News- Resouceful waste
This excerpt was originally published in the Missoulian (February 17, 2004).
Resourceful Waste By Betsy Cohen of the Missoulian
Collaboration fuels on-campus composting at UM They might look like hot tubs, but the two giant bins recently planted outside the University of Montana's Lommasson Center are called Earth Tubs. What they do is compost, and at UM they have been assigned to create soil amendment from the 42,000 pounds of food waste generated by Dining Services each year. "This is a project we have been hoping to do for a long time, and we are excited about the opportunity to do this," said Byron Drake, UM's assistant director for residential dining.
Although the tubs arrived a few weeks ago, the effort to bring a composting program began well over a year ago when the campus recycling committee broached the topic.
"We got pretty excited about it but it took some time to figure out where we would put such a project and where we would get the equipment," said Neva Hassanein, an assistant professor in environmental studies.
Collaboration between Hassanein's department, Dining Services, UM forestry programs, Louisiana-Pacific Corp. and a grant from the state Department of Environmental Quality pulled the project together and pushed the idea into reality.
Earth Tubs were chosen for the job because they are easy to use, have low maintenance and use wood chips, not worms, to transform food scraps into a soil product, said Denise DeLuca, a Missoula environmental consultant who helped research the equipment.
Although faculty, students and Dining Services staff are just learning how to use the tubs, they expect it will take about 90 days to turn the vegetable waste into a nutrient-rich byproduct that can be used for campus landscaping.
The tubs will compost all the pre-consumer waste that is generated in UM's kitchens, which amounts to roughly 120 pounds per day, DeLuca said. If her estimations hold true, over the course of a year, the tubs will transform roughly 42,000 pounds of waste into 26,250 pounds of compost each year.
Once everything starts to run smoothly, project participants will shift their attention to composting post-consumer waste, DeLuca said.
That goal may be trickier, though not impossible to achieve, because it involves educating the campus community on what can and can't be composted, and developing a system people find easy to use.
When the current composting system becomes routine business at UM, it will hopefully become a model for other state institutions and campuses, Hassanein said.
Not only will students be involved in the composting project, learning everything from its biochemistry to how food-waste recycling is tied between land and community, but the project also will demonstrate that composting is a viable thing to do.
"This is a very physical manifestation of our increasing effort to make this campus more green," she said. "Because the campus can be a model and really illustrate what is possible - which is what universities are all about - this is an ideal project.
"It's not just talking the talk, but walking the walk and putting ideas into practice."
Drake said he doesn't expect the tubs to necessarily save money for UM, although they could eventually.
"For us, this is more of a social responsibility," he said. "Keeping this stuff out of the landfill is the right thing to do."