Benjamin Rizzo
In a recent environmental project, Pierce College students took the bull by the, uh, tail and used animal waste (manure) bound with green waste (grass clippings) to produce a useful solid product that yields certain environmental benefits.
The Pierce College Manure Team is a scientific team made up of eight current and former Pierce students working under the guidance of Professor Craig Meyer.
During the past year, the team conducted experiments with different mixtures of manure and grass clippings to develop a product that could even be used as an electrical energy source.
For their efforts, the team has been invited to Washington, D.C., to present their findings at the 2008 National Sustainable Design Expo on April 20, located on the National Mall.
The team consists of Jeff Ferree, Kandis Gilmore, Taylor Johnson, Leslie Musser, Nathalie Rodrigues, Esteban Ruiz, Marian Ulery and Andrew Wilson.
Assembled in the fall of 2006, the team was formed to conduct a student project in response to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) annual P3 (People, Prosperity and the Planet) Award competition.
This competition challenges students to create solutions for some of the environmental sustainability problems that plague society every day.
“There is a major problem in the future of renewable fuel sources,” said Esteban Ruiz, 20, a biomedical engineering major. “We, the manure team, as we have been dubbed, are taking decisive measures to help learn and develop a knowledge base for the study of producing new clean and renewable sources of energy.”
According to the team’s findings, the mixture of manure and green waste produces nutrients that could be used in soil amendment practices, which today rely heavily on oil-consuming commercial fertilizers.
Also, the mix contains 5,000 British Thermal Units per one pound of water (BTU/lb) of energy, which is the same energy yield of a low-grade lignite coal.
This would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the team members, who in many instances conducted their experiments and research on weekends.
“I found working with the manure team one of the most exciting and rewarding things I did at Pierce,” said Gilmore, 24, a biology major at Sonoma State University near San Francisco. “To literally get your hands dirty for the sake of the environment and science.”
Gilmore spent two years at Pierce before transferring, and reminisced of her days of climbing “the giant steaming mulch mountain” in Moorpark and making “hockey pucks” of manure and grass clippings.
At the national expo in April, the manure team will be competing for up to $75,000 in grants from the EPA for the best projects, judged so by today’s leaders of the various scientific fields.
“It will be exciting to present our project in Washington,” said Musser, 27, who is taking prerequisite courses at Pierce for a kinesiology master’s degree program. “Normally, the opportunity to become involved in a research project such as this is only available to students at four-year universities.”