Progress on the Methane Digestion Facility

     First of all, it might be important to figure out why I am choosing anaerobic digestion of food waste for Sarah Lawrence College. I have travelled around a bit to learn about composting. You will see posts about my talks there before long I recorded my observations. Basically, I learned that all large-scale composting facilities require large, upfront costs. Windrow Composting requires a good deal less upfront costs but requires a lot more space and land that is just not available on Sarah Lawrence College, and additional land adjoining the college is just not available. There is plenty of talk among the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College about shipping food waste to a composting facility off campus to a rural area perhaps a few hour drive away, however, transportation costs are very high for any kind of waste out there (Transportation of garbage is 2/3 of the cost of waste management), and it also uses fossil fuel to transport compost. In addition, keeping our composting facility on campus also allows better transparency of our facility to make sure it is really doing something good for the environment. A facility right on campus that students can see and visit the same way they can see and visit a professor makes it inherently much more transparent and let me add, an excellent education opportunity for chemistry, biology, environmental studies, painting, photography, even a business course, countless conference projects, and much much more. If the facility were located somewhere far away, none of this would be feasible. Colleges are in the educational field are the not? What could be better for a college than having a progressive, liberal arts college educate the public on what will soon be the wave of the future? It would also be nice to use some compost for beautifying the college and even to supply some to places like Warren Green, and Laura's new-found garden.
     However, upfront costs of a composting system that also takes up a lot of land are very high. Therefore, if you were to pay say... 100,000 dollars for a facility wouldn't it make sense to pay for a facility that made two sources of revenue to pay itself off rather than say... one source? Methane digestion will produce energy to heat and power Sarah Lawrence College, IN ADDITION to producing valuable compost. Not to mention the fact that aerobic composting requires tons of energy to turn the food waste as I learned from my travels, while methane digestion PRODUCES energy and can even be buried underground so as not to take up very much space on campus. SLC already has a boiler system so connecting it to a heating system powered by methane would be a simple process. In fact, we may be able to use methane to produce electricity and use excess heat from that to help heat up water to heat all of the buildings.
     I also am working on a large-scale worm composting facility that can compost the final product of the methane digestion facility. The worms will transform this nutrient-rich substance into a high-quality compost that sells at a high price. This would work very well for wealthy homeowners in Bronxville New York.
     With all that said, there is a list of goals and priorities to get to the grand prize-a large-scale methane digestion facility that can compost all of SLC's food waste.

My July 18th Compost Work

I found a neighbor of Vicki Ford's house (One of the members of the Board of Trustees of the College). I asked if he would be interested in testing out his plants with some of my compost leachate. He was so now I'm going to test it on one of his hydrangeas for the remaining part of the summer and into fall. I will compare the growth of this hydrangea against the growth of several other hydrangeas he has.

I got my new book on methane digestion today. It will be a great introduction to the entire field. Meanwhile, I am reading about the types of methane digestion here.

Lately my compost has been getting dry so I decided to take a reused trashbag and lay it on top of my compost inside the compost bin. I'm worried it will create smells and prevent air from circulating in the compost pile- a problem even without some sort of plastic cover. At the same time though, my worms need to populate the bin and they cannot do it if the conditions are too dry. At this point, I'm just trying to get my bin with the few worms I have in there populated and ready to produce worm castings to make a steady revenue stream that can finally support this composting facility.

Tell me what you think of this for my compost label I'm making for my compost package.

"The compelling rich depth of this rich worm compost is the inspiration of our bold endeavor-to compost every last ounce of food waste at Sarah Lawrence College, in our community, and beyond. For countless centuries vineyards have long prized high-quality compost for the deep aroma, rich color, and superior flavor it brings to their wine. Vineyards of such world-renowned wines as _______, ________, ________ continue their timeless compost tradition. Eli's Gourmet Worm Compost, based off such time-tested traditions as these, now presents you the quality all homeowners, gardners, landscapers, and people alike deserve in our state-of-the art re-used plastic packaging"

My July 8th Compost work

Today I made considerable progress in composting. I made my second day in collecting food waste at SLC for the summer months. Today Chris, the manager of Avi Fresh at Sarah Lawrence College forgot to get my food waste and seeing I would be gone for a week, I had to take matters into my own hands. I got the food waste. I ate icecream with some chemistry interns- that is liquid nitrogen ice cream!! Really cool!

     Anyway, I decided to move more of the day-to day composting work to Warren Green house. I'm doing this for a few reasons. First, they have a rainwater collection system to clean out my buckets when I am done collecting food waste and for me to soak my paper to make it easier to shred. Secondly, when I form my composting club, I want to recruit volunteers to help compost food waste, and actually, to make this a business, I would like to figure out a means of paying people to take the time to compost. For now though it will suffice to just get people interested in the idea of composting all of the college's food waste, and there  is no better way than to just bring all the fun over to Warren Green. Third, Bates Dining Hall is close to Warren Green. Finally, it will be easy for me to pick up the bucket and just take it to the Board of Trustee's house. Actually I can also arrange compost tours and visits for anyone interested. I will have regular tours for anyone interested in learning more about the composting facility. It will be a weekly tour.
     I next found my food pulverizing tool. I learned about this from Compost for Brooklyn and their small-scale composting facility in Brooklyn. It's a really cool place!! I definitely recommend paying a visit to this small, homey place. This tool basically allows me to cut up my food waste to a fine pulp, which then can be mixed with shreds of paper to allow food waste to break down faster. Tearing paper still takes forever. This is sad. I really wish there would be a way to get the wood shop in the theatre department to stop using wood with lots of harmful chemicals. This would make their waste sawdust usable with my food waste. For now, I'll just have to make do with paper waste and taking the extra time to shred that up. I am looking into the purchase of an easy-to use paper shredder. It would make shredding paper much easier, make the paper smaller, and therefore, allow more composting to occur faster. I just want to be able to dump bag loads of paper into the shredder and have shreds of paper come out the other end in a matter of seconds. We may be looking at a couple thousand dollar investment, however, we would be reducing waste, and we would be making a high-quality worm compost that could sell for a lot of money. Once I know the machine I want, I will put all my will into finding the money to get the machine and to put it to maximum use.
     I'm testing my plants with compost tea and without compost tea to see which ones grow faster. For now, seeing the water coming out is not smelly, I'm not going to pump any air into it. See the link here for a definition of Compost Tea.