An Approach To Expanding Commercial Composting Operations

This episode corresponds to Lesson 5 and Lesson 6 of our online course.

In this episode we’re in Los Angeles talking to the project manager of the Inland Empire Regional Composting Authority Jeff Ziegenbein about how best to expand your composting facility without compromising quality or risking your business.  We discuss with him the reasons why composters may need to expand, the technological advances that can help with processing and odour control, how to use a phased approach to growth in order to secure financing and to maintain production quality, tips on dealing with regulations, and much more.

Thanks to If You Care for making this episode possible.

If You Care Certified Compostable Bags are made from potato starch from starch potatoes, blended with a fully compostable polymer, and are polyethylene and plasticizer free. Their potatoes are grown for starch only unlike corn which is grown for food. Their potatoes require forty percent less land than corn and no irrigation. For more, visit their website.

Photo by wasteman2009.

 

TRANSCRIPT

New Mandate And What It Means For Composters

 

Q: In terms of closing the loop, it is often preferable to have a larger number of small-scale composting facilities to ensure that organic materials do not have to travel far from their source in order to be treated. However, today there is still a great need for larger facilities, and composting facilities often face scenarios that require them to scale up their operations. Jeff, you mentioned before we started that there are changes taking place in California that will see more composting facilities needing to expand. Can you elaborate on this and tell us more?

JZ: California is going through a huge change. We’re mandating the organics away from landfills, and it’s a very ambitious goal. CalRecycle, which is our Integrated Waste Management board here in the state, has announced that they have this new paradigm, saying they want to move out of the landfill. They want to disincentivize and do whatever they have to do to pull those organics out of the landfill for higher and better use.

But the way this new assembly bill reads, some of the activities that are currently considered recycling will no longer be considered recycling – specifically Alternative Daily Cover for landfills. We’ve got a whole bunch of green waste and other organics going into landfills that are not being counted as disposal, but rather as recycling because it’s being used as Alternative Daily Cover. Under this new assembly bill, this no longer will count. We’re essentially doubling the amount of recycling in a very, very short period of time. So the impact to the organics world in California is going to be very profound. Most of us in California, and others I talk to in the US, view that what happens in California tends to trickle outward across the country and sometimes far beyond, so everybody’s watching how rolls out very closely.

I say that because when composters are facing different scenarios that may encourage them to change or expand their facilities, this is a big driver. Right now, California composts almost six million tons of organics, so we in the organics industry are expecting that to double to about twelve million tons in about five years. So that’s going to require more facilities, more markets, and infrastructure. I think one of the big things that we all need to be aware of is that it’s going to require diversity, so we’re going to have to be creative. We’re going to have to open our minds up a little and understand that it’s not just one technology, one scenario or one application that’s going to require a lot of different varieties. So, small backyard operations, community operations as well as very large regional facilities are all going to have to be constructed and expanded to satisfy this new mandate.

Q: So one of the major reasons a composting site might need to expand is an increase in feedstocks. But how about regulations? There are very stringent regulations in California that make it difficult for smaller composting sites to get off the ground…

JZ: That’s true. California is a big state, but I one of the things that’s common across the state is the challenge of siting facilities. We have a population and a state that doesn’t usually like facilities to be very close to where their residents are, but the further you move away from where your populations are, the more transportation costs you have. So we always try to build as close as we can to where the materials are generated, but in our state we have a lot of stringent regulations around water, air and nuisance that do require higher technology than I see in other places in the country.

For example, the facility that I’m operating here in Southern California – the Inland Empire Regional Composting Facility – this facility actually cost ninety million dollars to construct. And that is a very large price tag for any composting facility; it may be one of the most expensive ones in the world. But the reason why it’s so much money is because it’s right in Los Angeles. It’s in an urban area, and it’s in an area that is very heavily regulated by an air district, because LA is not in compliance with the clean air act and is also heavily regulated with water and with lots of things.

So in order for us to be compatible to build a facility like this in this type of an area, it required a lot of engineering and a lot of infrastructure. The good news is that we did get it built, we did get it permitted and we’re able to operated it at a very competitive cost, but the only way we’re able to make all that work is by a heck of a lot of volume. In the case of this facility, we’re operating over two hundred thousand tons every single year, and that’s the reason why we can make this work. It’s not always that easy: if you build a small or a medium sized facility with this type of VOC and odour control (VOC’s are volatile organic compounds, which are regulated in this district), and you don’t have a lot of volume to spread those costs over, you can price yourself right out of being a possibility. So we see that challenge over and over again in the state of California, and I’m sure that’s a common problem across the world.

Q: So if regulations are very strict, it may force composters to invest in building covers or in more expensive technologies, which in turn would require them to scale their operations.

JZ: Yes, and the good news that in two major areas in California have air rules that require the removal of VOCs, and when you remove VOCs you also have to remove most of the odours in the air streams that are remitted for composting facilities. So just by surviving in these air districts, we’ve learned a lot as an industry; what does work, and what works on a big scale, so we try to share that information and teach others that these technologies do exist – they’re fairly predictable in how they operate; I’m really talking about biofilters. We do have a pretty good understanding about how these work and we can use them in lots of ways; in ways that are very expensive, but also in some ways that aren’t quite so expensive. So we view that there’s some hope that we can site more facilities in California and be compatible with the air rules and the neighbours.

TECHNOLOGICAL Advances In The Composting Industry

 

Q: Let’s talk about technologies. A big factor here is that within the last 20 years we have seen an increase in the amount and type of feedstocks being accepted into composting facilities (biosolids, paper sludge, food scraps…). Due to the increased complexity in processing the material and controlling odours, it’s spurred on the need for more sophisticated technology to handle all this. Jeff, what rare the technologies that are worth investing in today to handle odour, and so on?

JZ: For odour control is often a biofilter, and a biofilter is essentially in most cases a wet pile of wood, and the beauty of that is it’s a wet pile of wood and most of us can figure out how to operate those. It’s not that complicated, you don’t have to have a full-time engineer with a bunch of fancy instruments, it really is just a pile of wood, and we have to maintain it for moisture and make sure the air is moving through it appropriately, and size the pieces of wood appropriately and things like that. But biofilters work, and the good news is that we can copy this and teach people how to do this, allowing them to build these things fairly inexpensively.

So for odour control, and for compliance with these air districts, a biofilter is a very good tool, and we’re getting more and more confidence with using them. More recently, there’s been a couple of variations to biofilteration, including some covers where they have permeable tarps that you can put over piles that have a bunch of surface area in the tarp so the water molecules will collect in the surface area and the air passes through and transformed similarly to how it would be in a biofilter. Those seem to work pretty good as well.

The Association of Compost Producers, a non-profit trade organisation that represents most of the composting companies in the state, developed an alternative to all those I’ve just talked about, where a finished compost layer is placed over a compost pile, and then air is blown up through the compost pile. And as the air passes through the finished compost layer, that actually works as a biofilter. So that’s even cheaper yet than securing new wood and having to size it and moisten it and so on. And so that was done in the San Joaquin air district that has very stringent air regulations.

So the Association of Compost Producers representatives and some others put together a pilot project with a grant, and demonstrated and measured the air omissions from these piles using the lowest cost technology, and it actually worked very well and got about ninety eight percent removal. So that may be something that really helps facilities deal with odour removal and VOC control with even a lower cost method. That same technology is being tested in the South Coast air quality district and other districts in California to verify it and see if it can be repeated in another air district. And if it can be, it may be adopted as a best management practice for these districts.

Q: Is there anything else on the market right now that you see as promising or worth investing in?

JZ: The most exciting things that I have seen is some of the technologies in the tarps that can actually process the odours and VOC control. I’ve seen quite a few of these work and I like the simplicity of just throwing a tarp over a compost pile and having these automated systems control the air flow and temperature and so on. So some of these kits for making a compost system are pretty interesting, and as we get more and more experienced, I can see them becoming an easy way for someone to start up a small or medium sized facility. It’s just a tarp and a probe that has an oxygen sensor and a thermocouple, and it goes to a small motherboard that controls the fan. I like the thought of that, I think things like that have a lot of promise.

Q: Your facility is a completely covered facility, is that right?

