Calin Farley and Matt Stanley sifted through a generous buffet from Owens Food Court: burritos from La Cantina, spaghetti from Lotsa Pasta and mixed greens from the salad bar.
But the two men handled the items wearing blue latex gloves, for it was hardly a meal they’d consume.
The medley of foods — most several days old and pungent — were mashed together in 48-gallon green collection carts, each instructing in large white letters “Compostables Only.” Farley and Stanley, employees of Poplar Manor Enterprises Compost, tilted the carts with the help of mechanical levers into a 25-yard-long, rear-packing truck.
“We got plenty of carts here,” Farley said. “We’ve got 41. It usually takes us, I don’t know, 30 minutes to an hour to dump them all.”
PME Compost toted the Virginia Tech student, faculty and staff leftovers to a farm in Floyd County where the will ultimately be recycled into compost.
Compost is a black soil that results from the decomposition of organic materials. Farley’s wife, Mindy, complements Calin and Stanley as the third, and final, PME Compost employee. She easily described what falls under the compostable umbrella.
“I like to say, ‘If it grows, it goes,’” she said. “So if it was once a living organism — a plant or an animal — it definitely goes.”
After graduating from Tech in 2005, Calin didn’t use his history degree to find employment.
“If you didn’t want to move away from this area, it was tough to find a good, paying job,” he said. “But I knew we had a farm — we had 140 acres — I knew we could do something with it.”
Calin said he and his father brainstormed how to best use the family farm, which had previously only hosted beef cattle.
“We were looking for a new business that would be a niche market for the future,” Calin said, “and we were also looking for something that would help our community.”
Juggling about five ideas, Calin said he pinpointed an activity that had little commercial presence in the state.
“Everybody was doing plastic recycling,” he said. “No one was doing organic recycling.”
Calin said he explored composting businesses for nearly a year. Most of his research was online, though he also heeded insight from Tech professors in the crop and field discipline.
A Radford graduate, Mindy said she helped Calin move beyond manure-based composting experiments, which were drawn from the farm’s cattle. In January 2009, they acquired a permit from the Department of Environmental Quality to compost food waste on seven of the farm’s 140 acres.
Tech, Mindy said, was anxious to welcome PME Compost.
“We got permitted like on a Wednesday,” she said, “Calin got his CDL license to drive a truck on a Thursday, and we had our first pickup at Southgate (Center) at like 5 a.m. on a Friday.”
Rachael Budowle previously served as Solid Waste Community Programs Coordinator for the Town of Blacksburg. She began a dialogue with PME Compost during her tenure there and has continued it at Tech.
“It was serendipitous that they got their permits — they were really only the second facility in the state that is able to accept this kind of waste,” Budowle said. “And to have it just be 35 minutes from us is really helpful.”
Budowle said PME Compost currently services Southgate Center and Owens Dining Center, which includes Hokie Grill, Personal Touch Catering and Owens.
Southgate Center is a predominantly pre-consumer food facility, therefore it produces fragments such as cantaloupe rinds or broccoli stems. Owens combines pre- and post-consumer waste — the excess you set on the assembly-line tray returns.
“With the kind of waste that we produce in a food-service industry,” Budowle said, “composting is really the way to go. I mean — that’s where most of our waste is coming from. It’s organic waste than can be recycled through composting.”
Budowle said training Southgate Center and Owens employees was extensive. She did facility walkthroughs with managers to finalize the placement of composting carts, composting signage and other referential visual cues. Budowle and Mindy led a presentation to regular staff members as well.
“Additionally we did in vivo, live trainings,” Budowle said, “where I would be back there with them with gloves on, sorting and helping them learn on the job exactly what’s compostable and what’s not.”
Budowle said Owens redirects approximately five tons of food and organic waste away from traditional landfills each week. From Southgate Center, PME Compost shuttles another nearly 3 tons per week to its farm — Southgate Center regularly diverts 75 percent of its waste.
Items such as parchment paper and cardboard are also compostable.
“(Southgate Center) gotten the system down so well there that they’re composting paper towels and things like that after they wash their hands,” Budowle said.
Considering the favorable numbers, Budowle said she hopes to escalate the endeavor.
“(Composting) coupled with recycling, we’d really like to get to the point where we don’t have much trash left,” she said. “I mean there’s always going to be something, but we’re going to be diverting a significant amount.”
Ideally, Budowle said, Tech’s composting could transcend dining centers into dormitories and other common areas, though it would be difficult to monitor.
“Other universities are examining ways to have composting stations for students to separate their own waste,” she said. “The risk for contamination increases greatly when you open it up to consumers.”
The only obstacle preventing PME Compost from reaching other dining centers, Budowle said, is the necessary equipment. Southgate Center already had a mechanical lift to lower the robust collection carts to ground level from loading docks. Tech installed one at Owens specifically to pilot PME Compost.
Calin said facility employees couldn’t otherwise safely maneuver the carts.
“They’re supposed to weigh about 168 pounds,” he said. “But if they get filled up with, let’s say straight all mashed potatoes, they can weigh up to 400.”
Moments later, while Stanley coasted by him with a cart, Calin awkwardly pivoted one to its loading mark.
“This one, for example, is 400 pounds,” he said.
However, a second PME Compost truck is in the works. Calin said it will be fitted to snag carts directly off loading docks.
“As a business, we took a big risk with buying a truck just for Virginia Tech,” he said, “in hopes that, you know, that they would give us the rest of their dining halls and it would pay for itself.”
PME Compost performs all the necessary modifications to its trucks, whether it’s welding for tighter seals in anticipation of leakage or installing a hose system with 120 pounds per square inch of water pressure to rinse the carts.
Once the truck — which can carry approximately 20,000 pounds of food and organic waste — returns to the farm, its innards are emptied and shaped into windrows, which is a triangular mound that extends for a great length. PME Compost’s windrows start out approximately nine feet wide by seven feet tall, and they stretch 250 feet.
“We kind of layer it like a lasagna,” Mindy said. “So you come in and you layer your food waste; we use leaves, and we use wood waste.”
Calin said the farm contains anywhere from one to nine windrows during a given season. The windrows sit for eight to 10 months, occasionally jostled by a bladed “turner,” which churns the elements to expose buried pieces to oxygen.
After just the first month, Mindy said, the windrows break down 50 percent, dropping to heights of four to five feet.
The final product is screened down to a half-inch soil that, when mixed with traditional soil, boasts benefits including improved workability and porosity as well as erosion control.
Budowle said Tech will soon witness the performance of the PME Compost product.
“Through a partnership with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Kentland Farm — Virginia Tech’s farm,” she said, “we have an acre where we’re doing sustainable vegetable production for the upcoming season.”
PME Compost recently connected with Kentland Farm.
“We actually just took some compost over there the other week,” Mindy said. “It kind of completed the cycle. It’s kind of awesome.”
Different Tech crops including potatoes, tomatoes and peppers will be used in Dietrick Dining Center this summer.
“Just to show people what this region can support agriculturally I think is important,” Budowle said.
The new PME Compost truck, Calin said, will be ready to collect those very scraps it ultimately helped create.
Mindy said she, Calin and Stanley currently work 10 to 14 hour days, six days per week for PME Compost. Along with Tech, their other customers include both Blacksburg Kroger locations, Christiansburg High School and Due South BBQ.
“We need about five more people,” Mindy said with a laugh.
Calin had some help during a recent compost delivery to Fishburn Park Elementary School in Roanoke. He said he asked if they wanted him to diffuse the goods.
“They said, ‘No. Dump it in a big pile. We’re going to have all the little kids with their hands go and spread it,’” he said.