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BY AMELIA POSSANZA

In print | Published September 24, 2009 — Updated October 07, 2009 15:39

Bertie may not make it through the year. Jean Dahlquist ’11, co-coordinator of the Good Food Compost Project, fears that the golf cart won’t be able to handle the addition of Essie Mae’s Snack Bar to the compost pick up rounds.

The composting of cups, napkins and plates in Essie Mae’s, which began last Wednesday, is the newest of the group’s three composting initiatives. Several other initiatives, including Mary Lyon breakfast room composting and solar-powered rotary composters, are in the planning stages.

For the past two years pre-consumer waste from Sharples, such as lettuce cuttings and egg shells, has been composted. In the spring of 2008, the Compost Project expanded by setting up green bins in the Kohlberg coffee bar to collect compostable cups and napkins. Last spring they brought composting to the Science Center coffee bar as well.

After compostable items enter the green bins, they are picked up and dumped behind the grandstands of Clothier Field. Then a Scott Arboretum staff member picks it up and takes it to the Swarthmore Municipal Composting Plant in the Crum, which handles the entire borough’s composting.

“We haven’t really met with any opposition,” Dahlquist said. “We try to do everything we can to make their [the arboretum’s] pick up easy for them because they’re doing us a big favor.”

Gusti Ruhri, the dining services cash operations manager, was eager to help the students begin composting Essie Mae’s waste. “Just the thought behind it, it’s wonderful,” she said.

But even though the new project has just begun, the Compost Project has already run into difficulty. “Essie Mae’s is a bit of a challenge because we already had our routine down,” Dahlquist said.

What’s even more challenging, according to Dahlquist, is that students have already eaten off the plates they throw into the compost bins. If they accidentally leave any food on the plates or do not completely scrape them off, the whole bin cannot be composted and must be thrown out.

In the first week of Essie Mae’s composting, this has already been a problem. “Unfortunately, when I look into the composting containers, I see that the customers often throw out everything indiscriminately, thus somewhat defeating the purpose,” Ruhri said. She suggested that further education, either through more signage or campus-wide emails, could help with the problem.

The Compost Project encountered a similar problem when it tried to set up post-consumer composting in Sharples. “We have trouble getting people to throw away cups in the Kohlberg bins,” Dahlquist said. “We try doing a scrape-off in Sharples, and no one listens. So that’s probably never going to work.”

The group is still thinking of ways to expand its project. “Right now we’re thinking of expanding next into ML,” Dahlquist said. The pre-consumer waste, such as eggshells, from the breakfast room could be composted in a manner similar to the Sharples system.

“It would be great if we had all the waste that students produced, like banana peels and things like that, composted as well,” she said.

Hannah Jones ’12 and Zein Nakhoda ’12 ran ML composting on their own last year and hope to spread their project to all dorms this year through the Green Advisor program. “The Green Advisor program has grown quite a bit this year,” Jones said.

Now with more GAs, dorm waste composting is a possibility. Jones explained that not only would GAs have to carry compostable waste out of the dorms, they would also have to educate residents about what is compostable.

A pilot program will begin next week in ML, Mertz and Dana. Study breaks and fliers will teach students what they can and cannot throw in the compost bins. Most food waste, such as orange rinds, coffee filters and tea bags with their staples removed, can be composted, with the exception of dairy products.

The Compost Project may also have the opportunity to acquire two solar-powered rotary composters. Kanti Somani, a Deputy U.S. Marshal and owner of the worms.com composting business, found the Good Food Project website three years ago. According to Jamie Hansen Lewis ’10, Good Food garden co-manager, Somani contacted Marshall Morales ’08 in July 2008 saying that he had found a description of the group’s mission online and wanted to write a grant proposal for them.

Marshall passed on this information to Jim Marzluff ’08 who then met with Kanti to discuss the details. Somani applied to the state of Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection for a Compost Infrastructure grant to build two stainless steel bins with solar-powered motors for rotation, a project similar to one he completed at Princeton in 2002. He received the grant in May and notified the Good Food Project.

The Compost Project still needs the administration to approve the building project.

“It would be innovative and interesting if he were to do this because no one’s ever built solar-powered rotary composters before,” Toby Altman ’10, co-coordinator of the Good Food Composting Project, said.

The new composter would create compost of a higher grade for use by both the Scott Arboretum and the Good Food garden.

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