JZ: Yes, the Inland Empire Regional Composting Facility that I manage is a converted warehouse. It’s actually an old Ikea warehouse that’s almost five hundred thousand square feet, so it’s a very large warehouse that has conveyors and wheel loaders and things like that operating inside of it. So all of the emissions from the compost piles are trapped within that building and then exhausted out through the biofilters. The amount of control of emissions is pretty extraordinary, actually.

Q: Because of this, would you say that covering your facility or using in-vessel composting would be the best way to go when dealing with such stringent regulations or being close to residential buildings?

JZ: I think it depends on where. We’ve looked at possibly working with other people on building additional facilities, and almost every time we halfway serious about it, we end up envisioning a covered, fully enclosed facility, due to the reasons I mentioned before. The only way we really feel comfortable in an urban area on a very large scale was to do the complete enclosure. I think if you’re in a different area and not so close to Los Angeles for example, then that’s when you can get into some of the hybrid technologies that I mentioned before.

 

 Challenges When Expanding Operations

 

Q: I’d like to focus on the process of expanding a facility. What are the key issues or challenges to take into account when planning your expansion?

JZ: I think the big challenges, and not in any particular order, would be environmental regulations – and that has some cost impacts – markets, and definitely technology to make sure it’s clean enough to be marketed and processed, and probably transportation.

Those seem to keep coming up over and over again when I talk to folks about expanding or building new facilities. But markets are always a major concern. In some areas less than other areas, of course, but in Southern California which has a tremendously robust composting infrastructure – we’re currently composting over three million tons down here – we need to expand markets.

Q: Market creation seems to come up again and again, and it’s something we talk about quite often. It is complex and it’s difficult for the composter to handle it by themselves of course, but what would you recommend to composters, then, as a strategy for expanding the markets?

JZ: Building markets is a long term process, and it needs to have the mainstream of people realise that it is important not to have naked soil and to just throw water at naked soil. We do that all the time in this state, and I’m sure across the world. So, getting that message across is very, very important. And in California at least, with the Association of Compost Producers, we’re working on service announcements, we’re working with our water distributers, creating model ordinances requiring soil preparation before irrigation permits go down…just educating people that it’s wrong not to treat your soil. You shouldn’t just throw a bunch of water on sand and waste this drinking water.

In order to market, it takes this broad approach. And then on top of that it takes a local approach. You need to work with your customers and tell them why they need more, how to expand their market, what their messages need to be. We work with schools in trying to get the message to the children that you need to put compost down. So it’s all of those things.

 

Using A Phased Approach

 

Q: Another big issue for expanding a facility is in securing funding and putting in place a workable strategy that will give confidence to lenders and also yourself when expanding. How would you advise composters to start planning their expansion with these issues in mind?

JZ: Yes, for example, to fund a new composting facility in California and get a bank to come up with a bunch of money so you can build your facility, they need some assurance that it’s actually going to work. So if you just have this vision of this huge facility, a lot of times folks will try to go get put or pay contracts, and build these models and things, but banks sometimes aren’t satisfied with that, and that can make the cost of money pretty prohibitive.

One of the better models is if you can design a facility so you have this expandability to it and you can do a phased approach, then you have a lot better shot of success. You can have, say, a receiving structure that’ll take it in a little or a lot of material, but that’s usually a fairly inexpensive part of your process, and then you can feed these different operational trains for one through four phases. And the facilities I’ve seen use that kind of process – that’s the smartest way to go if you can do it. In other words, if you can get funding for phase one at twenty-five thousand tons and you can make the business case work, then you can prove that out. And by the time you get to phase two your economies of scale are so much better, and it really gives you an opportunity to expand a facility.

But then you’re not starting right at this maximum best case – there’s just a lot more risk for failure when you do it that way. If we’re talking about borrowing, you need to demonstrate in a very professional way what’s working and why your expansion is going to assure that you are going to pay money back. So when you’re doing performa on your business models and having enough comfort level in there and enough conservatism in there that the numbers are real and you can verify them, that’s the key. It’s very tough to design a facility and have it actually work exactly how you estimated it would, so I would be as conservative as you can stand, and then if you have a bit of a track record and your numbers are real, I think you can get the funding that you need. It can be done, I see examples of it all the time, but you do have to put together a real performa, and it has to have some sort of backing to it.

Q: Yes, and in the US at the moment, financing is a very tricky thing to get these days what with state grants and loans having been decreased over the last ten to fifteen years. Is it easier for a composting site that has been running for a while to secure capital in order to expand?

JZ: Well I think it might be easier. I think if you go to a lender and you have this track record, and then this proposed expansion, I think you have a little bit more confidence from the lenders. And there is also some grants currently, with this new paradigm as CalRecycle likes to call it, there is some funding for facility expansion. So there is some money available that folks are competing for to expand their facilities, and that may give lenders a little bit more confidence too. I think there’s a little bit more money than there was, say, five years ago. I don’t think it’s as healthy as it was ten years ago, but it’s certainly better than it was recently.

 

How To Tackle REGULATIONS

 

Q: Let’s move onto regulations. It’s always going to be a long process to go through when figuring out what regulations apply and how to comply with them, and we can see even from our discussion today that they have shaped the composting industry and where we go with it. What advice would you give to composters on this front, and how can we best get on the right side of the regulators?

JZ: : I know this is a regional answer, but again we’re sort of a case study: in California I think it’s very important to be involved with a lot of these changing issues. Specifically the Association of Compost Producers which is this trade organisation, it has a seat at the table. We have a lobbyist sitting in Sacramento, and we are the state chapter for the United States Composting Council, so we are working with Caltrans and CalRecycle and assembly people, and the water board and the air board – all these different variables that are impeding the growth and expansion of the compost marketplace. It’s very important to get involved, and it doesn’t cost a lot of money, but you have to maintain involvement and get to know what’s going on.

For a long time the compost industry has been a fragmented group of companies who saw each of their own projects as an individual island, but because these regulations have become so dynamic and impacting, all these groups have joined together for this common cause to make sure everybody understands that compost is the highest and best use for this material, that we are a real industry with a real group of professionals, that we are involved and are funding staff to make sure we have a seat at the table. I think that’s probably the most important thing folks can do. Just get involved!

I think that raises the bar, raises the standard, it makes common standards, it keeps everything as professional as possible, and that’s really one of the biggest keys to moving forward successfully

Q: So your key advice is for people to just get involved, and then maybe we can influence how regulations are being created to support composting better.

JZ: Absolutely.

 

Managing ODOURS and QUALITY CONTROL

 

Q: In terms of managing the facility during expansion, it can be quite a lot of work to maintain your quality control and odour control as it gets bigger and bigger. What steps can we take to expand without losing quality or risking odour problems?

JZ: Yeah, that’s tricky. It is definitely tricky, and it’s not usually a linear change. If you have some sort of control system and you do a forty percent increase, you can’t just increase your control system forty percent and call it good. It’s more complicated than that. You have to be conservative when you’re expanding a facility for the reasons you just mentioned. The cost is so high; if you have a successful operation and you go to do a forty or fifty percent increase and you kill your whole project – that isn’t anything that you want to have happen. So I think you nailed it; I think it does require a lot of planning and research and control measures to make sure that when you do make these changes you’re not jeopardizing your entire project.

And we’ve seen that happen, it’s very unfortunate. You know, you think “this works, so if I do more it’ll work better”, and sometimes that just is not the case. So you have to build in a lot of safeguards when you start to expand operations.

Q: And what would these safeguards look like?

JZ: Well, there are a lot of professionals – not that you necessarily have to go and hire a full engineering firm – but there are some very competent professionals that can help measure and quantify some of those changes. For example, what’s going into a biofilter? What is the cubic feet per minute and concentration and the effectiveness of your biofilter? And if you want to expand to some X percentage greater, what would your empty bed retention time and biofilter need to be, and therefore your square feet? There are a lot of folks who can really help build in some of these control measures and then give you a safety factor.

That’s really the take on what I’m trying to say. I think you really need to be conservative when you start designing expansions. For example, if you wanted to expand by fifty percent you might phase that in. Start with your odour control device, and then do incremental increases in your throughput – that way you’re not destroying your whole project. So if you doubled your odour control device, but then only increased your throughput by half, then potentially you have this bit of a cushion before you jeopardize your project.

Q: So you need to go slow and steady.

JZ: I think it’s pretty important. Projects do get killed in California; it happens. If the neighbours are against the project, the regulators start to fall out of favour with it, and the local enforcement agencies – it’ll kill a project. There’s a lot at stake; it’s expensive to build these things in California, you do not want to get it shut down.

