Waste not
E
sther Grossman removes the lid of a 55-gallon barrel of decomposing food scraps, holds her breath, and peers in. “The last time, there was an egg on top that was still whole, but the shell was soft instead of hard,” says the OHIO sophomore chemistry and engineering physics major in the Honors Tutorial College. Four mornings a week in the fall, as part of her work as a Voinovich Scholar to help investigate energy production through anaerobic digesters (see below), Grossman trekked up to The Ridges to check progress at the Ohio University Compost Facility. The largest in-vessel system of its kind at colleges and universities nationwide, the multimillion-dollar site serves as the centerpiece of a growing effort to reduce and repurpose waste at OHIO and in the region. This eco-friendly enterprise, dubbed Soil to Soil, creates, refines, and reinvents environmental stewardship and strengthens the area’s economy while inspiring student Bobcats to go deep green. University officials consider such ingenuity the future of energy
18 • o h i o t o d ay . o r g
production and waste management. The Consortium for Energy, Economics and the Environment (CE3) in the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, in partnership with the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ College of Engineering and Technology and the College of Arts and Sciences, oversees the multipronged undertaking. A grant six years ago from the Sugar Bush Foundation jumpstarted the endeavor by forging an alliance between the Voinovich School and Rural Action, a nonprofit encouraging sustainable development in Appalachian Ohio. “The concept of zero waste is easy to say but difficult to accomplish,” says Scott Miller, MS ’96, director of energy and environmental programs in the Voinovich School. “At a large institution like this, it’s no one person’s job to track these things, and the temptation is to stay in our own silos. We want to knit people together in a more coherent fashion. We want to create a system-level approach.”