Events Calendar
In This Section
Most Read Stories
Akron police investigate teen mob attack on family
Man found hanging at playground in Stow
Relatives doubt story of suicide
FBI asked to investigate attack on white family near Firestone Park
Robbery suspect's body left at Akron hospital
Man shot in back near Akron park
Blogs:
Pets:
Zeke, the basketball playing dog
The Heldenfiles:
HTTP Error 403
Patrick McManamon:
For your Saturday entertainment …
Akron Zips:
Six new scholarship offers
Browns Bulletin:
Quick thought on Browns rookies
Tribe Matters:
Tribe roster on hold?
Cleveland Browns:
Stallworth test showed marijuana
Kent State Sports:
Men's Basketball Scheduling update
Cleveland Cavaliers:
Andy’s Signed According to ESPN
All Da King's Men:
Baby Got Barack !
Blog of Mass Destruction:
Overwhelming Evidence
Akron Law Café:
New Wiretapping Revelations from Inspector General
Varsity Letters:
Report: Ontko selects Wisconsin
See Jane Style:
Oh Baby!
Car Chase:
Where do We Go from Here?
Let's Talk Real Estate:
Closings….Not the Good Kind!
Ohio Travels with Betty:
Margy inquires-when is a Taste of Hudson?
Sound Check:
LeVert II live performance Saturday night — "Dedication" album due July 13,
HRLite House:
DDI One of Best Places to Work
Akron Gamer:
Video game sales drop in May
Company testing process that grinds together scraps, wood chips for compost
By Bob Downing
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Sunday, Aug 10, 2008
HUDSON: Tom Arcoria has big plans for food waste.
He intends to take discards from grocery stores and food manufacturers in Northeast Ohio, add wood chips and grind the mix into compost.
His company, Sagamore Soils, has won a $250,000 state grant through the Summit-Akron Solid Waste Management Authority to help buy a giant food grinder.
The firm is running small-scale tests on how to best grind up food waste — mostly produce — to yield a nutrient-rich compost. It is taking two or three loads — about 25 tons — a week from a few grocers and a salad producer in Medina.
The food waste, cardboard containers and wood chips are being ground up and then dumped in windrows — long piles — to fully decompose.
The two windrows off Barlow Road are 50 feet long, 20 feet wide and 12 feet high. There's no whiff of rotting garbage. What is there looks and smells like typical mulch.
''What we're doing is very simple,'' Arcoria said. ''Mother Nature is doing most of the work.''
Within 20 years, he said, food composting in the United States ''is going to be huge.''
Food scrap is the third-greatest type of waste — behind paper and yard clippings — going into the nation's landfills. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, food discards made up about 12 percent of the waste going into landfills in 2006.
In the past, concerns about high costs, odors and rodents have kept food-scrap recycling from being a priority. But that's changing.
States promote recycling
Some states like New Jersey and Minnesota have been especially active in promoting such recycling. In Minnesota, several communities, including Duluth, have food-waste collection and drop-off programs for household discards.
Joe Goicochea, food waste expert for the Ohio EPA, said the agency is working to develop the infrastructure needed to get food scraps composted.
Though this recycling effort is moving slowly, he said, it is becoming a higher priority.
Goicochea said Ohio has lagged behind other states in composting food scraps because its landfill tipping — or dumping — fees are the lowest in the Midwest. That makes it relatively inexpensive to simply throw away material that could be turned into compost, and the low fees have not provided a financial incentive to compost, he said.
The goal is for Ohio to increase both its commercial food and backyard composting.
''It's a better use of the resource,'' he said.
Backyard food composting is permitted in Akron and Summit County as long as no meat, grease, eggshells or grain products are added to the piles, said Bob Hasenyager of the Summit County Health Department.
The reason for those restrictions is to avoid animal problems, he said.
Commercial food composting is still quite limited in Ohio.
On July 1, the Columbus-based Ohio Grocers Association began a pilot composting program involving 24 Kroger's grocery stores in central Ohio.
Association spokeswoman Tonya Woodruff said her group, in cooperation with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, is preparing a how-to-compost guide for grocery stores that should be completed within two months.
Colleges composting
Youngstown State University, Ohio University and Baldwin-Wallace, Kenyon and Hocking colleges compost food scraps. Hamilton County is trying to set up its own pilot program.
Sagamore Soils is one of five commercial food-scrap composters in the state.
Arcoria began investigating grinding up food wastes about a year ago and made a visit to a North Carolina operation.
He admitted that he had big concerns about odors, but he soon learned that odors and rodents wouldn't be a problem if the food wastes were properly handled.
Sagamore Soils will let the organic material decompose in windrows for nine to 12 months, Arcoria said. The material being processed now will be sold as a soil additive next year.
The Ohio EPA and the Summit County Health Department are working with Sagamore Soils to supervise the food-waste tests that the company is running at its 20-acre site.
Materials arrive from grocery stores and food processors in the morning and are mixed with wood chips, ground up, screened and in the windrows by 3 p.m. the same day, said Arcoria, whose company also has operations in Macedonia and Bainbridge Township.
The windrows, sitting atop recycled asphalt, are closely monitored for proper temperature — about 132 degrees — and are regularly turned for proper aeration, he said.
During the company's small-scale testing, a week's supply of food is being turned into 25 cubic yards of wood chips-compost, he said.
New grinder to arrive
The new grinder, which could cost as much as $575,000 and would be capable of handling 500 cubic yards an hour, should be delivered by November, Arcoria said. The machine would grind up food into 1- to 11/2-inch bits.
Most of the food waste disappears in the grinding-composting process, Arcoria said. In all, 97.5 percent of the waste is reduced and only 2.5 percent by weight remains.
In comparison, when leaves are ground up and composted, 90 percent of leaves are reduced, leaving 10 percent by weight.
Setting up a commercial food composting operation is not overly difficult, Arcoria said.
The food waste is collected in oversize trash cans at the grocery stores, restaurants or food-processing plants. These cans are picked up and transported at minimal cost to the composting facility.
''It doesn't cost much,'' Arcoria said, ''and you're helping save the environment.''
Bob Downing can be reached at 330-996-3745 or bdowning@thebeaconjournal.com.
HUDSON: Tom Arcoria has big plans for food waste.
Get the full article here.
Comments
Click here to post your comments