Q: And this applies to the rest of the world too.

JZ: Of course.

TECHNOLOGY – Simple Is Best

 

Q: In terms of picking out the right technology for your expansion, there is often a tendency to source the highest functioning technology available, because it’s cutting edge and might be easier to sell when looking for grants, but that’s not necessarily the best option…

JZ: Well I think you’re right, and we’ve seen examples of trying to fully automate composting processes, and  we end up modifying that somehow and doing as much labour or more trying to live with whatever savings we thought we were going to get from this automation.

Personally, I take whatever is the cheapest and the dumbest first and work up from there, and ask why you can’t do this or can’t do that. Really low technology or inexpensive technology with the finished compost biofilters thing that ACP did is very good. It’s not going to work everywhere, but that’s one of the ones you’d look at early on. You know, “can I do this with a windrow? Oh I can’t because f the air rules. Okay, well can I do this compost blanket technology? Oh, I can’t because there’s a retirement community three miles away. Well okay, can I use a cover? Oh, I can’t because of – whatever”.

So you have to start ruling some of these out for whatever reason, and then ultimately maybe you get to where you have a fully enclosed composting facility, because that’s really the only thing that’ll be compatible in the region that you’re looking to build one. So again you need to start simple and cheap, and then work backwards.

Final Words Of Advice

 

Q: Is there one piece of advice you could give all composters out there who are looking to expand no matter where they’re situated?

JZ: I would certainly recommend looking at other facilities. We have a lot of good examples around the world of facilities that work, and go look at them. It does not cost that much; most facility operators are happy to show off what they’ve got that works. So take a look at it. Find out why it works and but lunch or something, and spend enough time that you can get the real challenges out of them. You know, ask the questions: what are your biggest challenges? Why would you do that again? And those type of things.

Learning from other’s experiences is probably one of the most valuable tools that we as an industry can use. And through associations like the United States Composting Council etc – we have these meetings where all these guys get together and talk about their projects. I think that this is a very important step.

Q: Do you have any final words before we go?

JZ: I’ll just say that as our industry matures, that organisations like the United States Composting Council and others like them around the world, and Association of Compost Producers in California – and Compostory.org – things like this are really important, and I think that the industry needs to stay informed and stay involved, and share what they know, and listen to what others know. And that’s how we mature as an industry and grow.

Winning Hearts And Minds: Outreach Strategies for Curbside Organics Collection: NYC Case Study

This episode corresponds to Lesson 3 and Lesson 4 of our online course.

We join Director of Recycling Bridget Anderson to discuss the DSNY’s extensive outreach and education strategy for their curbside organics collection pilot program in New York City. We explore how they dealt with the different demographics in the city, how they used online social media and traditional media, the importance of face-to-face communication, the reasons why people don’t participate, and much more.

Thanks to If You Care for making this episode possible.

If You Care Certified Compostable Bags are made from potato starch from starch potatoes, blended with a fully compostable polymer, and are polyethylene and plasticizer free. Their potatoes are grown for starch only unlike corn which is grown for food. Their potatoes require forty percent less land than corn and no irrigation. For more, visit their website.

Picture courtesy of DSNY.

 

(more…)

TRANSCRIPT

 

Breaking down the OUTREACH STRATEGY

 

Q: You touched on some of your strategies in the last episode, but I’d like to really understand the whole process. Can you tell me how the DSNY went about planning and implementing these strategies?

BA: Entering into a pilot program for New York City is a big challenge, because you have so many different types of communities and people with so many different experiences living in different types of housing structures. So we really approached this pilot from the perspective of what’s been successful in other cities? Most other cities have lower housing density – in New York City sixty percent of our population live in high-rise apartment buildings.

So we started focusing on the lower density areas of the city. In those low density areas, we reached out to the elected officials and the local community organisations to get feedback. Part of the strategy was to look within at sanitation and our sanitation workers know best what is happening on the ground – what neighbourhoods tend to be good recyclers already, and what neighbourhoods they think would be more amenable to doing a pilot program. Based on that, we chose a few committees; we reached out to elected officials; we talked to the local community organisations; and we tried to identify those “informal mayors” of neighbourhoods that might have their finger on the pulse of the community, to get feedback on if they think it would be successful in that neighbourhood and where the challenges might be.

Based on all of this information, we finalised our initial list of pilot areas, and then we sent a mailer to the households in the neighbourhoods about a month before the program was to start. Then we followed that up with a door-to-door door hanger that explained the program and that in a week they were to receive a brown organics bin, a kitchen container and information about the program. And then, when we do the bin deliveries – the organics bin, kitchen container and information packet – we have outreach people there during bin deliveries to talk to people on the ground; if somebody comes out and they have a question, we answer it. During those periods, we’ve encountered people who are just so excited about the program, and we’ve also encountered people who say “this really isn’t for me”. So we really try to change hearts and minds, and having people on the ground, and face-to-face communication, has been critical to getting people to even try the program.

We say that it’s a voluntary program, that you won’t get fined for not participating, but we encourage you to participate, and this is why: your going to help reduce the materials that we send to landfills that potentially could save taxpayer money, you could reduce incidences of rodents in the neighbourhood; it creates a cleaner waste stream for you, because you’re separating out the stinky stuff from the rest of your garbage. So, that on the ground, face-to-face, has been critical. It’s resource intensive, but it really has been extremely helpful to get the program off the ground in the beginning.

We also try to get articles in local newspapers – like the Daily News, New York Post, New York Times, if they’re interested – and then we have the local neighbourhood newspapers, and those have also been really helpful to explain that the scheme is coming to this neighbourhood, and that this is what it looks like, this is where you go for questions, this is our website… So they’ve been really helpful to get the message out.

Q: This strategy mirrors the strategy we lay out in Lesson 4 of our online course when we speak about outreach – that you need to let them know about the program initially around a month beforehand, and then have people going door-to-door to answer questions when the bins are delivered. And that’s exactly what you did, so it’s a very extensive campaign.

BA: Yeah, we’ve built email lists and newsletters, and any opportunity we can find the get the information to the local community, we use it.

 

 

Compost COMMUNICATION for different DEMOGRAPHICS

 

Q: Since there are so many different demographics in New York City, did you have different approaches that you used for the different groups of people?

BA: We had our standard approach, but in certain neighbourhoods, we had people on the ground who spoke the language. We had a Spanish speaker, a Chinese speaker, we also had a few neighbourhoods where Russian was an important language. So we had people on the ground so they’d have that specific face-to-face opportunity to speak with somebody in their own language. We also translated some of our materials – the most critical pieces of information – into multiple languages, and you can translate our website, so that’ been very useful as well.

One thing we have discovered is that, especially if you’re in an area that has a lot of retired people, we can’t rely on the web or social media as our only information portal. So, we have a hotline and utilise the city’s 311 program, and we have a lot of soft responses to the most common questions that we get. So we’re able to utilise phone calls as well as an opportunity.

 

 

Getting RESIDENTS started and using COMPOSTABLE plastic bags

 

Q: What were the most common questions that you got, or the most common issues that people had?

BA: We get a lot of questions like “is this mandatory, do I have to do it?” Because I think some people get the mailer and, even though it says it’s a voluntary program, they assume that because it’s a notification from the Sanitation Department, they have to participate. We encourage people by saying “it’s not mandatory, but we encourage you to try, because this is a new strategy and we’re trying to see if we can make it work in New York City”. One of the strategies that we’ve recommended to people that using certified compostable bags is one way to collect the material inside your home and get it out to the brown bin in a way that’s more similar to maybe what you used to do if you used plastic bags for garbage.

The availability of those compostable bags has been a problem. It’s taken us a while to get the bags into retail stores – there are also online outlets for the bags. The price of the bags has been a problem; some people say the bags are to expensive and they won’t use them, or that they would participate in the program if they could use the bags, but the bags are too expensive – that’s an example of something that’s been a challenge. We do say that you don’t have to use compostable bags: you can use paper bags, and you don’t even have to line your kitchen container at all if you don’t want to, it just means you have to rinse it out. And with the brown bin, you don’t have to line the bin if you have a way to rinse it out, or you can use paper bags or certified compostable bags. And this spring we’ve added that people can line their brown bin with a clear recycling bag. It’s not our preference to do this, but to encourage participation and because the compostable bags are not yet available everywhere, we are allowing people to do this to get people used to the program.

