The operating system for a circular economy is taking shape in North Central Washington

WENATCHEE VALLEY — By the time most Wenatchee Valley businesses hear the phrase “industrial symbiosis,” many of them are already doing pieces of it.

Fruit that would have been discarded becomes juice. Byproducts become compost or biochar. Waste streams get reused or redirected instead of hauled away. In practice, the Valley has been building a kind of circular economy for years, even if it has never been labeled that way.

What’s changing now is not the instinct to reuse, but the intent to connect those efforts on purpose — and at scale.

A regional effort led by Our Valley Our Future (OVOF), working with the City of Wenatchee, the Chelan-Douglas Regional Port Authority and other partners, is beginning to organize industrial symbiosis as a structured, business-driven initiative: map waste streams, identify potential matches between companies, and determine which connections are financially and technically realistic to build.

The premise is simple. One company’s byproduct becomes another company’s input. If that exchange reduces disposal costs, lowers input costs, or creates a new product, the economics start to work. The more participants there are, the more useful the network becomes.

“It’s taking resources and doing something else with them instead of just throwing stuff away,” said Steve Maher, a longtime regional planning figure and a key organizer through OVOF. “That could be water, materials, heat, organic waste. In some cases it’s one business using what another business no longer needs.”

Maher points to examples that already exist. Tree Top uses apples that would otherwise be discarded. Composting turns organic waste into soil amendments. Winton Manufacturing produces biochar. Pieces of the system are already here. What has been missing is a coordinated way to look at those flows together and decide which connections are actually worth building.

That coordination is now moving from concept into early implementation, supported in part by funding recently approved through the Chelan-Douglas Regional Port Authority.

At a recent meeting, Port commissioners approved $30,000 requested by the City of Wenatchee to help sustain the work while partners pursue larger state funding. Jessica Shaw, the city’s deputy public works director for utilities, said the effort began with a Department of Commerce-funded process that was city-centered, but quickly drew interest from utilities, businesses and agencies across both counties.

“We had so many folks saying, ‘We want to be part of this,’” Shaw said. “How do we figure out how to develop circular economies here in our community?”

Maher and OVOF agreed last fall to help expand the work into a regional effort that crosses jurisdictional boundaries.

A December stakeholder meeting confirmed that the idea is resonating with local industry. Shaw said businesses, utilities and technology developers showed up to talk about “how we can capture lost resources and make better use of all of our local resources and ag wood products.”

Now the work is narrowing from broad discussion into a set of focused tracks designed to test feasibility and move toward implementation. The groups are looking at resource recovery facilities, shared networks for matching needs and byproducts, reuse of waste heat from places like data centers and sewer systems, and the possibility of producing carbon dioxide locally for industrial and beverage use.

The point, Maher said, is not to generate ideas. It is to kill the ones that do not pencil out.

“What waste streams exist? Where are they? Who could use them? And what does it actually cost to connect those dots?” he said.

The goal is to surface a small number of projects that are technically feasible and financially realistic. Those findings are expected to be presented publicly at OVOF’s fall symposium at Wenatchee Valley College.

From the city’s perspective, this is not just theoretical. Shaw said Wenatchee’s wastewater treatment plant is running out of capacity, and one way to stretch that capacity is better recovery and reuse of outputs like heat, water or biogas.

“It also makes our utility more sustainable,” she said, “which hopefully helps keep rates down. That benefits businesses in the long term.”

One early concept already has a name: the Regional Organics Conversion Konsortium, or ROCK. It’s a coordinated approach to handling food scraps, orchard waste, winery pomace and other organic materials. Supporters describe it as a way to scale up what some companies already do into a more organized and economically useful system.

Other ideas sit at the intersection of local identity and market opportunity.

At a recent stakeholders meeting, Chelan County PUD senior energy conservation engineer Jim White floated a phrase that stuck: the “carbon-negative apple.” His idea was to use orchard wood waste to generate energy and produce biochar that returns carbon to the soil — a process that could, in theory, remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits.

Some people will find that environmentally compelling. Others will see a differentiated, marketable product story. Either way, the business logic and the environmental outcome point in the same direction.

No one involved pretends this is easy. Many of the most interesting exchanges — heat, methane, wastewater byproducts, CO2 — require pipes, processing equipment and coordination. Zoning, permitting and timing all matter. Industrial symbiosis only works if multiple parties move in compatible directions.

That is where OVOF’s role as convener becomes central.

“We’re guiding the process and bringing people together,” Maher said. “And when we need expertise that isn’t local, we bring it in.”

From a business perspective, the argument is not that every company should participate, or that every idea will work. It is that some version of this will happen, because the economics of waste, energy and materials are only getting tighter.

In that environment, systems that extract more value from the same streams start to look less like experiments and more like competitive advantages.

For many Valley businesses, the first step may simply be recognizing that they already sit inside a network of potential exchanges — and deciding where they fit as that network becomes more intentional.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media