Unfortunately, Still Cutting Edge

Chesapeake Bay Foundation spent extra to make its headquarters eco-friendly

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 25, 2011; E01

While leading a tour of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's headquarters in Annapolis, Mary Tod Winchester stepped into a restroom and waved her hand across a toilet as elegantly as a game-show model on "The Price Is Right."

It wasn't just any commode. There was no flush handle, no knob, no pulley. At the foundation's ultra-green workplace, there wasn't any water in the toilets, either. As far as the organization's leaders are concerned, it's a waste. They'd rather compost than send more polluted water gushing into the bay they're sworn to protect.

When the headquarters opened 10 years ago this month, the Philip Merrill Environmental Center was immediately recognized as the nation's greenest building for its compost toilets and assorted alternative energy features. Today, the building remains highly regarded.

With its $17 million price tag, the foundation put its money where its mouth was, showing other organizations how to be more environmentally responsible, said Winchester, the foundation's vice president of administration and operations.

Cisterns near the roof capture rainwater, which is used to wash hands and tools. Under the gravel parking lot, geothermal wells help warm the building, along with solar panels and natural sunlight that pours through oversize windows. Motion-detection sensors turn out lights when workers leave a room.

The floors are made of pressed cork rather than wood, preserving trees. The stairs are made of bamboo, preferable because it grows like a weed.

But the eco-friendly heat and floors are hard to notice. On the other hand, everyone who gets a biological urge sees the toilets. The latrines get all the glory, the eye-popping oohs and aahs.

People peek under the seats into the wide dark tubes that tumble to three gray metal bins. A maintenance worker has the unenviable job of stirring the stuff. It mellows for months before it's spread on the grounds as fertilizer.

If the image makes you want to hold your nose, you shouldn't. "They don't smell," Winchester said of the toilets.

She paused a second.

"Well, they actually do smell. But the smell is vented out of the building so you never smell a thing," Winchester said. During the recent tour, there was no foul restroom odor.

Why would an organization pay so much to be so green?

The building project "was an opportunity to practice what we preach here," said Winchester. "When we told [designers] we wanted no-flush, compost toilets, they looked at us like we were crazy," Winchester recalled.

The green concept was new to builders, as Chuck Foster, the foundation's chief of staff, discovered when he explained the group's alternative energy requests to a contractor working on another foundation project.

"I said that we wanted a green building. And he said, 'Son, we'll paint the building any color you want,' " Foster recalled.

A typical office building of a similar size uses 1,500 to 2,000 gallons of water a day, Winchester said. The Merrill Center uses 90.

According to the U.S. Green Building Council Web site, buildings in the United States use more than 13 percent of the nation's potable water, about 15 trillion gallons a year. "Buildings are one of the heaviest consumers of natural resources and account for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions that affect climate change," the site says. They account for 72 percent of energy consumption in the United States.

The war cry of the 43-year-old Chesapeake Bay Foundation is "Save the Bay," which is threatened by nitrogen and phosphorous produced by human and animal waste that flows into the 64,000-square-mile watershed every time it rains.

The foundation fights pollution with advocacy, studies and lawsuits against local and federal government. As part of its mission, it teaches students to be responsible stewards of the bay and its river tributaries.

The idea to use its headquarters to showcase the use of alternative energy and teach by example arose 15 years ago, when the foundation started to grow out of its offices in downtown Annapolis.

Winchester and Foster were tapped to search for a new headquarters nearby. They turned up their noses at several properties and were turned away by the owners of other sites they coveted.

Two years later, there was a breakthrough. The owner of the 32-acre Bay Ridge Beach and Inn resort decided to sell her sprawling Tahiti-style beachfront property. Fearing that a developer might purchase the property and bring noisy crowds to their secluded neighborhoods, members of the Bay Ridge Civic Association shopped the inn to the foundation.

"It took me 10 seconds to say, 'Oh my gracious, what an opportunity,' " Winchester said. "Not just because it's on the water, but because of what we do: field trips, planting oyster gardens, restoring woods, bringing in stakeholders who could see the bay."

They quickly discovered that it's not easy being green.

The price tag for the headquarters was $17 million - $3 million to purchase the property and $14 million to bulldoze the crumbling resort and build the 28,000-square-foot building. The foundation paid a premium of $46 more per square foot for green measures.

