The punctual crowd looking for a brew and a bite at the Harbour Public House just before lunch on Tuesday had to step lightly around the giant crane delivering a 13,000-pound “horse” to the spot that used to be a small herb garden near the island eatery’s front entrance.

Or, HORSE, actually.

The arrival of the High solids Organic waste Recycling System with Electrical output (HORSE) at the pub is part of a six-month pilot program, a partnership between Puget Sound Energy, Seattle-based Impact Bioenergy and Jeff Waite, owner of the Harbour Public House and Pegasus Coffee. The effort is intended to demonstrate the functionality of a cutting edge organic-based energy production technology and also the benefits of community supported biocycling.

Impact Energy’s HORSE, a converted shipping container, “eats” food waste and produces energy and nutrient-laden liquid fertilizer. It is a completely clean and odorless system which promotes the anaerobic digestion process, which occurs automatically in nature when microorganisms break down organic matter. This happens in environments with little or no oxygen, including swamps, water-logged soil, soggy rice fields, deep water and also in the digestive systems of termites and also large animals.

Waite said he hopes that between the pub and Pegasus, his HORSE will “eat” 100 to 135 pounds of food and carbon-based waste every day.

What’s more, the electrical power produced by the HORSE will be collected and monitored.

But while the actual output of usable electrical power will depend on how much waste is fed into the system, every little bit added is, at the very least, saved from a trip to the landfill and can eventually be harvested as liquid fertilizer for use on local farms.

“Remember watching Doc Brown power up his time travel machine with banana peels among other items scavenged from the garbage in ‘Back to the Future II’?” Waite wrote in an explanatory article featured in the pub’s Fresh Connections newsletter. “Well, that is our new reality. We hope to power part of our electrical use during the pilot phase of the project with the same food waste.”

Though the biology at work here is nothing new, the technology that makes the HORSE possible is very innovative, explained Impact Bioenergy CEO Jan Allen.

“This is a great opportunity,” Allen said. “We’re looking at the beginning of sort of the micro-scaling of this technology. They use it at wastewaterplants. They use it at breweries. But to micro-scale it? This is new.

“There’s never been a portable community-scale digester like this,” he added. “Nobody else is building these.”

Founded in 2013, Impact Bioenergy develops and manufactures bioenergy products that allow communities and commercial food waste generators to lessen their environmental footprint and conserve local soil resources, while also reducing their waste disposal and energy costs.

Something like the HORSE now at work at the Harbour Public House, Allen said, is good for the local economy at every level.

“This is exciting because it really demonstrates the circular economy,” he said. “[That’s] where you really don’t have any waste. You’re using everything. Everything is local: jobs, money, food, waste. All the resources are local.

“It’s a living system that’s got zero waste,” Allen explained. “Everything becomes a resource. The food waste, the energy, the fertilizer so you grow more food. You make jobs. Everything is sort of localized.”

This is, Allen said, the first time such a device has been put to use on an island.

“It’s just made to be on an island,” he said. “Because resources are automatically sort of amenable to a circular economy.”

PSE spokeswoman Karen Brubeck said it was the unique combination of a knowledgeable and willing business owner like Waite and the timely development of such scaled-down portable technology that made this the perfect time and place to demonstrate the potential that lies in bioenergy.

“The goals are to demonstrate the viability of taking the food waste, turning it into electricity, getting the fertilizer and putting it back into the local economy,” she said. “And hopefully also kind of facilitating continued discussion of a more permanent, larger digester as well.”

Discussion had been going on around Bainbridge for some time already about getting a digester and it was Waite who connected with Impact Bioenergy and then approached PSE, Brubeck said.

“It’s his whole farm-to-table concept, sustainability, that sort of thing,” she said. “It was a perfect fit for him but also a perfect fit for PSE, because starting in 2004, we’ve been working with diary digesters as a part of our green power program. So we have a long history of working with digesters and renewable energy.”

The delivery of the HORSE and the start of this six-month test run is the culmination of nearly two decades of discussion and effort by Waite, who said he was very excited for islanders to get the chance to see such technology at work.

“My background on Bainbridge is public works so I’ve been trying to, for 18 years, keep the conversation going about municipal solid waste getting recycled in the form of compost,” Waite said.

After learning about the work being down by Impact Bioenergy, Waite said he started to wonder what community supported composting could really be capable of.

He then learned, he recalled, that PSE was working to get a group together, including the city of Bainbridge Island, and the players in municipal solid waste industry, for a talk about that very thing.

“We all got around the table about last December and we had this conversation about what would a community program look like and Impact Bioenergy was part of that discussion,” Waite said. “Separately, I met with PSE and Impact Bioenergy and I said, ‘You know, I’ve got space here. You guys are building digesters. Do you have one available that we can do a pilot with just to show the community?” Because once a city gets involved things take forever. I said, ‘As a private company I can get this done and placed, if we can lease a unit.’

Impact Bioenergy readied a unit and PSE agreed to assist with the unit’s lease payments while Waite cleared some space.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Or at least it will be someday.

For now, however, the front yard of the Harbour Public House may actually be a window into the future.