It was a small pile, but it felt momentous to Georg Janssen. Last September, Salt Spring’s new community composter had just produced, for the first time, a small amount of composted material from what four weeks earlier had been offal (the remains of butchered animal carcasses).
“I was very happy,” recalls Janssen who is managing the composter project as a member of the Salt Spring Abattoir Society board. Although he has only been involved with the project for a few years, he knew that the small pile represented a lengthy community effort to turn organic waste on the island into local compost.
First compost: The first pile that spilled out of the Salt Spring community composter last fall was a cause for celebration | Photo: Georg Janssen
A year later, about 20 tonnes of waste annually from the abattoir is being fed into the composter located in a facility at the Burgoyne Valley Community Farm. There are a couple of key bylaw changes that need to happen before the composter is able to ramp up further and meet a goal of turning 60 tonnes of organic waste–not just animal waste but also restaurant and other waste–into a substantial amount of compost that can be sold commercially, but Gary Holman, Salt Spring’s electoral area director for the CRD, is confident that those changes will happen in the near future.
End composter: After about four weeks inside the composter, the animal waste is transformed into composted material and spills out the end of the machine | Photo: David Minkow
For now, a CRD bylaw restricts the feedstocks that the composter can accept from off-site, including restaurant waste. According to Holman, the bylaw is more restrictive than provincial regulations. He says that this fall, CRD staff will bring the board a report recommending that the bylaw be rescinded and thus allow for a greater range of feedstocks to be accepted onsite.
When this happens, it will open up a lot of possibilities, Holman says. For example, he notes that in response to a recent CBC story on the composter, Gulf Islands School District 64 reached out about having its organic waste go into the composter.
The current zoning of the composter facility means that the finished product can be sold only onsite to the farmers and gardeners on the 90 plots on the 65-acre Burgoyne Valley Community Farm, where it usually sells out quickly, according to Janssen. Islands Trust will have to add an additional use to the land’s current zoning to allow offsite commercial sales of the compost, Holman says. “I’m pretty confident the Trust will allow that, but it will have to be the CRD and the partners that approach the Trust with that proposal.”
“This project is an excellent example of the collaboration needed to get things done on Salt Spring,” Holman explains. “It’s a three-way partnership: The CRD owns the composter, and they lease the property from the [Salt Spring Island] Farmland Trust Society, and the Abattoir Society operates it.”
For Janssen, who joined the Abattoir Society board a year after moving to SSI in 2021, the community composter project appealed to him in part because of its multiple benefits. “It helps the abattoir, it helps the livestock farmers, it helps the atmosphere, and it helps all the gardeners and farmers here [to have a local compost source],” he says. Having a composter reduces the number of trips back and forth to the abattoir for livestock farmers and eliminates the hassle of dealing with the animal carcasses (burial has been a common disposal method), Janssen explains.
Skulls and bones: Once a week, the composted material is screened to remove the skulls and bones of the offal | Photo: David Minkow
The way the community composter project works is that on slaughter days (poultry on Tuesdays, red meat on Thursdays) at the abattoir, the offal is emptied into a large bin at the composter site. The bin is picked up by a tractor driven by Bayan Harvey, who runs Kumusha Farms and is community farm manager for the Farmland Trust. He then empties the feedstock and two piles of wood shavings into the doors of the big black Ecodrum composter (10-metres long, two-metres high).
The bins are washed right away with a power washer. Because there’s no organic waste stored on site, there are no rodent attracts and no significant smell. When I visited the site in late August, there was a slight odour when the composter was opened, but otherwise there really wasn’t any smell in the facility, which was surprising considering the source of what’s inside the composter.
The Ecodrum composter is a closed system designed for animal and organic waste, Janssen explains. The site is powered by vertical solar panels set up by Salt Spring Community Energy, and a fan inside the composter runs eight times a day for about 5-10 minutes at a time to suck in oxygen and take moisture out. The composter also spins twice a day to mix the wood shavings with the organic waste and add more oxygen. The contents gradually move from left to right and about four weeks after being put in, the waste spills out onto the floor as composted material.
