Concordia Journal Home > Archives > September 11, 2008 issue >

Reducing & reusing on a massive scale 

By Karen Herland

The latte you had at the Science Café and the orange peel left over from snack time at the Loyola daycare are helping to make the campus a little greener.

When Louise Hénault-Éthier and Alexis Fortin have finished bringing staff and consumers on board across the entire university, 100 tonnes of Concordia waste each year will be transformed into 40-50 tonnes of nutrient-rich compost.

“That will cover the lawns at Loyola with a quarter inch of compost each year, which is what they need as fertilizer,” said Hénault-Éthier. Considering that last year the R4 project that she now runs produced 1.2 tonnes of compost (enough for the flowers around the AD Building at Loyola) the project seems fairly ambitious.

But Hénault-Éthier, with the help of Fortin, hired through funding from Environment Canada, are behind a pilot project making Concordia the first academic institution to benefit from a state-of-the-art industrial composter, produced in Brome, Que.

The automated, entirely enclosed continuous system machine was designed for farmers to compost the waste from animal carcasses, but similar systems are used for all kinds of organic waste. Waste is rotated automatically at regular intervals, allowing it to aerate and speed up the transition from garbage to fertilizer. Once it hits capacity, the machine should be steadily producing compost that can be used at Loyola, and on the grounds of the Grey Nuns complex.

Most home composters are discouraged from using ‘resistant’ materials like dairy, dough, animal products and oils, since they take much longer to break down, require high temperatures to kill potentially dangerous pathogens and can create problems with rodents attracted to the rotting waste. The $35,000 machine is capable of handling more material, which in turn heats up to higher temperatures than smaller scale operations can manage. According to Hénault-Éthier, the increased potential means that we fall just under the threshold for requiring a license as a waste-management facility.

The previous systems were smaller scale, hand-built affairs that had limited capacity. The daycare, Science Café, Chartwell’s kitchen and some labs fed the Loyola system with organic waste, primarily fruit and vegetable, and coffee grounds. Java U and the Hall 7th floor cafeteria collected waste for vermicomposting at the Sir George Greenhouse. Any extra waste could be shipped out to Loyola in recycling trucks. Currently glass and metal produced on both campuses is collected at Loyola and paper and cardboard is collected downtown. Sending that material back and forth in trucks insures that trucks never roll empty and costs are reduced by having a single pick-up point for materials. Those same trucks can shuttle compostable waste, and finished compost back and forth where it is needed.

Hénault-Éthier credits the university with being very supportive of the endeavour.
The composter was set up in June, with extra help from the Sustainability Action Fund, Facilities Management, Environ-mental Health and Safety, the Concordia Council on Student Life and some funding through government programs. Small scale testing was done over the summer to determine how much energy was required to harvest compostable material, how high temperatures got, and the machine’s capacity. The plan is to increase sources of waste steadily at the rate of 20 tonnes per year so that in five years, the 100-tonne input goal is reached.

Hénault-Éthier points out that this will require a lot of training and participation from custodial and food service staff, as well as sensitization and recuperation facilities made available to consumers. Eventually, the pair hopes to be able to feed the composter about 400 kg per week with food waste.

Concordia was the first university to be certified ICI on recycle by Recyc-Quebec in 2007. R4 Compost received recognition by the City of Montreal and the Conseil régional de l’environnement in 2007 and was awarded a Forces AVENIR – Environment category prize in 2007 for its composting program. R4 is also currently working on a technical guide with the financial support of Recyc-Québec that will teach other institutions, businesses and industries how to implement their own composting programs.