Hot Sludge Sundays and Landfill LeachAde

Mmm, mmm good.

I hosted a group of high school science teachers and some sustainability interns on a garbage and recycling learning journey yesterday. It was great, and exhausting for some reason. We hit a high school lunch room, the hazardous waste facility, Millennium Recycling, a couple of green buildings downtown (this one and that one), and the big ugly Landfill. We also toured the City of Sioux Falls’ Wastewater Treatment Facility, where we learned what’s green in the sewage business, and were introduced to a little taste of heaven: “Hot Sludge.”

The Hot Sludge Lake Boat.

After the little micro-organisms eat up the poo and other nasties in an anaerobic digester, the remaining “solids” (which the dudes at the wastewater plant affectionately call hot sludge) get pumped over to Hot Sludge Lake–a settling pool. On this yummy lake is a boat, which operates a dredge that stirs up the hot sludge (which by this time is now just your average warm and soupy sludge) and scrapes some off the bottom to be turned into SiouxperGrow. Yes, the sludge eventually becomes a brand-named fertilizer for Minnehaha County corn and soybean fields. It’s injected by a fleet of honey wagons. Oh, one more thing: not only is there a guy who’s job it is to drive the Hot Sludge lake boat, but they also have to do maintenance on that sucker. Underneath the boat. While it’s still floating on Hot Sludge Lake…

And at  the landfill–which I learned is not a hole at all, but a gigantic mountain of compacted, decomposing garbage and earth that rises from the prairie at an alarming rate–we were shown the “Leachite Pond” (which for quite a few minutes, our group thought was called the “Leachade pond”). This is the holding pool for the “solids” left over from a literal mountain of decomposing garbage. The hot sludge of the landfill, if you will. It’s one of two byproducts (other than the mountain). The other is methane gas, which the Sioux Falls Sanitary Landfill is now piping to a nearby Poet ethanol plant to be used to make corn fuel.

Beautiful compost in the making.

The pipeline thing is pretty cool, and of course I was fascinated by the stretching piles of composting grass and leaves (get yourself some free compost–all you can scoop). But overall, the Landfill sucked all the energy out of me.  Witnessing rolling cornfields and precious wetlands in the process of becoming a giant garbage mound the size of Madison is tough stuff for me. Imagine this: you take the valley that Montrosians call home, and you fill it to the top with layers of garbage and dirt. Then you continue building up a mound that buries the water tower on the hilltop. Do that from the ballpark north of town to the south end of the Horstman Addition out by I-90. Now you’re mental visual is close to the real thing.  At least our tour guide Pearl was shining with hope and enthusiasm.

There are a couple of new “cells” ready to be filled up and mounded, with plans for up to five more on the land the Landfill already owns. These cells are about the size of Montrose, and take 5-7 years to fill up, based on the current five-county population the Landfill serves (which is estimated to more than double in the next 20 years).

We are wasteful creatures. But hey, we’re really getting good at helping nature make hot sludge and leachade.

Leafy

Winter really snuck up on me this year. You’d think after 30 South Dakota winters I’d have figured out that I better get my garden and yard ready for the cold stuff by November. Not so much. We had a bonafide-no-shit cold streak a week or two ago, and I’m afraid I lost some new plantings of shrubs. Shrubs that I hadn’t gotten around to mulching yet. In fact, I didn’t even get my gladiola bulbs dug up in time–and now the ground is frozen solid. Silly me.

For about a month now I’ve been meaning to rake up a big pile of leaves in Mom and Dad’s back yard (since I get about 72 total leaves falling on my hilltop yard) to bag for composting and mulching. Mission (finally) accomplished. I did manage to get one flower bed mulched with fresh soybean stalks during the harvest, but that’s all my mulching. Again, in case you’ve missed it, I’m a bonehead this fall. Life goes on…

Alternative Mulch and that Compostable Cup

Hope, Zoey and I were out helping Grandpa Pat on the farm for a little while last night. While Dad was knocking the frame off the big shed door (you can ask him for details), I was gathering up a big pile of soybean straw that Duane emptied out of his combine while fixing something earlier in the day. This was a jackpot for me.

I tried a little mulching experiment last fall that I learned from my friends at the Prairie Arboretum in Freeman, SD. I went out to the bean field where the guys were combining and gathered up the soybean straw that is a byproduct of the combining process. So, this nice big pile right in the middle of the farm yard made it much easier this time. Turns out the stuff works pretty well. My biggest problem, being a windy hill dweller, is keeping my mulch in place instead of down in my neighbors’ yards. I even reused some emptied feed sacks from the silo shed, so it was a green project. Good price (free), recycled packaging, and local and renewable materials. Oh so green goodness…

recycled bags, soybean straw mulch

old stuff from last fall

the end game

emptied composter

the lid, three months later

that supposedly compostable cup

I also turned the compost in my homemade composter this morning (I dump it out once int he process to stir it all up and put it back in the barrell). This is the compost containing that supposedly compostable cup from Oscar’s Coffee that I put in there on June 22. Well, still looks mostly like a cup to me. The jury’s still out, I guess.