It’s an aspect of life at the zoo as routine as the trumpeting of elephants or the chatter of monkeys. It happens every day, indeed many times a day and usually in public. Yet the subject is scarcely one that keepers discuss with zoogoers or mount exhibits on.
That is, the animals relieve themselves. Without restroom facilities. At Brookfield Zoo, that amounts to 5,000 pounds of poop per day by the 2,600 creatures there.
There has never been a particularly satisfactory way to get rid of the problem. Keeping it on the premises has proven too odiferous, and hauling it away to landfills, the route most zoos have taken, is costly.
But on Thursday, in a move that modernists might call corporate synergy, Brookfield unveiled a state-of-the-art solution.
Now, if the zoo’s immaculately landscaped 216 acres of trees and flower beds soon seem even more lush and vibrant, officials can thank the zoo animals themselves for what they drop into the effort.
A new composting system inaugurated by the zoo is turning the manure–along with tree, shrub and flower clippings from zoo grounds–into a very useful soil conditioner.
The new system should produce a million pounds or more of the stuff a year. The zoo will use it to enrich the soil around its own vast collection of trees and in its huge, formal flower gardens. What it doesn’t use will go to delighted horticulturists at the Cook County Forest Preserve and the Village of Brookfield.
The state of Illinois likes the idea so much it has given a $150,000 demonstration grant to the zoo. Officials hope it will solve a problem faced by many businesses that deal with large numbers of animals, including farms, ranches and racetrack stables.
“This (Brookfield’s composting operation) could be a model for other zoos if it is cost-effective,” said Jane Ballentine, spokesperson for the American Zoo and Aquarium Association. “That would be great, because most of them apparently still send it off as landfill.”
Considering that all those elephants, rhinos, giraffes and other big, hoofed animals are constantly chipping in with key raw materials, supplies pile up quickly and rather enormously.
“We’re re-establishing a natural process here,” said Gail Gorski, the zoo’s head groundskeeper. “Where they live in the wild, these animals play their role in the ecological cycle of their environment, with their droppings naturally enriching the soil.”
The zoo began composting tree and shrub trimmings from its grounds in 1989, she said. In a short-lived experiment a couple of years ago, the zoo tried mixing in some animal waste with the plant material.
That experiment ended quickly when bad odors it generated proved overwhelming, causing complaints from both zoo staff and homeowners near the zoo.
Gorski never dropped the idea, however, and eventually found a Tappan, N.Y., design consulting firm, Organic Recycling Inc., that came up with innovative technology to solve the odor problem.
The firm designed a greenhouse 99 feet long and 44 feet wide for the zoo that acts as a giant deodorizer. Every day manure and plant material is ground together and put in piles in the greenhouse, which is located in a wooded, non-public area on the west side of the zoo grounds.
A series of fans blow fresh air through large, perforated plastic piping buried in the piles of compost as bacteria “cooks” it, generating heat up to 160 degrees. Smelly gas also generated in the compost is removed by the air blown through the piles, carried in pipes to an outdoor, organic bio-filter that “scrubs” out the odors before the gases are released.
“Cooking” the waste matter removes about 60 percent of its bulk.
Thus, what goes into the greenhouse as a big pile of smelly waste comes out six weeks later as a small pile of rich, odorless soil additive.
The end product is not a fertilizer in the strict sense, Gorski said. It will instead replace material like peat moss that gardeners use to enrich soil around trees and in flowerbeds.
“What we have here is more properly an organic conditioner,” said Gorski, “something that softens up the soil and replenishes it with the microbes, bacteria and fungi that make it almost a living thing.
More Top Picks Best Tonneau Covers For F150
“It won’t show up right away, but eventually it helps plants take up nutrients more readily, strengthening them and enabling them to withstand diseases better.”
The Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs gave a grant to the zoo covering half the composting project’s $300,000 cost.
“The Brookfield Zoo’s system is an excellent model for how others in Illinois and the Midwest can reduce costs and the amount of waste filling up our landfills,” said Annie Adkins, the Commerce Department’s grant manager, at a dedication ceremony Thursday.
A few zoos have come upon other innovative, profitable ways of disposing of the waste. Several supply a company that composts the material, for example, and molds it into animal shapes, marketing the product as “Zoo Doo,” “Poo Pets” or “Dung Buddies,” to be placed as a soil additive in home gardens.
Tom Gannon, who oversees composting operations at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, has been selling it as a moneymaker for the zoo since 1984, becoming a public personality in the bargain.
He has come to be known affectionately as the Prince of Poo, Duke of Dung and several other choice titles.
Gannon presides over two annual bulk sales of the compost that he calls the “Spring and Fall Feces Fests.” He’ll load up a large pickup truck with the compost for $45, a smaller one for $30, and bags and garbage cans of varying size for a lesser price.
“Our animals produce about 600 tons of this stuff a year,” Gannon said. “It has become so popular around here with gardeners that we can only supply about 200 of them at each sale, but we have a waiting list of 1,000 wanting to attend.”
Some of the compost is reserved by the zoo for novelty gift shop items, sold in pint and gallon bucket sizes. At Christmas it is marketed as “Holidoo,” for example, and at Valentine’s Day, it is sold as “Love Me Doo.”
Gannon assures gardeners that the compost is “safe to handle and works great on veggies.”
Brookfield believes the message of recycling the waste into something useful is itself a valuable asset of the composting operation.
“A significant part of the zoo’s mission is conservation,” said George Rabb, Brookfield’s director,”which includes conserving our natural resources as well as animal species.
“We are pleased to be the state’s first demonstration site for this new composting technology. It is another way we put into practice conservation efforts that we encourage our visitors to learn more about and become involved in.”