates the store spends between $25,000 and $30,000 a year on electricity. Being able to generate its own electricity would be a real plus for the store, he said.

"Like any business, we are always looking for ways to cut costs," Ring said. "Don and I work all the time on ways to make the business more efficient. Operating costs is naturally a place you look."

Fallon added: "In our business, electricity is a big bill. There are lots of coolers to run. Last year we installed a system that enables us — in winter — to use cold air from outdoors to keep the temperature down in the coolers. We installed more energy-efficient light bulbs in the store. We're always looking for new ways to improve how we run the business."


Help from a friend

What Ring wants is an on-site facility that produces not only compost, but also energy.

The potential for generating surplus energy is there, but could take a while to develop for smaller-scale operations like Ring Bros. Enter Shane Eten, founder of Feed Resource Recovery and a childhood friend of Ring's. His Boston-based company will design and develop the system for the South Dennis store.

Eten and his wife, Kimberlee, founded the company, which is now run with partners Ryan Begin and Nick Whitman. Eten met them while studying business in graduate school at Babson College in Wellesley.

"I think my interest in alternative energy and renewable energy may have been prompted by my father's frequent and not very successful experiments trying to heat our pool with solar energy," Eten said of his childhood home in Brewster.

While not wanting to give away too many details about the system he will develop for Ring Bros., Eten said: "We're excited about this. It is a real opportunity for my partners and me, and for businesses like Ring Bros. Our hope is to see increasing number of businesses tap into this sort of thing."

Ring is optimistic that the technology being developed for his business could be expanded for use in other businesses that produce food waste.

"Getting a system that enables us, a small business, to do this on site, and eventually produce energy, will be a huge thing," he said. "It could lead to other small businesses or perhaps consortiums of small businesses developing similar programs. Imagine if restaurants on the Cape had a means of putting their food waste to productive use."

Karen Jeffrey can be reached at kjeffrey@capecodonline.com.

SIDEBAR
Organic savings

Two years ago the state and major supermarket chains began working together to increase recycling efforts - particularly to encourage composting such items as spoiled fruits and vegetables, floral and deli wastes and waxed cardboard, according to Brian Houghton, vice president at the Massachusetts Food Association, which represents 95 percent of the food sellers in the state, including large chains such as Whole Foods, Stop & Shop, and Shaw's. Ring Bros. does not belong to the association.

•    Stores participating in that concerted recycling effort began reporting savings within a year, according to figures from the state Department of Environmental Protection.

•    A pilot program at Roche Bros. Supermarkets, which included 12 of the chain's stores, was projected to save $10,000 to $20,000 per store.

•    Most grocery stores participating in the state-private enterprise to recycle are still having their organic waste shipped off site for conversion into pig food or compost.

•    Hannaford Bros., a Maine-based chain of supermarkets, has begun a large composting program at its Nashua, N.H., store. Behind the store is a tractor-trailer-size contraption that functions as a supersize garbage compactor making compost out of organic garbage - compost later sold to farmers.