The Shadow
BLACKSBURG, Va. (VR) – Virginia Tech has received more than $3.5 million to build an industrial-scale composting facility that will turn campus food and agricultural waste into a resource for university farms, research, and education.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) awarded the university $3,530,497 as part of an initiative to fund food rescue and composting at universities and colleges across the commonwealth. The facility – currently planned for construction in a field just behind the entrance at Kentland Farm – will have an intended processing capacity of 2,700 tons per year, including campus food waste and materials from the university’s agricultural operations.
The project brings together the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Dining Services, Facilities, and the Office of Sustainability to address two longstanding challenges: diverting food waste from landfills and improving manure management at Virginia Tech’s dairy operations. It also advances the university’s goal of becoming a zero-waste campus by 2030 and will create opportunities for research and hands-on student learning.
“This is something that the university has been exploring for decades,” said Director of College Facilities Patrick Hilt, who is helping coordinate the project for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “It’s exciting to see so many years of collaborative planning finally gain enough traction and resources that we can soon shift from talking about the facility to actually building it.”
The project grew from federal funding provided to DEQ by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as part of a climate pollution reduction grant program focused in part on reducing methane emissions associated with food waste.
Virginia Tech had much of the groundwork for such a facility in place. Previous studies had explored campus composting, while a zero-waste assessment helped identify potential partners and sources of organic material across the university.
“All the players were in place for us to hit the ground running when they announced this grant,” said Nathan King, Facilities’ campus sustainability manager. “This composting facility aligns so well with university’s land-grant status.”
Recovering food and diverting waste
The grant addresses food waste in two ways: recovering prepared food that can still be eaten and composting organic material that otherwise would be sent to a landfill.
Dining Services already recovers food through Campus Kitchen and plans to expand those efforts by sending prepared meals from dining centers primarily to The Market of Virginia Tech, which provides food assistance to students.
Dining also sends about 300 tons of compostable material annually to an off-campus commercial composting facility, according to Emily Williams, assistant director of sustainability for Dining and Housing. That includes food waste and compostable service ware.
“We have a huge need in this area for a commercial composting facility right now,” Williams said. “There are around three in this region of the state, and they’re all small scale.”
Williams said bringing that work closer to campus should reduce transportation costs and associated emissions while giving Virginia Tech greater control over a waste stream that is important to reaching its zero-waste goal.
Connecting composting and agriculture
At the Kentland Farm facility, campus food waste will be combined with manure from dairy operations and carbon-rich materials such as woody debris to create compost. This compost will then be distributed to agricultural fields where it will replenish nutrients in the soil, including at Homefield Farm, where food is grown for the university’s dining halls, bringing the system full circle.
The system will help the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences address existing constraints on manure management while producing compost that can return nutrients to soils used in farming.
Like Dining Services, Hilt said the amount of manure the dairy can manage is limited by existing facilities and restrictions on when manure can be applied to land. Composting could provide more flexibility while producing material that can be used in university agricultural operations.
For Gonzalo Ferreira, a professor and Extension dairy scientist at the School of Animal Sciences, that connection between waste management and farming is an important part of the project. Ferreira, whose research focuses on the reduction of agriculture-related greenhouse gasses, said he hopes the facility will provide a large reduction in methane emissions.
“One of the main sources of greenhouse gases can be landfills,” said Ferreira, who facilitated the grant’s submission. “Landfills create tightly packed anaerobic environments, and the microorganisms that grow there produce methane – one of the stronger greenhouse gases. Composting introduces air to the process, which means more CO2 production instead of methane.”
The planned facility is being modeled in part on a composting operation at North Carolina State University, another land-grant institution with similar waste streams and needs.
The DEQ award will help overcome funding hurdles that have stalled previous efforts at Virginia Tech. The grant will support design and construction of the facility as well as equipment and initial operating expenses.
“This took it from being a conceptual idea to something that’s financially viable,” Hilt said.
Developing the facility will still require an extensive permitting process, equipment purchases, and a detailed operating plan. Project plans call for the first two years to focus largely on planning and construction, with the facility expected to open after that process.
A facility for learning and research
The facility’s impact will eventually extend beyond waste management.
In line with Virginia Tech’s focus on applied research and experiential learning, the long-term plan is for the facility to be available to faculty members for composting, soil health, and waste management research. Students will also be able to access it through classes, research, and other hands-on opportunities.
“One component of the grant is that hopefully we are going to be educating the community on composting,” Ferreira said. “Once we have everything rolling, we could do Extension workshops on the side.”
The facility initially will focus on Virginia Tech’s needs, but project partners have discussed the possibility of future collaboration with organizations in the New River Valley. The Town of Blacksburg, Radford University, local farmers, and other community organizations are potential partners being considered once the operation expands.
King said the Office of Sustainability hopes to connect those academic and operational efforts and use the facility as “a living learning laboratory.”
“We’ll have other researchers helping us refine our process and learn better and more efficient ways of composting,” he said. “Then we’ll be developing that overall educational and operational model that we can then take out to farmers and the public. Hopefully, we’re going to learn a lot through this process.”
