Marissa Angell had a vision to start a composting program during her freshman year at Syracuse University when she saw a fellow student throw out an untouched bowl of cereal and walk out of a dining hall.

‘I was appalled when I saw her do it,’ said Angell, a junior agricultural sciences major who has since transferred to Cornell University.

After further observation, Angell realized it wasn’t an uncommon incident. She said she watched people do it every day. So Angell decided to take action and e-mailed Chancellor Nancy Cantor about the need for a compost program at Syracuse.

The chancellor replied the same day and told her there was already a group in the process of getting the wheels turning on a waste compost program. Knowing the program would be beneficial to the university, she immediately joined the group that was working to make her vision a reality.

Eight months after first throwing the composting ideas around and working out the kinks, the program went into effect at the start of the spring 2010 semester, said Steve Lloyd, associate director of SU’s Sustainability Division. Since its implementation, the dining halls have collected 30 tons of food waste available for composting.

Composting is when leaves, wood, brush clippings, grass clippings or food scraps are decomposed and often used as fertilizer.

SU first implemented the compost program in a few dining centers as a trial period and expanded it to all on-campus dining centers after a few weeks of success, Lloyd said.

The project faced a roadblock early on, as SU was supposed to contract out with a local farmer who was going to use the compost for his farm. But the deal fell through because of an insurance policy, Angell said. The planning committee found the solution in the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency (OCRRA).

Most of the waste from the Syracuse dining halls is sorted in the preparation stage and then transported to the site at OCRRA, said Mark Tewksbury, assistant director of SU’s Food Services. When the university was in the planning stages, OCRRA seemed like the obvious choice with which to partner because it had a facility that could handle SU’s volume of waste.

‘A couple of years back we tried to do a compost program, but it fell apart for reasons beyond our control,’ Tewksbury said. ‘We couldn’t find anyone to take our waste, but OCRRA has a great program going on. So once we were made aware of that program, we knew we had a win-win situation for both of us.’ 

The university needed to purchase a special kind of dumpster that could be sealed tightly enough for the food waste to stay viable for composting, while also keeping in the odor. SU financed that purchase from a $2,500 second-place prize in a contest through NBC Universal’s Green is Universal initiative, as well as money from other divisions, such as Food Services, Lloyd said. 

Lloyd said the composting program has many benefits for the university. One of the most substantial is it saves money. Trash is two times more expensive to dispose of than compost, though compost is three times as heavy. Lloyd also said it benefits the community beyond SU by being more environmentally friendly.  

The only downside of the program is the labor hours, which could be a little longer and more intense because of the sorting of the waste, Lloyd said. 

Even though Angell has since transferred to Cornell, she was happy to know the program she had a hand in starting was running smoothly. 

‘I think that America is one of the most wasteful places to live, and it is sad because we have the brainpower to do things better,’ Angell said. ‘We just don’t use it all the time.’

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Published on September 14, 2010 at 12:00 pm