SUSTAINABILITY COMMUNITY
Much ado
ABOUT POO Ever wondered what the Keepers do with all that animal poo? We get to the bottom of the waste management program at Melbourne Zoo. WORDS
Melbourne Zoo Senior Reporter, Gus Goswell
PHOTOGRAPHY
Jo Howell
How the poo is collected and used •
When it comes to collecting poo, it’s a big job every day. Depending on the size and weight of the poo, Keepers might use shovels, wheelbarrows, rakes or buckets. The elephant Keepers at Melbourne Zoo use a motorised buggy. Some raw manures are used as sensory enrichment for the animals. The tigers are especially fascinated by sniffing the manure of animals that in the wild could be their prey.
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Future plant food
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here’s an old joke about Zoo Keepers that they could be more correctly known as Poo Keepers, such is the amount of time they spend cleaning up after the animals they care for. And poo – or manure, as it’s more commonly called – is a popular topic at Zoos Victoria. A giraffe’s poo is quite dainty, whereas an elephant’s poo is, predictably, huge. Poo is also surprisingly useful. Zoo vets and Keepers might, for instance, study a koala’s scat to find out more about its health and condition. And poo is also valuable for another reason – rather than being thrown away, it’s carefully collected for some very important purposes, including helping Zoos Victoria strive towards its ‘zero waste to landfill’ target.
Senior Sustainability and Environment Manager at Melbourne Zoo, Thomas Meek, says nearly all the manure from the animals at the Zoo is turned into compost. “Every day the Keepers collect the poo and place it in special green bins or manure bays,” Thomas says. “The manure is collected by trucks and taken to the composting unit on the Multi Use Recycling Facility (known on site as the ‘Hot Rot’). It’s then combined with garden clippings, hay, food waste and compostable packaging and added to the composting unit. The composting unit pumps air in and lets microbes grow and thrive. These microbes eat the poo and food waste, turning it into compost humus or soil that helps plants to grow.” The compost is then spread around the Zoo’s gardens to supply nutrients to plants,