The College and the town of Hanover will open a composting facility next week in an attempt to ease the pressure on landfill space and reduce waste-dumping costs.
Located just two miles from campus, near the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the new composting site should save space, time, money and valuable natural resources, according to Composting Intern for Dartmouth Dining Services Julie Moynihan '98.
Materials Management Coordinator Bill Hochstin said, "We're taking material which would have been wasted and would have taken up valuable space in the landfill and we're creating a very useful product."
At the site, the managed decomposition of organic matter, like banana peels, yard waste and pizza boxes, will produce a nutrient-rich soil to be used and sold.
The idea for composting at the College originated in 1988 when a report on campus waste found that, although the College has a recycling rate of 35 to 40 percent, an estimated 51 percent of the remaining waste stream could be composted, Hochstin said.
A few years later, when the Dartmouth Organic Farm was founded at Fullington Farm, Facilities Operations and Management started a small composting area at the site, and used the soil product on the organic garden and College athletic fields.
Seeing how easy the process was and wanting to expand the program, FO&M intended to build a full composting facility at the Fullington site with a single bay Resource Optimization Technologies box built into a 24-by-50-foot pole barn, Hochstin said.
But the project faced complications, as the Fullington grant precluded building any such structures on the land.
Hanover then made one acre of land available for the facility, and ROT was hired to build, equip and operate it.
Hochstin said the facility will be used by the College for food waste and non-recyclable paper, and by the town of Hanover for land waste.
"We expect the facility to be operating on Monday," Hochstin said. He also told The Dartmouth that organic material collection bins will be placed in the dining halls and dorm bathrooms by the end of this week.
Moynihan said that the facility is relying on students to keep glass, metal and plastic out of the composting bins since these materials contaminate the organic stream.
"Anything that was once part of something living can be composted," she said. "If in doubt, throw it out."
Once food residue is collected and compacted on campus, it will be delivered to the compost site. There it will be mixed with grass clippings and non-recyclable paper, aerated and transformed into a nutrient-rich soil.
In addition to its use at the organic garden, this soil will be used for campus landscaping and sold to local farms, Moynihan said.
With landfills filling up and dumping fees increasing, Hochstin said the College will benefit financially from the new composting site.
Instead of paying $48 dollars per ton to dump the waste at the Lebanon landfill, the College will pay $46 dollars per ton to compost it at the new site.
Transportation will also be easier since the composting facility is nine miles closer to campus than the Lebanon landfill.
The idea for a composting facility has its roots in a project examining waste disposal in Thayer Dining Hall conducted by an environmental studies class 10 years ago. The class found that 51 percent of the waste in Thayer could be composted, and from that report grew the current Dartmouth Recycles program.
In 1990, the College began to compost waste for reuse on campus.
The first composting site was a 10,000 square feet plot at the Organic Farm.
Preplate vegetable material from the preparation of salads, unsold bagels, coffee grounds and filters and wet paper towels were composted at this site.
