Probably from the 70s and 80s generations listening to too much of it......
Posted on 08/15/2006 2:19:13 AM PDT by Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit
FAIRBANKS, Alaska — Environmental consultant Mike Pollen remembers standing on a pile of sewage sludge composting outside the Fairbanks treatment plant on a November day in 1997. The temperature was 40 degrees below zero but his feet were warm. Then sweaty. Then uncomfortably hot inside his insulated rubber boots.
"They felt like they were going to melt," he said.
He figures there was a 180-degree difference between the compost cooking at his feet and the frosty temperature freezing his head.
Prevailing wisdom said sludge composting wouldn't work north of North Dakota. Pollen, the author of several wastewater system training manuals used in Alaska, remembers turning to a utility official and remarking, "You know what you just did? You just rewrote the textbook."
Over the years, utility officials in the community 120 miles south of the Arctic Circle continued "aerated static pile composting" and now turn waste from 87,000 residents into a product so highly desired they can't make enough to satisfy requests from gardeners and landscapers who want to amend their sub-Arctic soil.
"It's something we think is a big hit," said Dave Dean, support services manager for Utility Services of Alaska.
The compost, cooked in beds bigger than football fields, has the Environmental Protection Agency's highest rating. Cooperative extension officials recommend it for growing vegetables as well as flowers and grass.
The price is right -- just $15 per pickup load or $5 per yard dropped into dump trucks -- and it's free to anyone with a shovel and a trash can.
But merely getting sludge off the premises has been a triumph for the second largest community in Alaska, where winter routinely lasts seven months and the severe cold can make life miserable for microbes.
Sewage sludge is the solid material removed from water that flows into a treatment plant -- 15 gallons at a time from a dishwasher, 31.5 gallons per 6.3-minute shower, 1.5 gallons per flush.
Treatment plants strive to separate solids from liquids, then deal with each separately.
Rich in nutrients, raw sludge also can be filled with dangerous pathogens or heavy metals that must be addressed before it can be applied to fields, burned, or even buried in a landfill.
There are plenty of ways to neutralize human waste but utility companies are constrained by time, space and money.
If they choose a process that's slow, they end up stockpiling sludge, where it's attacked by anaerobic bacteria that produce offensive odors. For many aerobic processes, abundant space is needed, unless a utility has cash for equipment that can speed or automate decomposition.
The Fairbanks plant itself is designed for the cold. It's one of the few in the country that's fully enclosed, allowing treatment in huge tanks all year round. The plant pumps pure oxygen into its digester, speeding the work of helpful bacteria that turn raw sludge into digested sludge.
In the early 1980s, when the EPA enforced new water quality laws, Fairbanks was banned from hauling digested sludge to its landfill. The utility, then owned by the city, instead merely stored it outside the plant.
When the utility ran out of storage space, it built a lagoon with 20-foot high walls. That filled up too, and utility officials launched a half-dozen attempts to address their sludge trove.
A contractor burning pure sludge produced putrid clouds that hung near the ground during winter temperature inversions. Operators tried mixing sludge with lime, which neutralized the pathogens but made a product that had the consistency of toothpaste and wouldn't mix with soil.
Finally, just before the utility was sold to private investors, operators began experiments with composting.
Digested sludge is run through a press to mash out water. Still, the sludge is 80 percent liquid when it's moved outside by conveyor to a dump truck.
That's where Jeff Karrick, one of three full-time compost operators, comes in. Karrick is a master of mega-mixology with a front-end loader, his measuring cup a 4-yard bucket, his "bin" the flat ground outside the plant.
Like any home composter, he mixes digested sludge, a "green" material rich in nitrogen and phosphates, with a carbon source that feeds bacteria, provides bulk to let in air and absorbs moisture from the sludge. The utility uses fresh wood chips obtained from the only sawmill in the Fairbanks North Star Borough, plus partially decomposed wood chips screened from older compost piles.
Karrick dumps 16 yards of used wood chips onto 16 yards of new chips, then adds 14 yards of sludge. With his heavy equipment, he attacks the pile from all sides, lifting, dropping and mixing until the material is homogenous. Then, on top of perforated pipe that delivers air, he stacks the mix against the main pad, creating a massive 9-foot-high sludge and wood chip cake that when completed will be 120 feet wide and 360 feet long.
Operators frost the top and sides with 2 feet of composted material. The topping keeps odors and nasty clouds of blowflies at bay.
