By Sharon Osorio
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wbfo/local-wbfo-969681.mp3
Amherst, NY – Thousands of meals are prepared each day at UB's dining halls. And within a day's time, the leftovers that students leave on their plates could be bound for somebody's garden. WBFO's Sharon Osorio explains.
UB is cooking up food that its students are not going to eat. Cooking up scraps and fruit rinds that would have never made it to their plates, and food that students have already put on their plates but never finished eating. It's all being cooked in the Eco-Smart 200, a composting machine that's turning potential trash into a soil amendment that will go back into the earth.
"It actually goes through a 14-hour cycle, cooks it at 180 degrees or better, and actually sanitizes it, breaks it down," says Thomas Ludtka. "So what usually takes a month and a half in a composting pile usually takes 14 hours here."
Thomas Ludtka is the service center manager at the University at Buffalo, and is a member of the school's recycling committee. He says the university's main goal of this project is to cut the amount of trash UB dumps, and it's working. The restaurants on campus are sending back their pre-consumer scraps from their kitchens, and the dining halls are collecting both the pre-consumer scraps and the post-consumer leftovers. Ludtka says the amount of garbage per each dining hall has dropped dramatically.
"We used to take out 16 to 17 96-gallon totes on a daily basis," Ludtka says. "We're down to three totes a day with this ongoing project that we've been doing, so we're eliminating waste that goes to the landfill. That's our biggest point."
When you combine this composting with the school's other recycling efforts, Ludtka says the university kept 1,270,000 pounds from hitting a landfill during the school year that just ended. That's higher than UB's goal, and an even bigger increase from the 900,000 pounds it saved during the previous school year.
Ray Kohl, the marketing manager for campus dining and shops, says eliminating trash also benefits the bottom line. "Every time that they pick up a tote, you pay a fee for that on a per-tote basis," says Kohl. "So the less number of totes that they're picking up, the less we pay out in that."
Ludtka says the scraps come to the decomposer in buckets.
"The buckets we use are a five-gallon sealable bucket so there's no contamination cross-over," says Ludtka. "We use five gallons because full five-gallon buckets usually weigh about 40 to 44 pounds. We didn't want to overtax our drivers. So when the buckets come here, they go onto a sorting table, we sort out the materials--remove anything that can't go into recycling--and then we get it through the grinder, we extract all the water. As soon as the water's extracted, then we get it into buckets to go into the decomposer. The decomposer takes anywhere from 600 to 660 pounds a day."
But the best part of this program, for some, is the end-product: a soil amendment that UB gives away for free, and is known to make vegetable gardeners and their plants very happy. It's used on campus, in community gardens throughout the city, and UB staffers also love to scoop it away for their own yards. Ludtka keeps a picture that a soil-amendment user sent him showing tomato plants that have grown higher than the man's roof.
"It's not a compost; it's a soil amendment.," says Ludtka. "It actually has to get mixed back into the soil. It's very high in nitrogen, it's 77% organic, but it's on the acidic side. It's about 4.85 to a 5 on the acidic side, but we let all our gardeners know about that so depending on what they're using it for, they can make their balances on that."
Chicken bones in the mix add phosphorous and calcium, and the crew will throw coffee grounds into the mix too. But here's the big question: does it pass the smell test? My answer is yes.
"It's a very earthy smell when it comes out of the machine," says Ludtka. "It doesn't smell like food waste. We did a test when we first initially started it, we put 300 hot dogs in there. We took the batch out with 300 hot dogs in--you couldn't tell there was a hot dog in there or anything like that."
And the proof is in how quickly the soil amendment disappears once it comes out of the decomposer.
"It just doesn't stick around here very long," says Kohl. "People are looking for it, especially this time of the year where they're looking to get their gardens in shape and add that extra nutrients to their garden."
One of the next goals is to develop a environmentally-friendly bagging system to package the soil amendment during the off-season and make more of it available during peak season.
If you're interested in picking up some soil amendment from the Statler Commissary at UB's North Campus, call 645-2832.