Quality time in Denver

EDITORIAL

THE FIRST BioCycle National Conference was held in May of 1971 in Denver, Colorado. The 33rd Annual BioCycle National Conference on Composting & Organics Recycling will be held May 5-7, 2003 in Denver. It's interesting to compare the Conference agendas which are separated by more than three decades.

The 1971 Conference theme was: "How Can We Put Waste Recycling into Practice?" The program stressed the economic changes that environmental awareness caused in the 1970s and its impact on composting technology. Topics focused on: How to turn a sanitary landfill into a recycling station; The impact of composting on waste transportation costs; Do ecologists make good composters?; New economic incentives for sorting wastes.

As we prepared the 1971 agenda, we invited readers to contact us with their ideas. One response came from Sam Hart, a former agricultural engineering professor at the University of California, who wrote: "Somehow I would like to see the Conference take the form of the Phoenix bird. We might recite all our failures why they occurred, and what each past advocate would have done differently. For instance, we could hear from the St. Petersburg, Florida Naturizer people; the U.S. Public Health Service about its Johnson City, Tennessee compost plant; the Phoenix, Arizona Dano operation; the ones in Mobile, Alabama and Houston, Texas. The session would be a garment shredding, weeping and wailing castigation of ourselves and composting as it was conceived in the past. Then we could begin to build on all this."

And so that first Conference came to be a reality - a blend of grassroots, diehard composters who mixed well with the engineers and research biologists. We had presentations from people like Clarence Golueke of the University of California's Sanitary Engineering Research Lab discussing sorting, grinding, composting and applying recycled organics.William Coors of Coors Brewery participated in a recycling dialogue in a session titled, Industry, Government and Citizen. Presentations were given on soil studies with MSW compost and applying treated wastes - sludge, sewage effluent, feedlot manure and other agricultural residuals - for land reclamation and nutrients. The legislative director for Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of the first Earth Day in 1970, discussed the new laws that would help recycling.

And - in 2003, once again in Denver - the spotlight will be on the role of an organic residuals recycling industry as environmental problem solvers, economic developers and energy producers. Sessions will focus on how the products recovered from composting, energy conversion and other recycling processes are used for reduced erosion, water conservation, increased food production, green power and enterprise development. Throughout major sections of North America, the dominant word is Drought - a topic well covered in sessions on how and how much compost and other organic amendments improve soil performance, enabling crops to grow with less water while reducing runoff and sediment loss.

Many other facets of organics recycling will be featured at the May 5-7, 2003 BioCycle Conference. For the full agenda and registration data, see pages 15-17 of this issue. We invite you to join us at the Renaissance Denver Hotel and look forward to seeing you there.