Town hopes to convert food scraps to compost

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — Mayor Michael Venezia has announced that an application by Bloomfield to enter the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge has been accepted. The challenge is a competitive process whereby communities of all sizes, world wide, propose universal solutions to its own municipal problems. The winning municipalities would receive funding and technical support to implement their proposals. Venezia’s information was provided at the Aug. 21 township council meeting.

In a telephone interview, he said the Bloomfield proposal takes aim at food waste.
The mayor would like the township to acquire a machine, he called it a Digester, which turns food scraps into compost. The compost would be used in Bloomfield parks and lands.

“The Bloomberg people came in to review the application,” Venezia said.
“We had internal discussions and two conference calls. The application has been selected.”
Bloomberg representatives also visited township restaurants, he said. It is from these establishments, as well as the schools, that would provide the food scraps that, according to Venezia, would make his proposal a township money saver and compost provider. He said Kean University has a composter.

Suzanne Kupiec, the director of Environmental Health and Safety at Kean University, said a composter is basically an industrial grinder.
Food scraps are gathered from the school’s dining facilities and placed in the grinder with wood shavings, Kupiec said in a telephone interview earlier this week. Twenty-five percent of the mixture is wood shavings.

This provides the chemical process for making compost with carbon, she said. Another required element is nitrogen which is in the food. Every 15 minutes, air is blown through the mixture, adding oxygen.

The machine is continually being fed, she said, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. About 1,000 lbs. of the food and wood mixture go in every day. The grinder has a 6,000-lbs capacity and takes five days to produce a ton of compost.

“From 6,000 lbs. of food we get 6,000 lbs of compost,” Kupiec said. “Wood adds bulk and carbon.”
She said the compost is used exclusively on campus.

“We have 180 acres,” she said. “There are plenty of places to put it.”
The Kean University machine was installed in 2010, Kupiec said. It has had some repair work over the years but she said it is going all the time. Before its installation, food scraps would go into the trash.

The machine is housed in a 1,000-sq. foot greenhouse. This facility provides some room for students because, Kopiec pointed out, the grinder is also studied as part of the School of Environmental Sciences and Sustainability.

“It’s tough to cost it out,” she said about the profitability of have the machine. “But since 2010, it’s diverted one-half million pounds from landfill. That makes us happy.”

Past Bloomberg Mayors Challenge winners have included Chicago, Santa Monica, Providence, R.I. and Philadelphia.
Providence officials wanted to confront was the lack of words children of low-income families heard from birth to the age of three. The officials said a child in a low-income family heard 73 percent less words than children of high-income families and 54 percent less than middle-income families. “Providence Talk” implemented technology that counted the words children heard and coached parents to use more words with their children.

Venezia said a Digester would cost the township $350,000 to purchase. He hopes $100,000 of that money comes from a winning challenge proposal.

“The goal is to work out agreements with the schools, Bloomfield College and the restaurants,” he said.
State Department of Agriculture Secretary Douglas Fisher, who visited Bloomfield last month to promote Jersey Fresh farm products, said in an email to The Independent Press earlier this week that post-harvest food waste is a national and international problem.

“We must find more viable solutions to this issue,” he said. “The more uses we can find for unused food provides enormous societal benefits.”