"That's our biofilter," Karrick said.
The extra layer is also the key to the success of cold weather composting, said Nora Goldstein, executive editor of BioCycle magazine and a member of the Water Environment Federation, a national nonprofit organization focused on clean water.
In the extreme cold, Goldstein said, bacteria could slow or shut down. That's not bad, unless it forces a utility to stockpile sludge.
"So much of that depends on the composition mix and the insulation of the pile," she said.
Temperature probes detect some cooling in the coldest weather but extra fresh wood chips keep the pile hot enough to let operators add to the pad all winter long -- and never stockpile sludge.
EPA requires the compost to cook at 104 degrees for 14 consecutive days. For three consecutive days, the temperature must reach at least 131 degrees so pathogens will be killed.
The highest temperature recorded in a Fairbanks pile was 206 degrees.
"I'm thinking of digging a hole and dropping a pig in there," Karrick joked.
When the piles attain the required temperatures, the stack -- now just 8 feet fall because of the shrinkage in the composting process -- is run through a screening machine to take out wood chips that didn't process.
EPA allows up to 1,000 fecal coliform bacteria per gram dry weight of compost. Tests of finished compost often don't detect any. Fairbanks has little manufacturing and solids entering the plant contain little heavy metal such as arsenic and lead. The official EPA rating for the compost is "exceptional quality."
The product has been around long enough that most gardeners have overcome their repugnance of using a product made from human waste.
Michele Herbert, land resources agent for the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service, recommends the compost to gardeners and has used it herself to grow vegetables, mulch perennial beds and landscape.
"It's crazy, the stuff is so good," she said.
In contrast, the city had to pay more than $400,000 to neutralize and move the 50,000 cubic yards of sludge that had accumulated over 20 years before a solution was found.
Dean, the utility support services manager, said the company is not making money off compost. It charges enough to defray its cost of loading.
But operators are clearly proud that they've solved their sludge problem by taking something nobody wants and turning it into a desirable commodity.
I know there are websites out there like this, but a whole town in Alaska?
hehe
Aren't they contributing to global warming?
In theory yes, but only by being alive and having natural body functions. The waste would decompose anyway. Realistically, by collecting it in one place, it would be that much easier to capture the methane, which would then constitute a carbon-neutral process. The amounts we are talking about, however are probably too small to be economical.
Although you question prompts me to ask alaskamomma how far north she is and how much things have warmed up for her over the past decade or so?
They grow nicely, but taste sh**ty.
I know I always think of cadmium pollution when I hear "human sludge". Can anyone enlighten me as to how heavy metals get into human waste in sufficient quantities to be dangerous?
Wouldn't a lot of it remain "un"-decomposed or take longer to decompose if it were frozen for good parts of the year or abandoned somewhere in less "congenial" conditions?
The project sounds great, by the way.
It's caused by industry dumping as opposed to humans consuming. Here in Indpls we have oxygen furnaces to burn off the cake because of the heavy metals.
Probably from the 70s and 80s generations listening to too much of it......
Sorry, but I am just not an expert on this type of $hit.
Reminds me of when the East Germans in the 70s were trying to make $hit into chocolate.
They got the color down, but were still working on the taste.
I am in Northern Germany and it is about 50 degrees here too. It shouldn't be though.
LOL
*********************************************************** From: The Boston Globe Oct. 7, 1993
Japanese cuisine is famous for its freshness, subtlety in taste and esthetic presentation.
Sushi, tempura, sukiyaki, tofu...what else floats to the fore of the imagination when considering the delicacies of this Oriental fare? How about a suasage made from sewage?
A laboratory in western Japan has devised a way to process sewage into an edible high-protein enriched meat substitute. The laboratory at the Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama was asked by the city sewage department to find an end-use for recycled sewage, said Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a member of the team that developed the material.
"The sewage department wants to show citizens that sewage isn't really such a dangerous and dirty thing, that it can be recycled into something useful," Ikeda said.
Making a sewage burger is easy. The protein is drawn out from the solids in the sewage, then mixed with soybean protein and food additives. The finishing touch is a standby in every Japanese kitchen - steak sauce for flavor.
Voila! A substance resembling beef in looks and texture and some what in taste and smell is produced.
Thanks. Won't be eating lunch today now.
informative, yet somehow humerous ping
Why don't they take this a step further and run some pipes through there and heat some homes?
The issue of metals has been the killer for many a sludge composting project. Nothing is said in this article of how it was addressed.
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