DISCARDED BITS of steak, stale bread and rotten eggs will soon be put to good use, thanks to a new facility in Marina that transforms organic waste into compost for fertilizer and methane gas, which can be converted to electricity.

A $2 million “dry anaerobic digestion” plant at the Monterey Regional Waste Management District’s landfill will convert restaurants’ food waste and garden clippings from businesses into biogas, which will be used to power and heat the nearby Monterey waste treatment plant.

The facility will also produce compost for county agricultural growers, reduce greenhouse gases and odor, and limit the amount of organic waste that would otherwise go into the landfill, according to Jeff Lindenthal with the waste management district.

“It represents the next frontier in managing urban organics,” Lindenthal told the Pine Cone. “We are very pleased to have this opportunity to test this technology.”

On Friday, the waste management district is set to unveil the plant — a collaboration between the MRWMD and Lafayette-based Zero Waste Energy, a firm that licenses the technology from German engineering company Eggersmann Anlagenbau.

The facility is housed in a prefabricated modular 50-foot- by-100-foot building. Trucks pull up to the facility, unload the organic waste into one of four bays, and a 21-day digestion process begins. A percolet of liquid bacteria is introduced to break down the waste. When the process is complete, the organic waste becomes fertile soil.

“It produces a very high quality, nitrogen-rich compost, which is in high demand in the agricultural world,” Zero Waste Energy’s senior vice president of business development, Dirk Dudgeon, told The Pine Cone.

The methane gas produced from the decomposing waste is captured and turned into biogas, which will be sold to the water pollution control agency to reduce the demand of electricity the agency purchases from PG&E, Lindenthal said.

The digester will process up to 5,000 tons per year of organic waste.

Though sewage treatment plants use organisms to break down wastewater, the dry anaerobic digesters at the Marina landfill use a different process, which Zero Waste Energy contends is more efficient and less expensive.

While the technology is relatively new to the United States, there are more than 8,000 anaerobic digesting facilities in Europe, with more than 20,000 planned by 2020.

Dudgeon said that in many parts of Europe, it’s illegal to put food waste in landfills.

And the facility, he added, will be compliant with a 2020 California mandate requiring a 75 percent reduction of organic waste in landfills.

“The only way to do that is to get the organics out of the waste stream,” Dudgeon said.

The Marina facility is the first dry anaerobic digester facility in the state; however, there are as many as 30 others in California that are in the planning stages.

Right now, the facility will only process organic waste generated from restaurants, not from residences.

Businesses that participate in the program will pay about $200 per month to have their food waste hauled away. But Lindenthal said it could pay off for some restaurants, since it can lower the volume of non-organic trash that goes to the landfill, thereby lowering the cost of collection.

And as more businesses join the program, it will help bring the monthly cost down, he said.

The waste management district paid for some construction work to accommodate the digester but didn’t pay for the facility itself, which was installed at Zero Waste Energy’s expense.

“We really benefit from the opportunity to test this technology,” Lindenthal said, “and hopefully to negotiate a deal with Zero Waste Energy in the future.”

The landfill’s contract with Zero Waste — which will get the profits from the sale of electricity to the water pollution control agency — is for three years with two one-year options to renew, he said.

Dudgeon said the company is also building similar but larger plants in San Jose and South San Francisco.