Hello fellow compost aficionados!
Apologizes for the overdue blog post! We’ve been busy preparing for several new efforts in between continuing our compost operations. Check out the exciting new partnerships and initiatives that will start later this week:
- Compost Concierge Pilot : We’ve been working with grad students and departmental managers to begin a pilot food scraps collection program in three academic departments (Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Geosciences, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology). The food scraps, collected in 5-gal bins, will be picked up twice weekly by the operational team and dropped off at our composting facility.
- Composting at Tiger Sustainability Night (2/22): We will be partnering with Campus Dining and EcoReps Greening Athletics to recover food scraps at our first major event – double-header basketball games against Cornell at 5:30pm and 7:30pm at Jadwin Gym on Friday, February 22. Watch the promo video featuring Lexi Weger ’22 and Gabrielle Rush ’19
- Lastly, this week we will be finalizing a new name for the project to better reflect that the biodigester is a composting system that decomposes food scraps into compost aerobically (with oxygen), not a digester, which generally refers to systems that break down organic waste anaerobically (i.e. without oxygen) and produce digestate, which is similar to, but technically not the same as compost. We will unveil the new name next week!
Weekly Data: 2/4 – 2/15
Now that the spring semester is in full swing, our weekly food scraps volume is starting to creep back up again, closer to the 3,000 lbs./week range. We are also experimenting with a higher percentage (by weight) of wood shavings to food scraps, increasing slightly from 30% to 33%.
| Food | Wood shavings (BA/CS) | % BA/CS | Compost Off-loaded |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week of 2/4 (lbs.) | 2,679 | 875 | 33% | 2,500 |
| Week of 2/11 (lbs.) | 2,997 | 985 | 33% | 2,750 |
| CUMULATIVE (lbs.) | 49,302 | 14,913 | 30% | 38,500 |