Composting Residuals From a Strawboard Manufacturing Facility
Scott Chapman1 and Daryl McCartney2
1. Department of Civil Engineering, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada 2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta,
Phase 1 of the research was a preliminary investigation that employed small bench-scale compost reactors containing various recipes using the three feedstock materials (straw, process unders, and a livestock lagoon sludge) at different moisture levels in an attempt to gain an understanding of composting effectiveness and to aid in the selection of several recipes that could be used for larger-scale laboratory testing.
Phase 2 was a larger-scale investigation focused on the composting of four recipes of varying straw particle sizes. The objectives for this phase were to investigate the effects of particle size on compost degradation and volume reduction and to monitor the rate and degree of degradation over a typical Canadian Prairie summer composting period (180 days) to estimate the
degradability of straw.