Our hope is that eventually the compostable bags will maybe become cheaper and be more available, and then we can switch out the regular plastic bags. One of the challenges with the plastic is that it doesn’t break down in the composting facility, so it adds to the contamination rate, but at this point we do think that it does encourage more participation because it’s more similar to our other recycling programs. In our recycling programs, you can use clear plastic bags, or you can put things directly in the bin, so it’s more parallel right now to those programs.

Q: So you’re thinking is that it’s more important to just get them on board and into the habit and then it’s easier to change…

BA: Right. There’s the challenge of the front end, which is participation, and then there’s the back end, which is trying to do something useful with the material. And we’re trying to balance those two things right now.

 

 

The most IMPORTANT aspects of an OUTREACH STRATEGY

 

Q: And in terms of strategy, would say that the face-to-face communication is the most important aspect?

BA: I don’t know if it’s the most important, but it’s a critical piece. I think getting articles in the media and generating a buzz…and we’ve been very lucky where the local television news media has picked up the program, the local neighbourhood newspapers have picked up the program; the city-wide newspapers have picked up the program and we’ve had radio shows pick up the program too. Having people hear repeatedly about the program has been absolutely critical.

Then, once an area becomes a pilot area where people are receiving the program itself, the on the ground outreach has been extremely useful. Not everybody reads the mailers: if you receive a mailing from the city, it might end up directly in your recycling bin – hopefully your recycling bin! And so, having people out there on the ground during bin deliveries to really make sure people understand the program is important. The elected officials and community boards have also often hosted meetings where people can come and ask questions.

I think what’s critical is that you try to hit every outreach opportunity that you can, because you never know who might be listening in which venue. And the bigger the program goes, the more difficult it will be, because of the more neighbourhoods we’ll have, and we’ll have to be really efficient in how we implement the process, because we won’t necessarily have an army to be in every neighbourhood all the time.

Q: And since you are planning to expand, is there anything you’re gearing up for, or planning, in terms of outreach campaigns for when the program does go city-wide?

BA: So this year, we’re working through the analysis to figure out if we are able to expand this program, and really think about it as a program that we’re going to expand city-wide – we’re working on this right now. So, we have plans to further expand in the spring to another, approximately, forty-thousand households. And this fall, we’re aggressively trying to recruit more multi-unit buildings to really understand the challenges to making this work in multi-unit buildings.

Then, next summer of 2015, we will start writing up our analysis and provide the city-wide expansion plan. In the end, when we expanded recycling, we started recycling in portions of the city and then expanded city-wide, we took a geographic strategy, where we said “now we know we’re going to go city-wide, let’s phase in each area of the city”. It is likely that that would be a useful tactic also for this type of a program once we expand it city-wide. But we haven’t yet crunched all the numbers to understand exactly how quickly it would happen and who would start first – those types of things.

 

 

The TROUBLE with high-rises

 

Q: Since you brought up high rises, I want to ask, what was your experience in dealing with the building owners and supers – were they on board right away, or was it hard to convince them to change?

BA: We’ve been lucky at this point because we’re recruiting buildings, and they are voluntarily saying to us that they would like to join this program. I would say one of the most interesting things to date is that it’s the co-ops and the condos – the buildings where people own their units – that tend to be much more interested in the program than the building management companies for rental buildings.

Where you have a co-op board, the co-op board president is perhaps the champion of the program, they’ve really been successful in getting buildings on board and participating, and committing to manage the program in their building. Where we have a resident of a rental building contact us, we then contact the building management company, and more often than not, the building management company says “I know this resident is interested in the program, but I don’t think I have the resources to manage it”. So we’re really working this fall to see if we can get more rental buildings on board to understand what the constraints are for a rental building as opposed to an owner building.

 

 

Residents reaction to the collection program

 

Q: In general now, how has the reaction been from the participants of the scheme so far, has it been mostly positive, or have there been any comments on it?

BA: It’s mixed. I would say you have the core group of residents that are really into the program; they’ve jumped on board and have given us feedback like, “I have no trash left!” and things like that. You do have, I would say, a significant set of residents who’ve chosen not to participate, and that’s the group that we’re really trying to recruit now. So we’re going back into the pilot areas and saying “you know, this really is beneficial and will make your trash management cleaner”, and things like that.

But we really have a mix. The people who participate are gung-ho about participating and enthusiastic, and then you have folks who are really choosing not to. It’s interesting when you look at the numbers; we have RFID tags attached to the brown bins, so when we go and collect, we’re able to see how many bins are placed out on each collection route and are able to get a sense of participation, which is really helpful for the pilot program. And what we’re finding is that there are some people who started in the program, and then they dropped out, or they dropped out in the winter and they came back again in the spring – and so you can see patterns there.

You also see, surprisingly, bins that had never been placed out for collection for three or four months, and then all of a sudden you see them being placed out for collection. So maybe that’s somebody who really wasn’t interested in the program and then saw their neighbours do it long enough that they said, “maybe I’ll five this a try”, or maybe they have a lot of yard waste and thought, “maybe I’ll use this for yard waste”.

So we’re trying to understand the patterns of behaviour. How do people behave with the program? Is there consistency with participation? It’s a pretty interesting analysis to understand people’s behaviour. And it’s a different thing from recycling – recycling is dry goods, so that “ick” factor doesn’t exist, whereas with organics it’s a little bit different. Yard waste is less scary than the food waste portion of course. But we have really great testimonials of people who say, “I really don’t have much garbage left, once I recycle and do the organics”.

Q: I often wonder about the people who start and drop out – what their reasons where. And it’s probably more difficult to get them back into the program again after that too.

BA: Yeah. And our feedback is that some people say “I had a free sample of compostable bags, and once those bags ran out, I tried to buy them and I couldn’t find them”, or, “they were too expensive.” So for those people, we tell them that they don’t have to use those bags, and list the other strategies we encourage them to try. There are some people then – it was a particularly tough winter last winter – and they said, “you know, I just didn’t want to do the program over the winter, but now that spring has arrived, I’m coming back.” It really is varying reasons.

 

Wise words of advice.

 

Q: And finally, do you have any advice on planning and implementing an outreach program, for those listening in who might be starting their own? Any pitfalls you want to warn against, or tips to share?

BA: If you have ideas of which communities you think you would like to start the program in, I would recommend having conversations with those local communities pretty early on. Give yourself at least a few months before the program starts to really start talking to that community, explain the “why” of the program: why are we doing this, and explaining how it would work. The more they feel a part of the development of the process, the better the response. I the very pilot area, we had a situation where certain people were told that this was going to be the pilot area before they were notified on a local level, and they felt a little bit slighted. So it was important for us, moving forward, to really get into those local communities. These are our candidate pilot areas: let’s get in there and talk to them and make sure they understand the program that’s coming. And then, when it comes, they’re not surprised. So having that up-front communication before the program starts would be an important piece.

I also think providing the tools – providing the bins and the kitchen containers – has been helpful. Giving them the tools so they didn’t have to go buy things right away was really helpful. In the initial pilot areas we had sample supplies of compostable bags so they could at least get themselves started, and that was also helpful.

END

Vineyard Special #2: Using Composted Mulch For True Cost Benefits

In this second part of the two-part special on vineyards, we speak with CEO and vineyard manager of Food and Beverages Australia Limited (FABAL), Ashley Keegan about the costs, risks and benefits of using composted green organic mulch on vineyards. We go into detail about sourcing a good quality product, cost-effective strategies for applying the mulch, the incredible increase in yield they experienced, as well as the water saving capacity of the mulch, and much more.

Thank you to YLAD Living Soils for making this episode possible.

YLAD Living Soils is an Australian owned company formed to supply sustainable biological, organic and humus compost fertility products and programs that support the natural balance of the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the soil, lessening the reliance on conventional chemical fertilser inputs. Find more on their website.

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Ashley, you’re the CEO of FABAL (Food and Beverage Australia Limited), and FABAL is a commercial farming company that manages agricultural businesses across Australia. Can you tell me more about FABAL?

Ashley Keegan: We’re a large agribusiness management company based in Adelaide, South Australia. We operate a number of viticultural enterprises, but also other horticultural operations as well. It’s pretty much spread across the country, with a focus on viticulture in South Australia.

