Week 9: Diving into Design

This week, it became apparent to the team that some necessary decisions needed to be made in order to move some of the design elements forward. One of the necessary explorations was checking out the waste pick up docks at the dining halls.

Where all waste and recycling is currently picked up from South Dining Hall.

It was difficult to observe dimensions and elevations of the waste dumpsters because everything in this area is locked up and covered by black-tarp covered fences. The important part of this exploration was to determine that there is a significant amount of space to work with and the drive entry is relatively open and maneuverable. Our hope is to be able to design for a smaller landfill dumpster and use the remaining unused area of the dock for an equal-sized food waste collection dumpster to be made into compost.

Another aspect of the design, which we really wanted to nail down was what type of composting system we want to focus our design on. Through cost and benefit evaluations as well as overall feasibility estimations, we want to move forward in designing a system that utilizes an in-vessel composter with the capacity to handle our estimated 1.5 tons of food waste from each day from the dining halls. We have been researching the Earth-Flow in-vessel composter from Green Mountain technologies, and we would like to move forward in obtaining cost estimates of obtaining such a vessel. The key benefit of a composter like this one would be the ease of installation, maintenance, and operation. It would control for odors and would not create a vector problem. While we still do not have a site determined for the vessel, the foundation needed would be a simple concrete slab and the loading of food waste into the vessel would be very straightforward from any kind of truck.

While the design is only going to reach 10% complete by the end of our semester, we are excited and confident that these key design elements will set the team up well to move forward with other key design elements during next semester. Through all of our meetings, phone calls, conversations, and design work so far, we have had a lot of help from very passionate and creative people who have been great help to us. Adequate design of transportation and cost estimates will be difficult, but very important in our proposal to the university for implementing a system like this. However, we are confident and excited to move forward on our design and to make an impact on student behavior and overall university sustainability!