New York Dog Park Composts Waste

ITHACA, NEW YORK - Several years ago, dog owners in the college town of Ithaca, N.Y., began worrying about all the plastic bags filled with dung that ended up in the landfill.
Leon Kochian, a professor of plant biology at Cornell and, more to the point, the owner of a yellow lab, recalled the thinking at the time: “This is Ithaca. There’s got to be a more environmentally sensible way to do this.”
This year, with Mr. Kochian’s nudging, one of the city’s dog parks — part of the Allan H. Treman Marine State Park — became a dog waste composting park.
Special corn-based bags, made by the Biobag Company, based in Florida, are available at several stations in the park. Dog owners put the bag and its contents into large bins near the park’s entrances, which are removed once a week by a company called Cayuga Compost.
At its composting facility, Cayuga dumps the waste into a pile — mixed with a bit of yard and wood waste — quite separate from the company’s regular food-waste compost.
And there it will sit — until the company figures out what it might be good for.
Late next year, Cayuga plans to run tests to determine the composition of the dog waste (after all, a dog’s diet is arguably more varied than virtually any other animal’s, in accordance with the whims of their owners). If it matures into nutrient-rich compost, it might be applied to potted plants or landscaping, said Mark Whittig, Cayuga’s operations manager. If the compost is of poorer quality, it could be used for blending with topsoil, he said.
The Ithaca group believes that theirs is the first such dog composting park in the nation, though it is not certain. A similar program is in place in the large Pacific Spirit Regional Park in Vancouver, and an experimental program is also under way at a dog park in Montreal, where the compost is processed on-site with the help of sawdust.
The Ithaca program costs roughly $6,000 a year, according to Mr. Kochian, who said that more than enough money for the first year has already been raised in donations. So far, the Ithaca compost organizers are delighted with the enthusiasm their project has generated.
“Imagine if they started doing this in Central Park,” said Bruce Stoff, the communications manager for the Ithaca/Tompkins Convention and Visitors Bureau, in an e-mail message.
from The New York Times