Visit to Dickinson College

     Dickinson College, located a in Carlisle Pennsylvania just a few miles outside Harrisburg, shows a clear example of the true potentials of composting at college. With a college population of 2,000 people, Dickinson college compost about 700 pounds of food waste a day, making about 68,600 pounds of food waste per semester. Seeing the college also composts other food waste from restaurants, and a beer brewing facility (used grain and wheat), this number is actually a lot higher. Despite the enormous amount of food waste composted, I was really surprised to learn about just how little land was needed to compost it.
     Using only 4 windrows about as tall as an average-height full-grown adult, and as long as two classrooms, the entire facility only needs about a half acre to compost. At Sarah Lawrence College where we only have only 1,200 students and faculty, the amount of land needed even if we used windrows would be substantially lower!
     Food waste first gets carried on a conveyor-belt device looking like this in the dining hall.

Then it gets taken into a machine looking like this. The machine grinds up the food waste, extracts excess water, and turns the food waste, meat, bones, fats, and the like into a fine pulp.

The machine then throws the pulp into these green buckets. I would opt to use those five gallon buckets always getting thrown away at Bates dining. Good lids for them may still be necessary, but I may be able to find those without too much hassle.

     There is then a regular shift of students who commute from the dining hall to the farm, owned by Dickinson college located a few miles away by pickup truck. The food waste then gets mixed with a mixture of mulch and and leaves. The compost gets dumped onto windrows looking like this. Once the compost pile has been cooking a front-loading tractor, powered by biodiesel produced by Dickinson college (this was another student and faculty initiated endeavor) then turns it to aerate it. A black, vinyl-like cloth then covers the pile to allow air in, retain moisture, and retain heat. The heat kills off pathogenic organisms and results in finished compost. Dickinson college actually is exploring the option of getting a compost turner which would look like this to turn food waste much more quickly. There is also not enough compost being made to handle all of the college's compost needs so the college is exploring other food waste sources.

     The composting facility was originally student initiated. The college, being supportive of the project, helped formulate plans. A grant proposal was then sent to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The first proposal was rejected but the second proposal was accepted and now the project has been going on since about 2002.

     While windrows are a really cost-effective means of composting, and space may be made for them at Sarah Lawrence College, rodents will still be a problem in the New York Metropolitan area. From travels to various composting facilities in the area, rodents have made their homes even in piles of leaves that sat out for too long. In addition, once rodents are there, they are hard to get rid of, they spread food waste everywhere, causing various pest control problems, disease-spreading problems and other issues. Therefore, it may cost more to enclose it but, hopefully a biogas facility that encloses food waste and fiber, and produces energy can help off-set those costs. Nevertheless, the food grinding machine looks very effective for a college dining hall setting, and, unlike a garbage disposal, looks much less likely to break from high usage.