You manage agribusinesses. Do you manage them solely for clients or do you own some yourself?

AK: We own our own, and also manage for others. So, if you’re a company that owns an asset, or you might be an individual, but we also do that work as well. But, we ultimately own a large percentage of what we do ourselves. We also do some consulting work for the industry on an external basis as well.

How many hectares of vineyards do you manage at the moment?

AK: We have about sixteen hundred hectares under management at the moment.

Sixteen hundred hectares is nearly 4 thousand acres, so that’s quite a lot. What are your key performance indicators; what do you take into account when you’re managing and improving the vineyards?

AK: Interesting question. I’m an agronomist by training, and a viticulturalist, but my managers call me the accountant now, because we have to measure the bottom lines of anything that we do. And again, I guess I look at it a bit more broadly in terms of return on investment, whether it be purely from a financial point of view, or a return on investment of our time, or our technology – any of the inputs that we put into our operations. We do extensive internal and external benchmarking from a KPI perspective, but my philosophy is to try and be in the top five percent in anything that we do. Again, when you start to benchmark yourself across the sector, ultimately you go to financial metrics pretty quickly to be able to do that in an objective manner.

Financial success is of course important to you, but in terms of return on investment you take a broader view and include things like labour, time and technology. Our topic today is the costs, risks and benefits of using composted mulch on vineyards. Can you tell me what exactly you use on your vineyards?

AK: Effectively, we’ve done several different trial works with a lot of different products. The products that we’ve mainly settled on now are the composted green organic mulches. So it’s a green organic waste composted through the Australian Standard 4454. We can have them specifically to different aggregate sizes, and different fines profiles, depending on what we’re trying to do with the product.

Where do you source the product?

AK: Our compost comes from commercial compost suppliers, and in our city there’s two or three main suppliers that do that. The majority of the material that we use comes from a feedstock that is kerbside collected. So, I’m not sure of what happens in other countries, but in Australia you have a two hundred and forty litre green wheelie bin that the home gardener can put their lawn clippings in, their pruning in, and in some circumstances can also put food stuff into the stream. Those bins are collected, taking it off to a processing facility, where they’re composted. That process then will generally do a few things: create a blend and a particle size profile that is what I’ve ordered up. So, that’s where we get our product from.

Regarding the specifications you ask for – do you make specifications for each particular site, or is there just a general blend that you use for all vineyards?

AK: That’s a really good question, and it’s not specifically with our site. I do fiddle with the specifications when I’m trying to ask the product to do something a bit different. If I’m looking for more of a mulch versus a soil conditioner or a fertiliser, I will manipulate the percentage of fines in the product. If I’m looking for a more mulch, water-saving product, then there’s a coarser fragment in there. If I’m looking for, sort of a multi-vitamin for my vines, then I tend to get a blend with a high fraction of fines in it that break down very rapidly and give the vines almost a hit that’s equivalent to green organic fertiliser hit.

Can you give a bit of context to the operation: when did you start using composted mulch, and why?

AK: We started, I’d say, doing that in a substantial way back in 2003, and 2003 in Australia was the start of quite a dry period that spanned over seven years, particularly in the south-eastern areas of South Australia. We went into, you know, on our history it’s recorded as a one-in-one-thousand year drought. So, rather than necessarily just hurl more water at a vineyard, we started looking at the options for investing in some composted green organic mulch, and doing some trial work with that.

We were pretty fortunate that there’d been a fair bit of work done in Australia – Katie Webster, John Buckerfield had done a fair bit of work with the products that we had available to us, so that there was some good, objective, empirical data for us to make some of the decisions that we had to make at a practical, commercial level. So, we weren’t having to start at a zero-base there. I was able to make some of those decisions – reasonably big decisions – and in 2003 we undertook a significant exercise in mulch: over six hundred hectares of vineyard in one year, and thirty-three thousand cubic metres of composted green organic mulch. Probably one of the largest single exercises ever undertaken in the country. We dove in the deep end!

For our audience, that study is the CSIRO Report “Compost as Mulch for Vineyards” by John Buckerfield and Katie Webster, which found that in certain circumstances, using composted mulch can increase yield by up to 35% and mid-summer soil moisture by 30%. But even still with the research, there were of course costs and risks involved in starting a new practice in the vineyards. Can you maybe explain those a little bit? I’m sure you were very cautious even still?

AK: Yeah, we were, certainly, and from a point of view…we mitigated the risks, for want of a better term, based on research. There are a few risks associated with it from the point of view of the type of application, the density, the application ratio – you need to be a bit careful with that. The research was pretty strong on water saving, and that helped facilitate a commercial payback. At the same time, it was pretty simple to do a nutrient analysis of the product, calculate that into our normal fertiliser programmes, and take that out of the three-year breakdown period, and do some economic benefit of that. So, yeah there was a risk, but what I’d call the agri-risks of that were pretty low, pretty controllable from our perspective.

Apart from risks, there are definitely substantial costs with starting to use composted mulch – can you tell me what the costs were?

AK: Because of the volume that we embarked on that project, we had a purpose built spreader made to be able to spread that particular product, and that was a reasonable investment, but in the context of the overall spend it made sense for us to do that rather than use a contractor. But, the costs involved were commercial at the time, and it was relevant to the market at the time; the market was pretty buoyant, we were getting paid reasonable prices for our product, and the economics stacked up. But just to put it in context for you: the compost itself was around about, just in rough terminology – but around about two-thousand dollars a hectare in material, but it cost you around four-hundred and fifty to five-hundred dollars to actually apply it to the paddock. So you’re looking at around about a two-and-a-half thousand dollar expenditure.

And that’s in Australian dollars, which would be roughly 2300 US dollars, and 1700 euro.

AK: Yeah. And just to put some context around that’s in the background spend of about six-and-a-half thousand dollars per hectare of normal operating expense. So in a single year we loaded thirty percent on top of our annual operating expense to do the exercise; but again, the research was showing that you would get three years worth of benefit out of it – and again, like all good accountants, you just spread that over that period as well.

So in one year you added 30% extra to your annual operating expenses to do it, but like you said the research showed that it lasts 3 years, so spread over three years, it adds just 10% to the operating expenses annually. Those costs were predicted costs, but were there any costs, or risks, that popped up during the operations that you hadn’t accounted for?

AK: Yeah, I’ve spoken about our experience on a number of occasions in our industry level, but I had one of those crucible moments when I was interstate on one of our other properties and I received a phone call from one of the managers from one of the sites that were spraying this material to inform me they’d identified some contaminants in the product. And this kerbside collected material does have some contaminant background in it, whether it be glass or stone, or anything that goes into your green wheelie bin.

But imagine our surprise when we started identifying syringes in the product; and that ground our operation to a hold, as we had to embark on a whole series of risk assessments. And our understanding as to what happened with that is, a long story short, and a lot of effort short, was that obviously the food stream had been contaminated at some point in time with syringe containers, and had been through the composting process. And we ended up – on our six hundred hectares – having to rake the entire area, and after going through that process we identified over four hundred new syringes in the material that had to be extracted out of that material.

So, it’s probably a bit unusual that you see me sitting here still being a card-carrying supporter of compost after grinding our business to a halt and creating an amazing logistics and practical [impact] on our business that we still deal with today. But what we had to do was understand very clearly that those contaminants represented a negligible risk that we had to put in procedures to manage around that – including identifying those risks to visitors to our properties, and our customers. So, we got together as a business and we looked at those risks and fundamentally we decided as a group that the benefits we were targeting and the support that we had for the product still mandated that we were comfortable to move forward with that.

We worked with the industry pretty hard to make sure that didn’t happen to any other group, and the industry responded pretty well. But I think coming out of the back of that, and the message that I recount to people, looking at that kerbside collected feedstock, is that you need to be careful about the fact that…really, the syringes were acute and emotive, but what they represented to me was just risk, and that if syringes can find themselves in your feedstock stream, then there are probably no rules about that, and as a community – as a supply chain – we really need to work hard on making sure that the public who are putting material into their green wheelie bins, understand the implications and the ramifications of the decisions that they make on their front lawn.

Yes, and we’ve spoken a lot about education in the past, and the importance of connecting people with the process so that they understand where their organic materials go and what happens with them. For example, when speaking with Gerry Gillespie of City to Soil, he told us about their extremely low contamination rates, and he attributes that simply to making people understand what happens with their organic materials.