Alternative energy gadgets cost more in 2000 than they do now "because the technology is cheaper, more available and more efficient," Winchester said. Maryland media magnate Philip Merrill, who was found dead in the bay years later after an apparent suicide, donated $7 million.

Foster and Winchester claimed that the extra cost was recouped with energy savings within eight years. They spoke in the Merganser conference room, with their backs to oversize windows that looked out on the bay. Waves crashed against the brown sand beach, driven by a hard winter wind. Thin rays of sunlight slid through shale-colored clouds and lit the ice-cold water.

But it was toasty indoors because of the 300-foot deep geothermal wells that pumped the Earth's heat indoors and warmed water for the kitchen and restrooms. Sensors measured warmth from the light shining through the windows and automatically adjusted the thermostat.

It costs $200 a day to heat and cool the building, a projected savings of $62,000 per year. Other sensors gauged the sunlight and powered off overhead lamps to conserve energy.

After Winchester said she hoped that others would duplicate the foundation's effort, Foster put his head in his hands and said the environmentally responsible path is long and hard.

"You see this?" Foster said, natural light gleaming on his bald spot. "I had a full head of hair before this started."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/24/AR2011012404669.html

Municipal Compost In Ontario, Canada

February 2011, Vol. 35, No. 2

AgriNews Interactive

www.agrinewsinteractive.com

Urban compost: From fork to field

GREELY — Farmers feed cities, but urbanite table scraps and yard waste are helping return the favour.

Orgaworld Canada LTD’s Hawthorne Rd. facility is the initial destination for all of that biodegradable household waste material collected by the City of Ottawa’s sometimes-controversial green bin program. But after a 31-day composting process inside the $25-million processing plant, the dark and rich-looking material is ultimately destined to fertilize farmland in the region — a fact that hasn’t garnered as many headlines.

The British-owned company intends to ship out all of Ottawa’s municipal green bin compost as a bulk product sold to farmers, with no plans to make the stuff available in smaller, bagged quantities — although it is technically approved for that particular use as well — said Orgaworld’s Travis Woollings.

As the company’s sales and marketing manager, he’s been promoting the compost at local farmers’ meetings, including county soil and crop associations, to get the word out about the product’s availability in the local agricultural community. According to Woollings, relying on farmers to absorb the material has already proven effective in the countryside around London, Ontario, where Orgaworld’s first facility in the province began operations in 2007.

"This compost already gives you $30 per acre in fertilizer value, plus you get all the organic matter," said Woollings at the Ottawa site, where he led a visitor on a tour of the sprawling steel plant building inhabited by large, brightly lit payloaders trundling around through clouds of steamy fog created by the decomposing waste.

A sophisticated fan and ductwork system constantly draws all air from the building through odour-removing equipment, before exhausting up the tall stack that towers over the structure, punctuated by a plume of steam visible on a frigid day.

The material yielded at the end of the carefully controlled, accelerated "in-vessel" composting process undergoes pasteurization as it rots. Within six enclosed concrete bunkers or tunnels — each 30 meters long by about six meters wide and about four meters tall — the compost is remotely monitored and aerated through a series of breathing tubes in the floor to ensure the temperature rises high enough for long enough. "It’s pasteurized because we’re able to manipulate the environment to 55 degrees (C) for 72 hours. Then it’s cured for 21 days," he explained. "And it’s tested every so many tonnes for pathogen levels. This gives them [farmers] a lot of comfort that what they’re putting on the field is free of e-coli."

Wearing a hard hat and bright orange safety coat, Woollings scoops up some of the finished product from a large pile and holds it out in his cupped hands. The material has a trace of a musty odour, similar to old leaves with a whiff of silage.

Two types of compost are available, a regular kind marketed as "Orgapower" and a coarser variety uniquely available from the Ottawa operation — spawned by the city’s insistence on having the facility process leaf and yard waste, unlike the southern Ontario municipalities served by Orgaworld’s London plant.

Last year, when the Ottawa site went on line, the company distributed about 10,000 tonnes of compost to several farmers in the St. Isidore area, according to Woollings. Most of that was purchased and spread in the fall of 2010, so the impact on crop growth won’t be seen until this coming season. But a couple of early birds did take delivery last spring, allowing them to look at results on the field last year.

