The Trash Tour

Posted by Katherine Bercik

OU students, staff tour the World of Waste in Earth Month celebrations

The average New Yorker throws out 5.5 pounds of trash each day, and most of that trash is exported to Pennsylvania and Ohio, according to Elizabeth Royte’s investigative 2005 book Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. The book poses a serious question: Where does our trash go?

In hopes of finding the answer to this question, students and staff at Ohio University piled into three small buses to investigate, participating in the World of Waste Tour on Friday, April 24.

The tour was a part of the Earth Month 2009 festivities that were hosted by the university’s Office of Sustainability. Led by Sustainability Coordinator Sonia Marcus, the World of Waste was a sequel to last year’s Cycle of Coal tour. Participants visited the university’s composting unit, an area sludge farm, landfill and recycling center.

1. OU Composting Unit

The trash tourists first saw the university’s in-vessel composting unit, which Marcus referred to as the “gem” of the Office of Sustainability. It is the largest composting unit on any U.S. college or campus and is able to turn food and landscape waste into soil within 14 days.

According to the Office of Sustainability’s Web site, the unit has composted 16.4 tons of food waste and 10 tons of yard waste in the first quarter of 2009. Landscape waste (mostly composted wood chips) is added to mix to speed up and lessen the smell of the process.

By regulating the temperature and moisture within the machine, grounds crew employees can accelerate the decomposition process. The unit is composting food waste only from OU’s Central Foods Facility, receiving 800 to 1,000 pounds a day. Marcus stated that food waste from the dining halls will be included into the program by this fall.

The system employs other sustainable functions. The unit is powered by a 10-kilowatt solar photovoltaic array. Rainwater harvested through the pole barn roof is used for the unit’s moisture. The building that houses the unit is built for day lighting, the use of sunlight for lighting, and is insulated by silver panels. Even the pavement leading to the unit was reclaimed from old parking lots.

2. Sludge Farm

The next World of Waste stop was a location that also tries to put waste to good use, though it may not be as appealing in sound, or smell. Ron Lucas, who works for the Athens City Street Maintenance Department, showed visitors a sludge farm near the Hocking River.

On sludge farms, raw sewage waste – the sediment that settles within waste water – is injected into the soil. The solid waste comes from the area’s waste water treatment plant and is brought to the farm in a large tanker, where the sludge is pumped into the ground through a hose-like device.

Lucas insisted that the process produces a “nice fertile soil,” but some of the World or Waste visitors did not appear convinced. The farm is used to grow corn and soybeans used in dog and cat food. Nothing produced on the farm is for human consumption. Lucas stated that people would never eat anything grown from a sludge farm. This may be because the main ingredient for the fertilizer is human waste, and anything else that gets flushed down the toilet.

3. Athens Hocking Reclamation Landfill

The third site visited was the landfill to which OU’s trash is transported – the Athens Hocking Reclamation Landfill outside of Nelsonville. Site manager Mark Ruof showed visitors the landfill from both faraway and up close. One of the first things visitors noticed was the smell, which is caused by hydrogen sulfide emissions.

Ruof considered the landfill, which used to be an old strip mine, to be a small to medium size site. He stated that the area receives 200,000 tons of garbage annually during a “good year.” With the economic recession, the garbage collectors have not been gathering as much waste, Ruof said. As of now, the site is home to 3-4 million tons of waste.

It is important that people do not think of landfills as open dumps. Open dumps are large piles of trash above the land’s surface, landfills are places where trash is shredded, compacted, and then buried underneath layers of sand, clay and dirt. Modern landfills are also protected against uncontrolled leaking by multiple layers of clay and thin plastic foil liners on the bottom of the pit. Although a little safer than open dumps, there are still many environmental problems surrounding landfills.

All landfills emit gases, such as methane gas. The Nelsonville site does not produce enough methane for collection. It has also experienced problems with leachate, which is a by-product of material decomposition that enters into the site’s groundwater. Ruof attributed this leachate to large amounts of decomposing plastics within the landfill.

When visitors went down to the actual site, they were able to see a wide assortment of materials, from plastic bottles to old lawn mowers. One of the disheartening aspects about the landfill was how many materials there were that could have been recycled. This takes the World of Waste tour to its last stop.

Athens Hocking Recycling Center

Of the material recovered at the Athens Hocking Recycling Center 98 percent of it is resold into the commodity market, said Roger Bails, the center’s manager. Although most of the material is sold back into the community, the center does not generate a large profit. The center is funded by OU and the city of Athens.

“You don’t go into (recycling) to make money,” Bails said.

The center collects regular materials such as aluminum, tin and steel cans, newspaper, cardboard and paperboard, but there are some restrictions on the types of plastics and glass collected. The center collects No. 1 and 2 plastic and clear, green or brown glass only.

Prices for recycling fluctuate with the market, which in some instances has paradox effects: If too many people recycle their materials, prices go down, which makes recycling economically less effective and thus less attractive, which raises serious questions about the usefulness of the market mechanism.