Solar field: The composter facility located at the Burgoyne Valley Community Farm is powered primarily by a solar panel set up by Salt Spring Community Energy. The panels use an innovative vertical design | Photo: David Minkow
Once a week, the growing pile on the floor is screened for bones and skulls, says Janssen, who is looking into a way to crush the bones and skulls and add that to the finished product. The composted pile is moved to a corner to cure for at least three weeks before it can be sold.
When I visited the site, the composter had just spun an hour before I arrived, and the inside temperature was already up to 56 degrees. Janssen explains that it needs to be at least 55 degrees to kill pathogens, and the readings generally range between 58 and 65 degrees.
“When compost piles are not turned properly, they get anaerobic and create a lot of methane,” Janssen says. “The machine does it automatically so no one has to be there when it spins. It’s producing compost of high quality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by preventing it from getting anaerobic.”
The ratio of carbon to nitrogen is key to good compost. Last winter, too much carbon made the end product woody; Janssen says it was a good soil amendment, but not yet compost. However, he says the carbon/nitrogen ratio is now getting to where it should be. A recent test showed the ratio was 24, well inside the ideal 15-35 range.
Curing compost: The composted material cures for about three weeks before it can be sold as a soil amendment | Photo: David Minkow
Holman says it has been quite a journey to get to this point, and he compliments the work done by the many volunteers who recognized the value for SSI to have a sustainable, on-island way to deal with organic waste as well as have a local source of quality compost. Some of the key players lauded during my reporting of the story include: Mary Richardson of the Liquid Waste Commission; horticulturist Jane Squier; former Farmland Trust president Patricia Reichert; and Kevin Chipperfield and Anne Macey of the Abattoir Society.
“As quite often is the case on Salt Spring, the NGOs are the folks who initiate things. They’re the ones with the ambitions, but in this case, they’re also the ones who actually made it work,” Holman says.
The roots of this project go a long way back. For example, one of the main recommendations of the 2008 SSI Area Farm Plan was the establishment of a composting facility to keep nutrients on the island and produce high-quality compost for local farms. In 2010, the SSI Agricultural Alliance completed a Central Composting Feasibility Study, followed in 2012 by a study on the anaerobic digestion of offal from the abattoir, which had just opened that year.
In the wake of the CRD banning kitchen scraps from the landfill in 2015, Mary Richardson of the Liquid Waste Commission and horticulturist Jane Squier brought together local stakeholders to form the Salt Spring Organic Waste Working Group. In 2017, the group received funding from the CRD to produce a report “The Ins and Outs of Organic Waste” that looked at how much finished compost and soil amendments were being hauled in from off island, and how much organic waste was being created on island. Also, starting in 2018, there was an effort led by the Liquid Waste Commission to include biosolids (sewage sludge) in the mix of materials for a composter, but that ran afoul of CRD restrictions prohibiting the land application of biosolids.
The Organic Waste Working Group identified the Ecodrum composter as something that could work well for SSI, and in 2021, the Abattoir Society bought one, thanks to grants from the BC Investment Agriculture Foundation and Salt Spring’s Community Works Fund. Then in 2023, the CleanBC Organic Infrastructure and Collection Program in 2023 awarded almost $170,000 to create a facility for the composter. Project partners (Salt Spring Island Community Services Society, Abattoir Society, Farmland Trust) then raised another $120,000. Private individuals, the Salt Spring Island Foundation and The Berman Foundation are among those not named elsewhere in this article that have supported the composter project.
The reason why the CRD now owns the composter instead of the Abattoir Society is because the CleanBC grant required local government ownership, Holman says. He adds that the CRD insisted that SSI taxpayers be entirely responsible for operating the facility and that revenue shortfalls, of which there may be some in the short term, would fall on them and not on other local governments. Holman believes this makes Salt Spring the only local government within the CRD that owns and operates a compost facility
Holman explains that when the CRD amended its liquid waste bylaw a few years to include organics (this was before the creation of the Local Community Commission, which now has local authority over the liquid waste bylaw), it “allowed us to take ownership of the facility” and cover any operating shortfalls through that bylaw.
“Because the liquid waste service is an island-wide service, it means all taxpayers on Salt Spring have a stake in maintaining this facility and eventually replacing it, which in my view is a good thing,” Holman says. “It’s going to be an important public amenity.”