He said, "You could see the difference in the height and colour" of a crop grown with the product on an Eastern Ontario field last year.

Woollings’s history with the agricultural spreading of Orgaworld compost predates his employment with the company. Running his own equipment and transport business when the London plant opened, Woollings worked with a farmer in that area, John Killins, who bought and applied some of the compost on his fields.

"His yields went up 15 to 20 bushels per acre. The second year was even better and his quality went up," he said.

Especially in southwestern Ontario, where some cash-crop land "hasn’t seen manure in 50 years," the product has proven especially valuable, he said.

"I have farmers in Western Ontario that have completely eliminated chemical fertilizers from their plans. One customer is planting 1,400 acres of corn [in Orgapower] this year."

The product’s features include "disease suppression, building soil structure and moisture retention," he said, adding those attributes should help it compete against the sewage biosolids that the City of Ottawa — ironically — provides at no charge for agricultural spreading in the same region. "All of these things help me demand a premium for this product in an area where biosolids are free."

And being compost, farmers may buy it, stockpile it, and spread it when they wish — another feature in an era of otherwise increasing regulations.

"It’s considered an unrestricted-use product," he explained.

He acknowledged that area farmers "love the concept" of using compost, although the price typically leads to experimental use at first.

Depending on the volume purchased, Orgaworld charges $8 to $10 per tonne for Orgapower and $4 to $5 per tonne for the coarser compost referred to as 10/100. Trucking and spreading is the farmer’s responsibility, although Woollings can put buyers in touch with people in the industry.

In a recent article prepared for the Thames Valley Regional Soil & Crop Improvement Association, Christine Brown, OMAFRA nutrient management specialist, noted green bin compost as having a "good balance of available N-P-K and micronutrients" and easier to apply than most solid manure types. Material analysis showed the product at 47 lbs/ton total nitrogen, 19 lbs/ton in both potash and phosphorus, and 1,002 lbs/ton organic matter, according to the article.

Orgapower compost "meets all the MOE guidelines for finished compost," said OMAFRA environmental management specialist Steve Redmond.

"I’m really supportive of this composting process. It’s such a great way of saving micronutrients and phosphorous," added Redmond.

St. Isidore cash cropper Marc Bercier, one of the only farmers in the area to use Orgapower during 2010 growing season, said he was taking a wait and see approach to the product. He would need two to three years to accurately measure the benefit, he said.

"Right now, on our corn and soybeans, we saw practically no difference, but there was no disadvantage, too," said Bercier, who spread 1,500 tonnes on specific areas of the farm with sandy loam soil. On those particular fields, he also divided the crop — half with compost and half without — to see any difference.

He said he intends to follow up with soil tests to measure increases in organic matter anticipated over the next two to three years.

Gatineau-based crops consultant Bob Dalton, a member of the Agri-Trend Agrology network, said he viewed the compost as a "win-win situation" for city residents and farmers in the region. "Specific fields where nutrients need to be built up, that’s where the focus needs to be, in my opinion," said Dalton.

Based on the current incoming stream of raw material from Ottawa green bin users, the company expects to produce about 50,000 tonnes of compost for farmers in 2011, according to Woollings. But the Ottawa facility could produce up to about 105,000 tonnes of compost, taking into account its current MOE approval to process 150,000 tonnes of raw green bin waste annually minus a 30 per cent weight reduction that occurs after composting. And that figure could theoretically rise even higher if the company has reason to seek MOE approval to take in the 250,000 tonnes of waste the facility is actually built to handle.

The firm is confident it will find farmers to take all of it.

One fly in the ointment is the city’s insistence that residents can’t put their green box contents in tidy and convenient plastic bags, which leads to a lower participation rate, according to company officials.

In fact, the Orgaworld facility serving Ottawa is capable — and does — handle waste arriving in plastic bags. They are shredded and screened out by a machine at the beginning of the composting process.

In London, where plastic bags are openly permitted by the participating municipalities, Orgaworld is about to embark on a trial with St. Mary’s cement. The latter company will use the screened-out plastic scraps as fuel for cement kilns, Woollings said.

Prospective compost buyers may contact Woollings at 519-649-4446 or 519-317-6756 (cell).

http://www.agrinewsinteractive.com/fullstory.htm?ArticleID=11442&ShowSection=AgriFocus