Like many cities, Douglas, Ga.,
had a problem with solid waste. What’s different in Douglas
is that people now are
standing in line to take it away.
“Douglas Natural Pride” is the compost that’s fast
gaining a reputation in
area nurseries, farms and gardens.
“I used it to put in a new day lily bed,” said city
manager
separated the day lilies, cut
the stalks back to 2 inches and planted them in the new bed.
A week later they were 11 to
15 inches tall.”
Lewis made sure every nursery around got all of the
compost they could use. “They
all say it’s the best stuff they’ve ever used,” he said.
The word spread fast. “We’re having to be a little
selective now when we give it
away,” Lewis said. “We don’t want to be caught without any
for the next people
who come by.”
The Douglas story is like something out of Tom Sawyer.
The compost people are clamoring
to get is made of two things they were eager to get rid of a
few weeks before.
It’s made of yard trimmings – pine straw, leaves, grass
clippings, limbs -
and dewatered biosolids, or sludge, from the city’s waste
treatment plant.
The south Georgia city of 14,000 generates about 35 tons
of yard trimmings daily. City
officials knew that figure was high. But nothing had helped
reduce it.
They’d tried an exhaustive campaign to get people into
backyard composting. “We
reduced yard trimmings by less than 5 percent,” Lewis
said.
The city solved the problem first by contracting with a
private firm to grind yard
trimmings into mulch.
“As the process evolved, people began requesting the
mulch,” Lewis said.
“We began loading trucks and trailers on Saturday mornings
at no charge.”
That got rid of about half of the mulch. The city tried
to use the rest in public
projects. But they still had a surplus.
City officials had worked closely with the University of
Georgia Extension
Service office in educating
people about composting and using mulch. In April 1997, they
contracted with the UGA
Environmental Sciences to
prepare a composting plan.
UGA engineer K.C. Das came up with a recipe to combine
the ground yard trimmings with
the 9 to 11 daily tons of municipal waste in a seven-week
composting process.
The city got a $200,000 Georgia Environmental Facilities
Authority grant that covered
all but $68,000 of the startup costs.
“The funds for GEFA grants vary from year to year. But
it’s something local
officials need to keep an eye on,” said UGA engineer
Douglas get the grant.
“GEFA also offers low-interest loans for this type of
project,” he said.
“It’s usually about a 3 percent loan. That can make these
things a lot more
feasible.”
Lewis said Coffee County extension agents Rick Reed and
Randy Roberts worked with Glen Harris, a UGA crop and
soil scientist in Tifton, Ga., with the local hands-on
work.
“They were champions,” Lewis said. “We could not have
done this without
the University of Georgia folks.”
Harris said the compost has about a half-percent of
nitrogen, phosphate and potash. But
its best value isn’t its fertility. “We have a lot of low-
organic-matter soils down
here that can really benefit from this compost as a soil
amendment,” he said.
The product has no unpleasant odor, and the weed seeds in
the yard trimmings are killed
in the composting. Best of all, it’s a process other towns
and cities could use, too.
“I really think a lot of towns could do this,” Harris
said. “The things
the Douglas folks did so well is they went at it as a low-
cost process and were just
determined to make it work.”
