Industrial Composting
by Chris Tilley
More and more cities have set goal for how much waste they are diverting from the normal waste stream. San Francisco has set a goal of 75% diverted. As stated in last weeks article some numbers on the breakdown of your average waste:
- 52 Percent Organic and there for compostable
- 37 Percent Recyclable
- 11 Percent Actual waste that needs to be landfilled
A number of cities are using industrial scale composting operations to deal with the organic component of the waste stream.
First up is Transform Composting. They provided the worm composter that Matt and Steph are using on the Eco-RV. They also design, build and equip these industrial composting facilities. They are currently designing a 200 tonne per day facility in Welland Ontario and have another 200 tonne per day facility under construction in China.(source) Composting involves microbes and those need air to do their job. Transform compost holds the patent on the AirFloor that allows air in to the pile.
Second up is the Edmonton Facility. They are the largest composting facility in North America capable of processing 1200 tonnes per day.(source) The website has an excellent diagram of the process plus lots of pictures.
Third up is Wright Environmental Management. They make in vessel systems where you but the waste in one end in a continuous fashion and compost comes out the other end. They also have a good animation on how their system works. Each of their tunnels is capable of processing 25 tonnes per day. The two in the picture above together can process 50 Tonnes per day. One of their clients is Walt Disney World who in 2004 composted 5600 tonnes of food scraps from its restaurants. They then use some of that compost on site.(source)
One of the big questions is do these places smell? Done right they don’t. All of these systems have computer monitoring to watch temperature, moisture, air flow and other variables to keep the smell down. What smells do occur can be dealt with filters.
So these places are coming. Doing or own composting in our backyard or balcony is still best as you don’t have the carbon dioxide emissions from trucking the waste. However this is much better than just throwing it in the garbage to go to a landfill.
Please write to about the price of this machine.I would like to buy this machine for bangladesh.
Comment by Shahjahan Ahammed — Monday, July 6, 2009 @ 3:38 pm
A very interesting article on Industrial Composting. Thanks for sharing it.
Comment by Molly — Tuesday, November 10, 2009 @ 1:19 pm
how much is the machine and how can we get one to buy
Comment by ike — Thursday, October 7, 2010 @ 10:20 am