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| School
Shows How to Turn Trash Into Treasure; LSU
AGRICULTURAL CENTER NEWS Distributed
05/21/98 |
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| It's like turning a sow's ear into a silk purse. Participants in the LSU Agricultural Center's 8th semiannual compost facility operator training school learned to transform garbage into something valued by society. "By
using compost on some drought-prone cotton fields in Northeast Louisiana,
we nearly doubled yields," said Experiment The 22 students in the weeklong school, which ended May 15, came from seven different states and one foreign country - Japan - and represented municipalities, prisons, the U.S. Air Force and small businesses. "We get students from all over," said Extension Service environmental education specialist Bill Carney, who is the coordinator of the AgCenter course that began in 1994. "We had people come from Israel a couple of years ago." Though Carney says he does not advertise the course, news spreads by word-of-mouth and the Internet, so there never is room for all who apply because of a limit of 20-25 students. The course includes intensive training in the chemistry and biology of making compost. Students learn not only in the classroombut also by donning hard hats and safety goggles and digging into compost piles at the LSU Ag Center's composting facility. That composting facility is a couple of acres of land covered in various piles of waste and compost near LSU's campus in Baton Rouge. The waste includes rice, corn, tree, sugarcane and cotton by-products. After curing, the finished compost is coarse, relatively odor-free and looks like potting soil. "The school is definitely hands on," Breitenbeck said. Under a tent at the facility, he sets up a miniature chemistry lab and teaches the students to use various instruments and to measure carbons, nitrogen, oxygen, moisture content and other important compost features. He
divides the group into teams that must compete to see who can build
the best compost pile and correctly find different characteristics
in the compost piles already there. For example, they need to find
the pile with three times more carbon dioxide "This helps them learn and makes the school worthwhile," Breitenbeck said. Rhonda Sherman-Huntoon, an extension specialist from North Carolina State University in Raleigh who was one of the students, agrees. She helps teach a similar course there - although she says it is not as intensive. "I came here to learn because of the reputation of the school," she said. "This school has more field work than others." The city of Lafayette has sent representatives to six of the schools, which are now held both spring and fall. "That city is very progressive with its waste management program," Carney said. "We've trained everybody on the staff. Their compost facility has saved the city about $2.5 million so far." |
Military units and prisons send employees to the school on a regular basis, too. "Army posts and prisons are like communities," Carney said. "They have to learn how to deal with their waste." Employees at an Air Force base in Alabama reported back to Carney that they had won that state's best compost facility award for 1995. They had attended the school the year before. Many
of the participants are entrepreneurs looking at ways to make money.
Compost is valuable for commercial agriculture because, when worked
into soil, it adds nutrients and structure that allow water and
air to help plants grow. This is especially "We need more people in the business who can match the properties of the waste to what's needed to improve the quality of the agricultural land nearby," Breitenbeck said. "It's a growth industry," Carney said of the whole field of waste management and making compost. "There aren't enough landfills. And the landfills we have are closing." In Louisiana, for example, the number of landfills went from 800 in 1980 to fewer than 30 this year. The state Department of Environmental Quality said that number will be reduced to 11 by the year 2000. The LSU Ag Center's compost facility includes demonstration versions of three of the main pieces of equipment needed at a composting facility - tub grinder, traummel screen and windrow turner. The tub grinder, which is like a big garbage disposal, can take waste as big as a tree trunk and grind it into smaller pieces. The traummel screen is like a sifter. Materials rotate in a screened drum so pieces that are too large can be filtered out. The windrow turner is a device that mixes the compost once it has been put into elongated piles about 5 feet tall called "windrows." Periodic turning helps the waste product "cure" into compost. "This is the best research facility in the country," Breitenbeck said. "But we want to get better." Breitenbeck
and Carney are working to get funding to expand the capabilities
of the facility to take in and compost municipal biosolids and hazardous
wastes. This would include adding a hard-surface receiving pad,
collection basins for run-off and a security system. Contacts: Gary Breitenbeck at (225) 578-1362 or gbreite@lsu.edu Bill Carney at (225) 578-5920 or bcarney@agcenter.lsu.edu Linda Foster Benedict at (225) 578-2263 or lbenedict@agcenter.lsu.edu |
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