We go into detail about this in Lesson 4 of our online course on Compostory.org, and we go through the whole process of how to set up an education and communications strategy when you’re implementing a new kerbside system – so anyone who is interested can check that out.

But as a business like yourself, what can you do to help control the contamination rate?

AK: I think that if I was talking to – well I guess we are potentially talking to people considering using it – you really need to do your homework with your suppliers, you need to do the homework on the product. And I’m not sure of the standards in other countries, but there’s an Australian standard for composted green organic, and it’s a basic standard but it’s a good Australian, or international, standard as to what actual process it has to go through. That’s a really good first start. It’s not everything, and frankly it’s the base hurdle that the product should jump over, and that helps manage some of the agri-risks, but it also demonstrates that this is actually operating in a sustainable, professional manner.

And then you really need to go around and get your hands dirty and have a look at the product, look at the process; and understand that if you’re just buying a couple of bags, it’s a return on your time, really, but if you’re looking at embedding it into your production systems, then it’s imperative that you go and have a look at not only the process, but I’d argue [you need to] understand very clearly where the supply is coming from. And ten or eleven years down the track, we’re quite discerning about feedstocks going into our composted green organic mulches. We still use kerbside materials, but we also use very specific streams, and we also have a supply base that will create blends from specific streams for me as well.

My experience with the industry is that it’s pretty proactive in that context. Every day the technology improves for sifting and sorting and managing contamination in the kerbside products, but nothing beats stopping it getting in there. And I think that as a community, as an industry, there’s still a lot of work to be done to make the home gardener understand the sheer responsibility that they have. Because it dramatically adds to the cost; it dramatically impacts on the decision-making of blokes like me, and if we could remove those variables – if we had a magic wand that could remove those variables, then look out, because the product is a very powerful product.

Going back a bit, contamination was the biggest risk you encountered, but for costs – what were the biggest costs that you experienced, perhaps transportation of the product was the biggest cost?

AK: Definitely the distance to the producer is really important. It doesn’t weigh a lot, so the bulk density of the product generally, you know, you can only jam so much in a truck. So, there’s a large volume for weight that you’re transporting. So, I guess this is where some of the other products have gone to [muffled] structure and try to get a bulk density increase, but unfortunately you lose some of the benefit of that loose, open-aired structure that you’re looking for with the mulch.

So, certainly transport is a big factor. It’s probably dangerous for me to talk about percentages of that, because it’s so variable depending upon how far you are from… But it can range from ten percent of the product cost, to forty percent of the product cost.

Let’s talk about the strategy for using the composted green organic mulch on your vineyards: I know you’re keen to get the best value out of the product, so how do you apply the composted mulch to achieve this?

AK: We started with a very blanket approach, non sophisticated; start at one corner of the paddock and go to the other corner, and that was as sophisticated as our strategy got, because we were looking for that water-saving, fertiliser input benefit across the whole board. Then we found, almost by accident – we use remote sensor satellite imagery on our vineyards to look at biomass – and what we found by accident when looking at some of those images – after we’d done the mulching work where we’d put in some trial works – was we were having some profound impacts where we were taking low biomass, low vigour areas and really dramatically shifting those profiles.

And it got us thinking about how we can maximise the benefit of that, and it dovetailed into the fact that, as the product is reasonably expensive, you want to put it where it’s going to give you maximum value. And we started to do some trial work on that, where we looked at taking it into the weaker sections of our paddocks, applying it to those, and then looking for a response out of that. So, just to give you a bit of a background as to that in viticulture especially: vineyards are very linear. They’re built on trellises and they’re very linear, and no matter how accurate you were with your source surveys and your selection of the paddock, you end up having high vigour areas, or stronger areas, and some weaker patches on shallower soils.

And managing that vigour variance…that’s viticulture 101. And we do that generically be managing our fertiliser and trying to trim, or managing our irrigation as best as we can, but you end up trying to average that out against the whole block. And what we started to do was some experimental work where we just went into the weak sections and apply it, and then task the satellite again to have it look at another image to see if we could even out the vigour. It was really quite astounding, the responses that we were having on that – and I guess that satellite imagery allowed us to objectively validate that as well.

At this point you started to look at the cost benefit of the mulch – so what were your findings?

AK: What we found was, if I explain to you: you might have a ten hectare paddock that might be contracted to a certain customer and they might say you can deliver a hundred tonnes off that block. If that block is delivering you a hundred tonne, that’s great and everybody’s happy. But in reality, what happens in most paddocks is that half that paddock might be delivering you twelve tonne to the hectare, and the other half of the paddock might be giving you eight tonne to the hectare. That’s really crude, but you’ve got sections that are weak and harder than other sections. And if at the end of the day the equation equals what your customer wants, then everybody’s happy.

But if you’ve got a situation where you’re under performing because the vineyard is not delivering to its capacity, intrinsically what you try to do to meet that contractual opportunity is you try to drive the vineyard a bit harder. And that exacerbates this variability, if you’ve got a problem, it sort of becomes a spiralling cycle at that point. One of the great things we found with the mulch was – when we started to put GPS sensors on our harvesters, and we tracked and found this new variation that was happening in our paddocks, and we lined them up with our biomass images from the satellite’s on the canopy densities – that the correlations were pretty good.

So, we figured that if we can make the weaker sections of our paddocks work a bit harder, then we don’t have to drive the whole paddock up just to meet those obligations and meet those opportunities. And that’s where we really started to look at good, positive returns on investment. We did some work that we published a bit of, that showed the capacity to take areas, increase those in yield by twenty percent, or thereabouts. And depending on your price profiles – at that particular time it was a single year payback for us with a three-year delivery of that result. So, besides the commercial repo, it actually improved our product. It created a more even vineyard block, so our customers are happy; we’re happy because we’re meeting the targets, and we’ve actually minimised our requirement to spend money on the mulch as well. So we’re just putting it where we’re getting maximum return on it.

You experienced a single-year payback with a three-year result, that’s really excellent, though I suppose that’s particular to your experience?

AK: Yeah, the key point that I’d like to make, or I think is really important, is if I was to run that metric again today in a different price metric, different yield parameters…you have to be very careful, it’s going to be very specific to your site and the market you’re playing with. If you’re growing a very high quality product and where a tonne to the hectare makes a big difference because of the price point, then it amplifies the impacts. If you’re in a different quality spectrum then…you need to do the numbers yourself on that. But really, the key return on investment is if you’ve got latent potential, or under performing potential, and you can capitalise on that by returning that area to a better performing area. And therefore there’s a market for that fruit, there’s an opportunity to sell it at a certain price point.

The thing that jumps out to me is the 20% increase in yield. How was the quality of the grapes themselves? Because more does not mean better quality, necessarily.

AK: This is the other point: you’ve got to be really careful with that, because if you’ve got a vine that’s operating at a certain potential and you just make more vigorous to grow more tonnes, well there’s a threshold in viticulture where that could potentially detract from the quality of the grape. And that, again, to me is the advantage of targeting the weak areas that are under performing, and potentially haven’t got enough leaf over the top and have maybe too-exposed fruit: you can create a situation where you can grow a more healthy canopy on that vine and get better protection for the fruit, and at the very least, improve the quality of those under performing areas.

You mentioned water saving benefits and we talked about the study – but how much water did you save then in the end?

AK: We went into the whole exercise with a view that we were potentially going to save thirty percent of our water, but it was a particularly dry year – again, we were heading into the drought – so we almost abandoned the need for that. We almost ignored the water saving component of it; we wanted to maintain the biomass. So what we found was our ability, with the mulch on-board, to create a more healthy canopy than we otherwise would have at the same water level. The research that Katie Webster and John Buckingfield did – that’s really quite categorical in that they were looking at around a thirty percent water saving. And I’ve no concerns about that, that in the right applications you can deliver that. We personally now use the products in more of a remedial sense, and spatially remedially. So our whole aim is to take a block and be able to just apply a normal water level, rather than have to apply more water to compensate for the weak area of the block. So, we can fix the weak area and then just water the entire area normally.

Is there anything else that viticulturalists need to keep in mind in order to achieve success using composted mulch?

