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This week’s Environmental Almanac is a story in two parts.
Part one is the nitty-gritty tale of what happens to the vegetable scraps generated in the kitchen at Ikenberry Commons, the new, very green, student residence on the U of I campus.
To begin with, those vegetable scraps, which include all of the stuff you might expect, from lettuce stems to pineapple tops, are placed by Dining Services staff into bags that are kept separate from other trash, since they’re not headed for the landfill. Those bags, which are themselves biodegradable, accumulate in two large, rolling carts, which hold up to about 600 pounds each.
Those carts are picked up twice a week, on Monday and Thursday afternoons, by Matt Luedtke, who is with the U of I Environmental Change Institute. Luedtke retrieves the vegetable scraps from the kitchens at Ikenberry Commons to compost them, and I joined him for a run earlier this week.
He has been fortunate this semester to have help from undergraduate students in the College of Engineering who are part of a group called “Engineering in Service to Society.” On the day I met up with him, two of them came to help, Jason Kenyon, from Muscatine, Iowa, and Ryan Chan, from Hong Kong.
From the dining hall, Matt and his helpers drove the compostable material by pickup truck to a site on the U of I South Farms near the intersection of First Street and Windsor Road. There they loaded it with an equal volume of dry leaves into a manure spreader, which is essentially a small wagon with a rotating bar at the rear. [Photo: Matt Luedtke, left, and helpers Ryan Chan and Jason Kenyon, right, running the manure spreader to mix compost.] When the bar is engaged, a staggered line of paddles attached to it simultaneously mixes the vegetable scrap with the landscape material and flings off the back.So far this Fall, the campus compost operation has generated two substantial mounds about twelve feet in diameter, with another having just been started. For now, when this material is ready to be used on a field, it will be transported a mile east to nourish the soil at the student farm, which, in turn, supplies fresh produce to Dining Services.
In the future, however, some on the U of I campus anticipate using the compost to nourish the soil on site, as part of a development known as the Integrated Sustainable Homestead.
This brings us to part two of today’s story, which is a vision for the future of the site at First and Windsor, which promises to become an important gateway to the U of I as Curtis Road is developed in Champaign.
Wes Jarrell, who is interim director of the Environmental Change Institute, sees today’s composting effort as a first step toward an operation that will demonstrate how food and energy can be produced sustainably at a local scale in Illinois. At the Integrated Sustainable Homestead, students would learn about where food comes from, how energy can be conserved and produced on a local scale, and how water can be used efficiently and sustainably, all through hands-on experience.
Picture, for example, a dormitory topped with solar panels, set among fields of a bioenergy crop, such as switchgrass, with forage plots for livestock and organic vegetable gardens filling out the scene.
You can get an even better idea of what the Integrated Sustainable Homestead might look like in a presentation by Matt Luedtke at the Environmental Change Institute’s annual symposium next Monday, November 8. The symposium, which is free and open to all, will take place from 2:00 – 5:00 p.m. at the iHotel and Conference Center. Details are available on the Web at www.eci.illinois.edu.
