The eco-friendly on campus may soon hit the next frontier in recycling: composting kitchen scraps.
Getting an on-campus composter has been a plan at least eight years in the making, but members of the Columbia Composting Coalition, an affiliate of EcoReps, said they are making the final preparations to purchase and begin using a composter in the basement of Ruggles.
Although purchasing the composter will cost the EcoReps about 25 to 35 percent of their annual budget, Aida Conroy, CC ’13 and co-president, believes that the project is well worth it.
“It’s something that will directly benefit students and, as EcoReps, that’s our job…to make living a more environmentally sustainable life possible for the average Columbia student,” said Conroy. “Ideally, one hundred percent of our budget goes to projects like this.”
The idea for a composter grew out of concerns that Columbia was not an environmentally friendly campus. In 2003, Housing and Dining Services coordinated a major survey to review all the places on campus where composting could possibly take place. Because of the high population density around campus and concerns about the smells it might emit, a location was not determined until last year.
According to Scott Wright, vice president of Student Administrative Services, the new composter will be on campus and available to at least a small group of students by the beginning of next semester.
Even as recently as 2008, the University could not locate an area in which to place an on-site composting vessel. It was only after students became involved in the plan in recent years that the project began to accelerate.
After a forceful student push revived the debate last year, Columbia officials decided to place the machine—called the Rocket A500— in the basement of Ruggles. According to Wright, after observing the use of the appliance at other institutions around New York, they decided that as a bug-free, odor-free, self-contained unit, the machine “should not affect anybody, whether you are in the buildings right next to it or elsewhere.”
The composter will process approximately 80 gallons of food waste per week on a constant, seven day feeding schedule.
After multiple revisions of both the business plan for the University and the building plan for the City, the Coalition is completing the last step of the process by checking competing prices at various retailers of the Rocket A500.
Through an arrangement organized by students, the soil produced from the composter will be exchanged with Padilla Tree, a local and organic landscaping company, for wood chips—a necessary ingredient for the creation of a carbon-rich soil.
This procedure will also cut down on the operating costs of the machine, which, according to Wright, will be about 5,000 dollars per year through an annual lease.
Members of EcoReps have spoken with Dining Services to discuss the possibility of utilizing food scraps from John Jay and Ferris Booth, in case students end up not using the composter. Eventually, the club is hoping to create a subscription list through which interested students can sign up to leave their compost at the site.
But for Adam Formica, CC ’13 and a member of the Composting Coalition, the composter is just the first step in a larger movement to create not only a greener campus, but also a greener city.
“Private institutions, like universities that are well-endowed, are really going to be leaders in demonstrating the importance and feasibility of composting, in vessel composting. An institution like Columbia is going to need to show the rest of the city that we can reduce our impact through composting,” said Formica. “It’s about time that something like this happened.”
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