AK: I’m a huge fan, absolutely huge fan, of trialling everything. It costs virtually nothing to go and put mulch on a few rows and see what happens. And just record it; put a control in place, put a treatment in place, do that in three different varieties in three different soil types, and you’ll learn for yourself. And that’s ultimately how we started and ultimately what gave us the confidence to go really broad-acre on some of this strategy. But it started with two rows of vines and…You know, wiggle a finger and stick it in the air and see what happens! You know, there’s a bit more science behind it, because you can measure it and do the analytics that you need to do, but….

At the same time, I’d say it’s not for every site. If you’re on a high-vigour site or a wet site, you need to be very, very cautious about it, and you’d need to really have a look and a hard think about the applications for that. And my overriding comment with these products is just to know the source and know the quality of the product. And don’t be afraid to ask; don’t be afraid to have the analysis done, and look at the analysis and make sure you’ve done a little bit of background work on them.

I have one more question before we go. I wonder if you’ve ever considered using cover crops on your vineyards?

AK: It’s interesting, we did, and we compared cover crops. We looked at the biomass that we can generate with a cover crop, and the reality is we just can’t grow, internally, enough cover crop to make a material difference. A really interesting thing we did with cover crops on one of our properties was – almost using the same theory that we did with the satellite images – we’d grow cover crops in all of the vineyard block, and we use a forage harvester (which is a machine that cuts and collects the cover crop) to take it out of the paddock and compost it, and then bring it back in and spread it on the weaker parts of the block again. So, we’re actually using a cover crop to potentially de-vigour the high vigour areas, and at the same time taking the nutrients from there and transplanting them – with the compost process in between. We found that to be a really good way to draw down on a high vigour area by planting a hungry cover crop, and yet put that benefit back into the same paddock where it helps you even it out.

Fascinating, a really interesting way to use cover crops to control the vigour of the vineyard. And unfortunately Ashley, that’s all we have time for. Thanks for coming on the show today.

AK: Thanks!

Toxic Dump Transformation: A Story from India

This episode corresponds to Lesson 1 of our online course.

In this tenth episode, Master Composter Peter Ash tells us how he helped transform a hospital dump in Kerala, India, from a toxic wasteland into a lush environment – with a dramatic drop in heavy metal quantities in the soil – by using recycling and vermicomposting techniques.

Thank you to the BioCycle for making this episode possible.

BioCycle, the Organics Recycling Authority, is the leading magazine and website on composting, food waste management, anaerobic digestion and renewable energy from organics recycling. Subscribe to BioCycle and get access to every article published over the last 10 years, and sign up for @BioCycle, our free biweekly e-bulletin. For more, visit www.biocycle.net.

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TRANSCRIPT:

EM: Just to set the scene a bit, Peter, can you tell us a bit about the AIMS hospital and where it’s situated?

PA: The hospital, AIMS: Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Centre, they call it AIMS for short. And that, it was really a trip, because this had been a twelve-bed hospital about twenty years ago. And it turned, it grew up, like: everything that…where Amma goes, wherever she has a school or any kind of centre, it just goes from zero to a hundred miles an hour in no time.

So this hospital went from a twelve bed hospital to now a fifteen hundred bed, state of the art hospital and research centre, Med school, dental college, nursing college, school of pharmacology, you know, the whole thing. And with Amma, if you can pay, you pay. And if you can’t, you come and you get served, and you bring your family, and the family stays in the guest house while the patient’s being, you know, treated in the hospital, and everybody eats for super-cheap, and you stay until, you know, everything’s fine, and then you go home.

And so, there’s probably seven to ten thousand students that serve over, probably, twelve hundred patients every day. There’s thousands of employees. And it’s all coastal, tropical wetlands environment. And the hospital, it’s about 7 kilometers inland from the Arabian Sea. The city of Kochi, it’s a huge metropolitan area, you know, India is so densely populated. So there’s Edappally and Ernakulam, all these communities that just all run together – it’s just huge and it’s all interconnected with these waterways.

EM: Okay right, so it’s a densely populated area, and a massive hospital.

PA: Mh-hm.

EM:  And often hospitals use incinerators to burn the medical waste – but you were telling me that this one didn’t have an incinerator the first few years, and they were just dumping the medical waste onto the island itself. So, what did the dumping ground look like when you got there – and what did you do?

PA:  Basically, when I got to AIMS, the first thing I did was a big waste audit and a site assessment. And they took me around and showed me different properties, and the property I picked was right across this backwater channel connected to the Arabian Sea, to this big island that’s just, not even a meter above sea level. You know, it’s mushy in places. But, where they had been boating the waste, and the food waste – they were just dumping it in the backwaters – but all the other waste, if they couldn’t just easily recycle it, they were taking it over to the island and they were dumping it in pools of water or burning –

EM: And this was from the hospital?

PA: Yes. And for years before they got the incinerator, they had just been taking the hospital waste over to the island and burning it – right on the surface of the island. They took, like, metal rods, stuck them in the ground and made, kind of a rack so they could get some air in it, and they just put the bags…. I’ve got pictures of when I first arrived on the island where they had red hospital waste, you know, medical waste on this rack where they were burning. And the island, right there where they were dumping and burning was so dead that there was no insects, there was no birds, you know, it was just completely dead. And I said, “okay, this is the spot. This is where we’re going to do it. We’re going to have to build a big roof, so we can compost during monsoon season…”.

So, they said, “Well, what do you need?”

“Yeah, well I need this roof…”

“How big?”

“Well, like, by this, by that”

“Okay”

So, they laid it out and they started digging holes to pour concrete to hold up the pillars to hold this roof up. And then all the dumping and stuff that I’d seen, I said “Well” you know, “no more dumping, no more burning. We’re going to sort through this, we’re going to do better recycling. If it’s recyclable and it’s already over here now, we’re going to wash it and send it back to be recycled. If it can’t be recycling, then we’ll bag it up and we’ll send it to the proper incinerator, but no more dumping, no more burning”.

But when they started digging these holes for the footings, they’re like a meter wide, and they’d dig down so they can pour concrete and get…because it’s like the roof…like almost…our initial roof was almost the size of, like, a football field, because we had to build these big windrows of compost. Here we’re talking each day we were going to be composting six to eight metric tons of material a day. So, we’re building these long windrows, you know. We build a pile and then we’d add onto it the next day and add onto it the next day, until we run out of space. So when they start digging these holes, all this stuff starts coming out of the black mud. Syringes, blood vials – with blood still in them – catheters, IV bags, medicine packets…I mean, it was just, it was nasty. It was terrible. And I’m going, “Oh my God”. And they had told me the reason that Amma wanted me to come back was to start composting because they were under a lot of pressure from the State Pollution Control Board. And when I saw what was coming out of the mud, then I understood that, okay, this is not about composting the food waste, this is about the hospital’s impact on the environment.

EM: Hmm, I see…

PA: And Kerala has laws, I mean, they’ve got an environmental policy, they’ve got laws – state laws, federal laws. It’s just that, enforcing laws – they don’t, like, fine you. What they do is, they tell you “Okay, you can’t build anymore”. And with Amma, everything is growing, you know: more students, more patients, more technology, you know. So everything’s got to keep…they’ve got to keep building. And so, we couldn’t hold still. So we had to show them we were getting better.

And we actually, we cleaned up everything we could off the surface, and if it was recyclable, we washed it and bagged it up and sent it back to be recycled. If it couldn’t be recycled, we sent it back to go into the incinerator. What was buried in the mud we couldn’t do anything about because they hole fills up with water, you know. And this was really black, nasty, dangerous toxic mud, you know, with needles and…so we had to be careful.

So what we did was: once we cleaned the surface up, then we just, we took, like, palm fronds and, you know, things that were growing along the water edge. And we laid them out over the surface of the spongy soil, just so we wouldn’t sink into the mud, and we built our compost windrow on top of that, and then we build another one next to it. In two or three days we’d have a whole row of compost.  And in the island there was a little channel, where they had been boating with the waste and they’d been dumping on either side. And so, on either side of this little channel, we had a plot where we were making compost. And as soon as we’d turned and spread out the compost on one spot, we’d go right back in there and start composting again. And then we’d be turning and spreading on the other side, and we just kept going back and forth, and we did that for six months waiting for the roof to be finished and the floor to be compacted so that we could get a piece of equipment to turn our windrows by equipment.

EM: Okay.

PA: So, in the six months we’d built about eighteen inches of finished compost on top of the black toxic mud.

