Analytical Studies > Analysis on the 2025 Kananaskis Summit
G7 Summits > 2025 Kananaskis Summit > Road to the 2025 Kananaskis Summit

Powering the G7 with Yesterday’s Lunch:
Eco Growth’s Circular Economy in Action

Nell Sykes and Jacob Rudolph, G7 Research Group
June 18, 2025

G7 leaders and journalists had a lot on their plates at the Kananaskis Summit, and not just geopolitically. Between catered receptions, working breakfasts and backroom buffets, hundreds of meals are served daily. But here’s a question the cameras did not catch: how much of that food ended up in the trash?

At a typical international summit, the answer would be too much. Organic waste, food scraps, coffee grounds and napkins account for up to 60% of event waste. Globally, food waste contributes 8–10% of greenhouse gas emissions, primarily in the form of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. In Canada, landfills constitute the largest source of methane emissions.

But the Kananaskis Summit is not a typical event, and that waste did not end up in a landfill. Thanks to the work of Calgary-based Eco Growth Environmental, those leftovers are now heating water, powering buildings and helping Canada take meaningful sustainable action.

From Buffet to Boiler: Closing the Loop at the G7

Eco Growth’s work at Kananaskis is a case study in what a circular economy can look like when policy meets practice. Using their Eco-Growth Organic Reactor (E.G.O.R.), the company collected and processed food waste generated throughout the summit, dehydrating and compressing it into a clean, high-energy biomass fuel.

This fuel is then burned in an ultra-low-emission boiler, producing thermal energy used on site. No methane. No landfill. No diesel trucks hauling soggy leftovers to a distant dump. Just a closed-loop system that captures waste and turns it into a usable, renewable resource.

According to Eco Growth’s estimates, every tonne of organic waste diverted from landfill using their technology avoids the equivalent of up to 9.47 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. When that is multiplied that by a multi-day summit feeding thousands of delegates, the climate savings are no longer marginal. They are meaningful.

Over the past 12 years, Eco Growth has worked with municipalities, commercial sites, Indigenous communities and even the Canadian military, which adopted the system for forward operating bases to reduce reliance on diesel supply chains. Their technology has been proven in high-stakes, off-grid environments where emissions, logistics and reliability all matter.

Sustainability in Practice, Not Just in Principle

This initiative is part of Canada’s broader effort to make its G7 presidency as climate-responsible as possible. As outlined on the G7 Environmental Initiatives page, the federal government is pursuing low-emission energy sources, sustainable catering, and aggressive waste diversion. By bringing in Eco Growth, Canada has done something crucial to summit diplomacy: moved from ambition to execution.

Eco Growth demonstrated what Canadian clean tech can deliver. The system is modular, scalable, and built for the kinds of institutional settings that governments often struggle to decarbonize. This is not a one-off pilot or a green publicity stunt. It is a commercially viable, locally engineered solution doing real work in real time. In many ways, Eco Growth’s presence at the Kananaskis Summit shows how Canada’s climate leadership goes beyond the chair’s summary itself.

Beyond the Summit: A Path Forward

The genius of Eco Growth’s model lies in its simplicity. Food becomes fuel. Fuel becomes energy. Energy powers the very buildings where waste is produced. It is a virtuous cycle that is as good for the environment as it is for operational costs, and one that could be replicated not just at summits, but also across universities, hospitals, airports and municipalities.

With food waste continuing to pose both an environmental and logistical challenge, particularly in urban centres, this kind of clean, distributed waste-to-energy solution may prove vital. As G7 leaders call for more innovation in emissions reduction, Eco Growth is already showing what that looks like.

Conclusion: From Scraps to Solutions

The story of food waste at the G7 is not about what is thrown away; it is about what is recovered. In the shadow of global negotiations, Eco Growth has offered a blueprint for sustainable operations that is efficient, Canadian-made, and immediately deployable.

At Kananaskis, sustainability a summit theme, baked into the infrastructure. When the world’s most powerful leaders left the table return home to implement their agreements, Eco Growth made sure the leftovers became productive too.

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Nell Sykes is a University of Toronto Scholar studying political science and environmental studies at Trinity College, and a passionate environmental advocate in the not for profit sector. Nell serves as a compliance director with the G7 Research Group, and has been with the group for two years, developing scoring metrics on global food security and forest protection.

Jacob Rudolph is a third-year National Scholar at the University of Toronto studying financial economics, public policy and mathematics. He is co-chair of summit studies for the 2025 G7 presidency and has been with the G7 Research group for three years.

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	Please send comments to: g7@utoronto.ca This page was last updated June 18, 2025.