|
|
Turning French Toast To Compost
Nick Smith-Sebasto’s foray into the world of composting was a lot like going to a pool party where everyone wants to swim, but no one knows what the water is like.
“I’m the fool who jumped in first,” says the associate professor of earth and environmental studies at Montclair State University.
As it turns out, the water’s just fine. Smith-Sebasto has been running a giant composter—it can process 500 pounds of food residue daily—at MSU for two years, collecting food waste from two of the campus’s six kitchens. Food preparation excess and leftovers are mixed with wood chips (in a 4-to-1 weight ratio) to create high-quality compost, which is used on the university grounds and in Smith-Sebasto’s “germination study” (read: garden).
Three times a week, Smith-Sebasto and student volunteers add the organic waste to a metal basin with an auger that breaks down the food before sending it up a conveyor to a cylindrical iron tank. There, it rotates for twenty hours each day. As the material makes its way through the tank, it reaches temperatures of 135 degrees while bacteria help transform it into earthy compost. Students shake the cooled-down compost through a screen to remove any plastic spoons or latex gloves. (“You’re never going to be 100 percent contaminant free,” Smith-Sebasto says.)
The final product is “green” compost that slowly and naturally releases nutrients back into the earth, and also subtracts thousands of tons of material from the university’s waste stream. For a school that pays approximately $120 per ton of hauled waste, the composter—which costs about $2 in energy per day to operate and $40 per ton of compost—provides substantial savings. Composting on-site also results in fewer trucks transporting garbage and less landfill use.
The first school to sign a comprehensive green construction and operation agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, MSU is also the first college in the country to use such a large-scale composter. Smith-Sebasto is hoping to secure grant money for a bigger system. In a country where 30 million tons of food waste is disposed of annually, he says composting is the wave of the future, and schools that can control their own waste-shed should make the effort. “It’s a no-brainer,” he says. “Colleges and universities need to take the lead.”
Junior Leah Tepperman, a 21-year-old broadcast journalism major, volunteers at the composter. “If this does take off, and it should, it’s nice to be a part of it on the ground level,” she says.
It’s also nice to know that the seed is being planted in the Garden State. “Contrary to Frank Sinatra’s words,” Smith-Sebasto says, “if you can make it in Jersey, you can make it anywhere.”
