The Grow Project: Day 2

Daily Deliverables:
-- Decide who gets to research what
-- Learn more about in-vessel vs. out-of-vessel Composting
-- Talk to Delicia Nahman
-- Field trip to Community Garden this afternoon

The feel of the morning was set by the song "Send Me on My Way". This song is the perfect road trip/adventure starting song. Much brain storming occurred today. Writing on the glass windows with markers to feel extra smart. We investigated composting facilities at other schools, such as Cornell, Lafayette, Delaware Valley College, and University of Colorado at Boulder. Given the daunting task of determining what type of composting system Lehigh should take on, we wanted to see how other schools around the country were doing it.

We gained access to a 65 page presentation of the University of Michigan and how their composting system was broken down. (get it? broken down? composting? jokes). They had this really neat idea of splitting the implementation up into Phases. So in our case, Phase I would be taking pre and post consumer food waste from just the Rathbone Dining Hall (our biggest standalone dining hall). Pre-Consumer waste consists of anything before it gets to the student. All the waste from prepping vegetables and such. Waste is considered Post-Consumer as soon as it is on a plate. Employees at Rathbone are hired by Sodexo and take care of all post-c waste. Students wouldn't even notice that their food was being composted if we did implement Phase I. We believe that is a good thing, because it is difficult to get people to change their habits (ie. putting food into compost bins instead of regular trash).

Phase II would be including the other dining hall Cort (pre and post consumer waste) as well as Upper Cort (strictly pre consumer) and the Brodhead House Dining Hall. The concept is to start off with a place the has a constant flow of food, i.e. the low fruit on the tree. Easy to pick. Then as the phases progress, we tackle food waste from less consistent sources, such as libraries, classrooms, residence halls, and eventually every building on campus. This is a very long term and lofty goal, but hopefully one not out of our reach within the next 5 to 10 years. Eventually we would like to incorporate the outer community of Southern Bethlehem, such as Broughal Middle School and local eateries.

We then backtracked our thinking. Drawing a big list of pro's and cons, we tried to determine the difference between Business As Usual (BAU) and Phase I. What would change from right this minute if we implemented Phase I? Things such as the dehydrator at Rathbone would be gone (which would make it slightly less smelly when you're walking passed the back of Rathbone which we all know is Hell on Earth), as well is replacing Cougles with Brickman. Cougles currently takes our waste from Lehigh to Four Springs Farm in Kutztown, PA (30 miles away). Brickman would just take it to Mountain Top campus (< 2 miles) to our own composting facility. Sounds ideal right? But the thing is, we then need someone to manage this facility. Whether it is a graduate student, a Sustainable Energy intern, or someone from an outside source such as Brickman, they need to know what they're doing. Or at least be passionate about it. After we create a facility with someone to manage it, there is still a matter of manual labor, to actually run it. Then, once it is up and running, we need to apply all of the regulations laid down by the EPA to make sure we can use the compost in a garden or what have you. In order to figure out if we are meeting regulations, we need to gather data of all the compost we make. This data includes aeration, moisture, temperature, and particle size. OH, and somewhere in there, we need all of the proper permits from the state of Pennsylvania.

As you can see, there are approximately one billion factors we have to take into consideration for this project. Let's delve a little bit into the difference between in-vessel and out-of-vessel composting. Not to bore you too much, but I just want to point out some enormous problems that we are going to face.

In-vessel composting is self contained, self-running, and self-monitoring (for the most part). They are expensive, small, and hard to expand. Lafayette College has two Earth Bins covered by solar panels to power them as well as to keep them covered, and they process up to 200 lbs of food waste per day. Delaware Valley College has out-of-vessel composting. They use 3 acres of land covered with Windrows that are turned daily. A windrow I learned is basically a huge pile of decomposing food. They are long and brown, and pretty much look like Hostess Ho Hos. A tractor with a cool turning mechanism (if you can afford one) turns the windrows in order to maintain temperature, aeration, etc. The hottest temperatures come from the center of the windrow, so it gets all mixed up to cool it down.

Super interesting, I know, but think about this. What happens to Del Val's outdoor Ho Hos in the winter? Riddle me that. How do two little Earth Bins maintain all of the food waste for Lafayette's entire campus? All good questions. We decided that field trips are in order.

Speaking of field trips, we decided to go to the Community Gardens after lunch today. Possibly up to Mountain Top Building C again too, just for fun. The first one we went to is the actual Lehigh Community Garden. Although it didn't look anyone had been there in months. It was mainly growing Dandelions. We saw some old piles of compost (possible windrows?). After a few minutes of perusing around there wasn't a lot to see, so we took off for the other site Lehigh could set up a composting facility. It was next to the highway, full of abandoned machinery and tons of wood. We saw a Brickman truck pull in as we were leaving, and we almost went to stalk them and interview them, but decided against it. Next stop, community garden number two. This one was a LOT cleaner and more organized and smaller than the first. We turned on the hose and even gave some plants a little sprinkle. Basically the second half of today was spent on reconnaissance, seeing what campus had to offer to our project. As they say, Location, Location, Location.

Team regroup at STEPS 430, our glass case of emotions, to split up research work. Half and half, in-vessel and out-of-vessel. aaaaaaaaand Break!