20th Annual National Compost Conference September 22-24, 2010 Crowne Plaza Ottawa, Ottawa Ontario

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1 20th Annual National Compost Conference September 22-24, 2010 Crowne Plaza Ottawa, Ottawa Ontario An Eighty-one year old civil engineer s last hurrah or Bill Goodings Experience goes to Waste

2 My foreign assignments (both short and long) when gainfully employed Kabul Afghanistan Eldoret Kenya Bermuda Brazil Columbia Venezuela With all my 50 plus years Canadian consulting Engineering experience and these foreign assignments in my pocket, upon retirement, I joyfully became a Volunteer Advisor for eight years for CESO on Solid Waste Management

3 Sharing a Lifetime of Experience through CIDA funded CANADIAN EXECUTIVE SERVICES ORGANIZATION

4 CESO Operations Worldwide

5 I am now a CESO VA My first assignment in 2003 was in San Carlos, Negros Oriental, The Philippines, (about 100,000 population) Two hours south of Manila by air.. This is what I found.

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14 I arrived at the San Carlos dump, and I felt as though I was back in Ontario in 1951, but this time in a foreign country with no engineering assistants, no technicians, no specialists, no machinery and. no budget And all that rotting garbage stench, flies, rodents and wind blown debris plus dozens of poor people trying to make a living by scavenging.

15 .just me and all that 40 plus years of waste management experience which fortunately included operating a large windrow compost operation on top of a very full landfill in Bermuda. I remembered what a Malaysian engineer once told me Bill..Composting is a natural process that requires mechanical intervention only when things go wrong

16 THE 1992 RIO CONFERENCE on the ENVIRONMENT Here is their Policy relative to buying environmental solutions THE MAXIMUM LEVEL OF SPENDING ON WASTE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS WILL HAVE BEEN REACHED

17 WHEN THE ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS FROM FURTHER SPENDING WOULD BE LESS THAN BENEFITS BY INVESTING THE SAME MONEY ON EDUCATION, ROADS, OR HEALTH CARE, ETC.

18 Ontario can afford a high level of spending for waste management and obviously an emerging country must have a lower level. but in Ontario, we often forget these basic Rio principles while we strive for expensive and sometimes elusive waste diversion targets.

19 Good old simple and inexpensive composting should, in my view, be considered more often as a means to manage more of our waste

20 even if we do not always make useful horticultural compost we will reduce the production of that landfill CHG methane which has an effect on our atmosphere that is 21 times worse than carbon dioxide

21 in my opinion this is worthwhile for you to think about at this conference.

22 MY SOLUTION HERE IS HOW I APPLIED THE RIO PRINCIPLE TO SOLVE SAN CARLOS SMELLY AND OPEN GARBAGE DUMP PROBLEM.

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27 The outcome Stabilization of Organic Fraction of Municipal Waste by Composting Convert from landfilling (anaerobic) to passive above ground windrows (aerobic) in 6 or 7 months, to Reduce leachate (95% to 10% rainfall) Produce no methane or H2So3 (rotten egg) gases and no other LF malodors

28 The outcome cont d Not attract flies, vermin, goats and their kids, and scavengers and their kids But produced water vapour, and heat. AND a clean humus AND cleaned recyclable material

29 Outcome of my work My last hurrah as a civil engineer! I had turned an Open Garbage Dump into a Composting Operation using rice hull covered passive windrows that required no turning, and all at no increase in the cost of operating that awful dump.

30 Keys to our success was inclusion of bulky non-organics like bottles, scrap steel, lumber, etc. in windrow which created conduits for continuous supply of oxygen 7 months, and.

31 Outcome cont d And the 15 cm. thick cover of rice hulls which kept it moist in the long periods of drought but deflected most of the rain in the monsoon season. A local newspaper wrote a nice article about this. (see material I provided to Susan Antler)

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34 CESO Assignments that followed Bolivia (8) The Philippines (5 more) Honduras Sri Lanka I converted 9 dumps into all waste composting processes. It would work in Canada too.

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36 And also helped 2 farmers and 1 fish farmer (fish do not eat compost but algae do) turn rice straw and chicken manure (C/N ratio 12) into a profitable horticultural product by composting.

37 A little bit about one farmer, Mr. Pama with 40,000 chickens and how together we turned his odour problems into a success story both environmentally and financially.

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43 Sometimes there is a little time for a CESO volunteer to enjoy a bit of R & R or to be recognized.

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48 My travelling Partner June has traveled with me to almost all of the foreign countries I have listed. When asked, she would help locals where she could, and together we suffered meal after meal of rice and fish floating in hot water that they called soup often, the best food that the clients had.

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52 And so I say to all of you. Behave decently (in three languages)

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54 and. don t be slothful

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56 Thank you for your patience, and listening to me tell you about my last hurrah probably my best hurrah.

57 I have attached to this e-file a few papers that you may find interesting Thank you

58 Four attached reports FYI Waste Management Lessons from an Open Garbage Dump in the Philippines City finds the cure for its stinking dump (Manila Times) Nov. 07, 2003 Seven Stages for Effective Solid Waste Management To Bury or Not to Bury, That is the Question (a discussion paper)

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