EM: Mh-hm…

PA: And before we got too far along, I went and I took a soil sample of the mud – about the upper four to eight inches of mud in this one area. And I had it tested for heavy metals. And I asked them to test for every metal you can test for, and there was only one metal that was not found: antimony. But mercury, lead, selenium, you know, arsenic, it was all in there. And it was way over limits. And we knew that was what it was going to be.

I also took a sample of the river sediment because we’re not the only polluters, you know: all that huge metropolitan area – there’s chemicals, and open sewer lines, and you name it, and the rains are running off, you know. But we did find that, there where I sampled where the dumping and burning had been going on, it was more toxic there than in the river, especially for certain metals.

EM: Mh-hm, okay…

PA: And, but anyway, so then, after six months of composting out in the open, we saw that now there’s all kinds of insects and stuff, you know, in the compost and birds are coming, you know, so it’s, like, coming alive – and then there’s seeds sprouting out of the compost. So we just come out and looked at each other and we go, “Hey, that’s pretty cool. Let’s bring in some clean soil now and mix it, and we’ll start planting stuff, you know, and we’ll restore the habitat here.

EM: That’s incredible. And what else were you doing? You were vermicomposting as well, right?

PA: Yeah. And I’d done some research, you know, like, how people were composting with worms in India, and so we build our own, kind of, open tank system: it’s just basically you build walls about waist-high on a cement floor, you put a roof over it, you put netting between the wall that’s about a meter high or less, up to the rood so it’s shaded and so birds can’t get in. And you have a little drainage on the floor so if there’s any liquid leaching out of the vermicompost pile, then you can capture that because it’s got nutrients in it. And so we started a lot of vermicomposting.

And then when we started planting plants, we used a lot of the fresh vermicompost to plant the plants with. So we knew we were inoculating the soil with earthworms, you know: there’s going to be some babies, there’s going to be some hatching eggs. And I knew that, from research that I’d done, that worms actually extract heavy metals out of the food that they’re eating. So getting earthworms into this new ecosystem that we’re building is going to be a good thing.

EM: Yeah, and we’ll talk a bit about what happened with the soil in a minute. Just before that though, can you give me a little bit more information on the logistics of the whole thing, and equipment you were using? How did you…?

PA: You know, everything gets boated over to the island – everything. You know, all the construction materials, all the cement blocks, the sand, the roofing materials, and then, you know, all of our plants for gardening and you know. And then all the food waste and the woodchips and…and then, we found this manufacturer in India that made this agricultural shredder, and then we bought this shredding machine to shred palm fronds and…. But we needed to shred a lot of wet materials too, like fresh coconut and green coconut palm fronds, and that wet stuff tends to clog up a lot of material. And so we found that this shredder machine – we bought a little one and we tested it, and then we had our own mechanics and fabricators and engineers look at it, and we told them what we needed and so we made some modifications to it. And then we took it back to the manufacturer and we said, “Look: we want to buy the big model, in fact we want to buy a couple of them, but we need these modifications build into it, because we’ve got to run a lot of wet stuff through it, and the way it’s designed right now, it clogs up. So we worked with the manufacturer and they built us, you know, the one that we needed.

But then we also needed some compost turning equipment, but nobody in India really makes composting equipment, you know: commercial scale composting equipment – there’s no compost turners, there’s no big filtering machines for compost. So, you know, I found a YouTube video of a farmer in Northern California that built his own compost windrow turner by taking the rear axle out of a heavy truck and just done a bunch of modifications: he welded this big tube onto the wheel hub, and he connected the differential onto the tractor on the power take off, you know, the tractor, to drive this differential.

Then he had this big tube with these paddles welded on it, so that you could lower it down next to the compost pile and you could drive the tractor beside the pile, and this tube with these paddles on it is now going to turn – and the thing is, this tractor is going forward, but this tube, this big metal pipe with these paddles on it, has got to turn the opposite direction; it’s got to be going, like, in reverse, as opposed…you know, so it can lift up the pile with, you know, these paddles welded to it: lift it up and throw it up into the air to get it aerated. And at the same time, we spiraled them around the tubes, so that it would actually throw the edges of the pile towards the middle, and the middle of the pile to the outside. Because that’s what we want: we want the middle of the pile on the outside, and we want the outside of the pile moved to the inside. So, we bought a tractor, and we built the compost windrow turner to put on it.

EM: That’s brilliant. And going back to the soil now – what was it like after all the work you were doing?

PA:  Yeah, so I’ll tell you what, here’s what happened was: last April, I went to the very same site that I took the original sample. And I dug down below the compost and the imported soil, down into the same black mud that I took the original sample from. And so I went and I did the same thing, in the same area, in the same soil layer, and I took that sample in. And it turned out that, like, in the upper eight to ten inches of that same original layer, we reduced three of the metals to non-detectible levels. Two others, we reduced them so that they’re still detectable, but they’re within safe limits for food consumption. There’s still three metals that we’ve reduced by at least fifty percent, but are still too high for human consumption.

EM: That’s still incredible, though, isn’t it?

PA: It is, especially when you consider that so much of the food in India is grown with overdoses of toxic chemical pesticides and fertilisers and stuff, that if that food was tested compared to the plants that are being grown on the island, they probably wouldn’t be much different.

EM: Okay, interesting…

PA: And we did, in just over three years, what we did on that island – reducing the metals the way we did – that’s unheard of! It’s unheard of. You know, and, so we’ve written some papers and I’ve presented this to different conferences…I presented this last fall to the Global Humanitarian Technology Conference in San José, California. We had another presentation at a conference held in India, also late last summer.

EM: Okay cool, so you’ve been busy trying to get the word out about this. And how do you explain to people what happened with the soil – do you know how exactly the results came about?

PA: Yeah, so what we’re finding is, like, there are a lot of different things that are happening, and we don’t know all the answers, you know, that how this could happen so quickly. We know that the earthworms are playing a part; we know that some of the plants are accumulators, or hyper-accumulators or metals. So we can plant certain plants that will pull metals out of the soil. And then, what do you do with the plant, you know? Can you compost it? Can you keylate it? Can you change the form of the metal? And then the earthworms, you know, pulling metals out: what happens when the earthworm fills up with all these metals and then it dies? Well, another earthworm eats it, so it keeps it tied up.

And then there’s some keylation that takes place, and it’s some kind of an ion exchange, especially with carbon molecules, apparently, and where there’s active fungi in the soil. You know, and one of the things we did too was we took a biological testing of the soil. Normally, farmers and gardeners to a chemical soil test, you know, they look for NPK, pH and EC – they look at the nitrogen, the potassium, the phosphorous, you know, that kind of thing. And then they want to know, like, how the chlorides – how salty is the soil. So that kind of a typical chemical test – but that’s just really supporting the chemical companies, because then they want to sell you more nitrogen, or more phosphorous, or something to condition the soil with. But if you just make compost, and you get the organic material, and you get all the microorganisms in the soil, then everything takes care of itself. The soil pH neutralises, and then these metals start to get tied up. They get keylated – they pick up or they lose an ion, and now it’s still lead or mercury, or whatever, but it’s no longer in a toxic form that enters into the food chain.

EM: Yeah, exactly. And it’s amazing to see it actually happening!

PA: Absolutely.

EM: And before we go now – because we don’t have much time – is there anything else you’d like to add, or some advice you’d like to give to people listening in?

PA: Well, you know: whether it’s composting or habitat restoration, or reforestation, or just permaculture design, or even just backyard gardening, you know, the key that I see is that: we just need to look at natural ecosystems – how is nature doing this? You know? What we need to do is mimic nature. Assist nature. As gardeners and farmers, when we see pests or we see weeds, we often ask the wrong questions. We go, “What fertiliser do I need?” or “What pesticide do I need”, you know? And that’s the wrong question. Those are all wrong questions.

We need to look at what’s out of balance in the soil, in the ecosystem. What’s out of balance so that these pests are coming? Why are the pests there, why are the weeds there? These are nature’s cleanup crew. The plant diseases and the insect pests are nature coming in and taking out a plant that can’t live there because something’s missing. And what’s missing is the microbiology. If all the microbiology is in place, then the plant will feed itself and be happy and healthy.

EM: That’s great advice, Peter. But that’s all we have time for now. Thank you very much for coming on the show to speak with us.

PA: My pleasure.

EM: All right, okay thanks.

PA: Thank you.

EM: Bye.

PA: Bye.