Clemson Organics Recovery’s dedication to education, innovation, and sustainability has made it a leading compost program in the southeast. Clemson’s program began as a student initiative and has expanded into a multi-departmental effort to capture organic waste from dining halls, sports arenas, academic buildings, and student housing. The program offers valuable industry-level learning opportunities to students and other community members and is a resource for colleges and universities looking to start or improve their yard and food waste recycling program. Education, innovation, and sustainability are core values of Clemson’s program and are vital to its continued success.
Clemson’s composting facility, Cherry Crossing Research Center, is both a test bed for new ideas and an established facility that is defining best practices for university composting. The scale and management structure of universities, like Clemson, can control the type of materials collected and the way they are processed, which offers a unique opportunity to capture and repurpose large amounts of organic waste.
During the fall semester of 2019, Clemson University collected and composted approximately 635,000 pounds of compostable products such as food waste, paper towels, and compostable wares. Diverting organic waste from landfill reduces Clemson’s environmental footprint while providing economic and social benefits to the university and surrounding community.
Clemson Organics Recovery is seeking partnerships with industry, universities, and faculty or student research projects to expedite the expansion and advancement of Clemson’s programinto a new facility that can accommodate post-consumer collections and provide a broader range of outreach and education services. Partners would have an opportunity to collaborate with Clemson’s composting team and utilize Cherry Crossing’s resources to test new ideas and technology.
Download the Clemson Organics Recovery 2020 White Paper
Clemson University’s Recycling Services department manages a compost site which processes food waste from campus. The site is located at the Cherry Crossing Research Facility. Just like the rest of us it has been greatly impacted by COVID-19, but work at the site has not stopped. Student interns Matthew Lawrence and Jared Montgomery were kind enough to give FRESH a tour of the facility earlier this spring.
This mixture then undergoes a 6-week process of progressing piles, ending with the cure pile, which is loaded into a trommel and sifted into the final product of sifted compost. The sifted compost can be land applied or used as soil amendment. The compost piles are turned every other day to make sure they are aerated properly and decomposing as quickly as they can.
Cherry Crossing’s final compost product is used by campus landscaping as well as the student organic farm. This past year a large majority went to Musser Fruit Farm, Clemson’s fruit research farm. The compost is also typically sold to the community, but sales were suspended at the time of our tour. With Clemson’s campus shutting down as a result of the pandemic, there had been an extreme shortage of food waste produced from campus. Before the campus closed due to COVID-19, the recycling staff was picking up about 48 bins per day. Now they’re only collected an average of 10 bins a week.
