Increasing compost awareness on campus

Exonians crowd the right side exit of Elm Street Dining Hall to pile plate upon plate of half-eaten food on the conveyor belt. Most plates contain scraps of lettuce, shredded chicken wings or apples with one bite taken. With Exeter’s all-you-can-eat buffet-style meals, it is almost impossible to ensure that everyone finishes the food they got, despite waste awareness campaigns. So is all of this wasted?

It depends on how you define waste.

Six years ago, Big Red purchased the first compost pulper as part of Elm Street’s renovation. Following Elm Street’s lead, Wetherell Dining Hall and Grill began composting a year later, collecting the waste in special trash bins to be processed by the Elm Street pulper.

Composting accounts for the processing of 20 percent of Exeter’s waste. After going through the pulper, which extracts water and reduces its mass, the waste is sent, twice a week, to a composting service in North Andover, Massachusetts. According to Environmental Compliance Manager Tegan DeGenova, the school has not been able to find a licensed facility in New Hampshire, because unlike Massachusetts, New Hampshire has not made composting a mandatory practice. “It’s a very rigorous process to be able to handle dairy products and meat products,” DeGenova said.

Another challenge is that the pulper is not of the highest quality, being one of the first on the market. “Hopefully, we’re upgrading the Elm Street pulper in the next five to six years because it breaks rather often,” DeGenova said.

But why go through this rigorous process? What is composting and what are the benefits it brings to the environment?

Simply put, composting is the conversion of waste product into soil conditioner, with the help of earthworms, fungi and aerobic bacteria. Not only does composting produce healthy soil teeming with organic material for plants to use, but it disposes of waste that would have generated methane—a greenhouse gas—when dumped into landfills. Incinerators which directly burn the waste are no better - they too, emit climate pollutants like carbon, sulfur and nitrogen dioxide.

Like all waste management initiatives, the composting program relies on Exonians to be conscious about the different types of waste. Environmental Proctor Catherine Griffin noted, “I think one of [the EProctor Board’s] main goals the past year was to increase awareness about composting [...] some people don’t even realize that we have composting in Grill.” The Board created signs and posters educating students on what could be composted.

In addition to this, the EProctor Board also spearheaded a composting program at residential halls, with some pilots like Langdell and Peabody. “We lost a little momentum this year, but I hope that once the Board becomes more active, we will be able to pick it back up again,” Griffin said.

DeGenova noted the difficulties that students need to be aware of when starting dorm composting programs. “One of the issues we’ve had in the past is the upkeep, it was not where we needed it to be so there were fruit flies and the programs were discontinued,” she said. If students commit to bringing the compostable waste to Elm Street a few times per week, however, DeGenova believes that the program would greatly add to Big Red’s composting efforts.