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���ϸ�����-Dearborn has been dipping its toe in the water with regard to composting for a few years now, with the addition of Zero Waste university events that collect food waste and send it to an offsite composting facility, a few office food waste collections and a composting system at the Community Organic Garden. And Assistant Sustainability Programs Manager Graces Maves says that a few years back, a student group even partnered with Picasso Restaurant Group, which operates the food service at the Renick University Center, to compost food waste coming out of its kitchen. Some logistical issues and the COVID pandemic cut that experiment short. But earlier this year, Maves and intern Bridget Lawson decided to revive the idea. Picasso was all about it. It turned out the kitchen’s executive chef, Dak Zorn, is an enthusiastic home composter and gardener, and he quickly added food scrap collection bins for the kitchen staff. At the end of the day, the bins are dumped into large outdoor containers, which are picked up weekly and the material is composted offsite. 

Lawson, who was managing the day-to-day details of the project until her internship ended this spring, says the composting pilot has gone smoothly thus far. During a typical week, it diverts about 200 gallons of compostable food waste from the landfill, where it would otherwise generate methane, a climate-warming gas that’s about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Zorn says it’s also helped him reduce food waste upstream. “It gave me some insight into everyone's knife skills, because I could go through all of the cooks’ buckets to make sure we were using as much of the product as we should be,” Zorn says. “So it's a win-win. We're using more of the product, which helps keep costs down, and then on top of that, we're composting.”

Maves says she’s eagerly awaiting the next phase of this project. With help from a , which Lawson spearheaded, they’ll soon be able to do the composting right here on campus — creating useful compost for the Community Organic Garden and a new hands-on venue for students to learn about waste reduction and soil science. Maves is still working out some of the details for the new composting site, but she says it will likely blend two composting techniques backyard composters are most familiar with — the tumbler and the multi-bin system. Every composting system needs a good balance of nitrogen and carbon. So as a first step, Maves says they’ll utilize a commercial-scale tumbler to create a uniform mix of nitrogen-rich food scraps from Picasso’s operations and carbon-rich leaves and wood chips from campus and the City of Dearborn’s Public Works department. Once the ingredients are well mixed, it’ll move on to the “aerated static pile” portion of the system. Maves says this is pretty similar to your typical three-pile backyard bin system, with a few tweaks. The material spends some time breaking down in the first pile, where fresh materials and high oxygen levels create optimal conditions for microbes. It then moves on to the second pile, where it decomposes further, before moving to a third pile, where microbial activity slows way down and the material becomes usable compost. Throughout this process, which typically takes three to five months, the microbes that break down the organic material require a healthy supply of oxygen. In a backyard system, a pile gets oxygenated through regular turning. In an aerated static pile system, oxygen is pumped into the pile via perforated pipes, which reduces the need for turning and helps the material break down more quickly. Maves says she is also working with the designer to make sure the piles can be moved by machinery or by hand — should volunteers want to get their hands dirty and learn about the process.

Maves anticipates that one of the biggest challenges of the new system may be getting enough of the right materials. As a fairly small restaurant operation, Picasso may not generate that much food waste. So she’s been thinking about ways to get more — like a potential partnership with the Dearborn farmers market, where residents could bring in their food scraps to be composted at the university. Maves is also exploring the possibility of collecting food waste from the Student Food Pantry now that the pantry has the capacity for more fresh food. “This would really showcase a closed-loop system, as the food waste from the pantry and yard waste from campus would create nutrient-rich soil for application in a student-led garden plot, where food is grown for the pantry,” Maves says. The carbon-rich material seems to be more abundant. Tree trimming and landscaping operations on campus generate quite a lot of wood chips, some of which are used on campus as mulch. But Maves’ contacts at the City of Dearborn say they have more wood mulch than they can handle if she ever needs more.

One of the goals of the new composting program is to reduce the amount of food waste sent to the landfill, which will cut some of the . She anticipates the larger impact may be educational. A biology professor has already reached out about using the site to teach his students about soil science. And she hopes it can also be integrated into kids’ programming at the Environmental Interpretive Center. “We could easily keep shipping our waste out to this offsite composting facility. But it wouldn’t have these hands-on learning benefits,” Maves says. “I mean, that’s the purpose of the institution: It’s to provide educational experiences and learning opportunities for our students and the community, and we think this is a great chance to do that.” 

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Story by Lou Blouin