The secret of his compost

How did it start up and break the first plant to process solid residues across Piura?

 

By Nelson Peñaherrera Castillo. Photos by Simon Garragate.

 

SULLANA, Peru – A cistern truck gets again to a sewer hole at the skirts of Bellavista City toward El Cucho Village. It contains residual water from Humboldt squid process that is made at the Industrial Zone. The Sullana Province’s Municipality (MPS as its initials in Spanish) admits that the equivalent to 70 vehicles of that kind (about 30 tons each one) eliminate residual water to Chira River through that hole. This means 2.1 million liters every 24 hours.

 

“It’s rich in ammonia and nitrogen,” the manager of one processing plants explains to me. The liquid smells bad, but it is not polluting technically neither legally, first, because it’s about an enriched fluid, second, because the Peruvian Criminal Code does not specify the stench as a cause of contamination crime.

 

But, the things change when the whole spill loses into the sewer hole. Its final destination is Chira River, that dammed beside Sullana Metro Area to provide water to farmers in districts of Marcavelicá, Ignacio Escudero and Paita Province, has became the largest waste water lagoon of the Peruvian Coast.

 

The Peru’s National Authority of Water verified it is 266,000 thermotolerant coliforms per every milliliter (the maximum rate for World Health Organization is 1000), what means a virtually useless water mass and where the life can’t flourish. The same manager estimates that per every five liters of residual water, four belongs to squid process and the remaining one comes from houses, little companies, and businesses of the metro area.

 

That water into the river is already pollution in the whole sense of the word, although tolerated by local authorities, due to this industry doesn’t have treatment systems that avoid to make Chira like a green and liquid pigsty. But, there is a detail – it’s water rich in ammonia and nitrogen.

 

“The nitrogen helps in the development, growth, and color of the plants – the ammonia is the urea decomposition which the plant can absorb nutrients,”  the 2013 Environmental Citizenship National Award nominee Ronald Zevallos Muro explains to me*. The agronomical engineer lives in Tuman, Lambayequé Department. In other words, both make the plants grow and develop.

 

At the market, there are agrichemical products containing both things but their process is relatively expensive, unless you obtain and use them organically.

 

There was a solution

Almost touching the border with Piura Province, at the south of Sullana City, it was the plant of Administration & Management of Solid Residues (GEMA-RS as its initials in Spanish)that promised to convert all industrial organic waste into organic products for the benefit of agrindustry and urban & rural families of Piura Department, first.

 

It is estimated those plants have  an eco-friendly impact area upper to 200 miles around. This means the whole Piura, Lambayequé Northern, Tumbés Department, and Ecuador’s Loja Province.

 

Orlando Acevedo Talledo was the pitcher of the idea that –he said—was unique in Piura, Peru, and even South America. “I started working in fish flour industry and I realized from the quantity that you extracted in bags, a big part remained in the machines, and you still could give a second use to the bags.”

 

The industrial engineer and manager inspired on GEMA-RS creation in 2011 after Visiting Colombia, where he realized the processes of residues conversion had some failures, considering we are talking about one of the Hispanic-speaker countries with a biggest environmentalist vocation.

 

He returned to Peru, closed his fish flour plants, and started to project a little complex fed by the wwaste from agriexporting industry and the residual water of Agropesca, one of the squid processing plants in Sullana Industrial Zone, for obtaining compost, biol, and humus. “I don’t generate negative environmental impacts and even we can postulate to carbon bonus,” hhe stated.

 

Bureaucratic odyssey

GEMA-RS was conceived and drawed by Mr Acevedo himself. He didn’t build it at all because he assigned it to a specialized firm that, rather, corrected him some details in the plans, but the integral process from the reception to sales of the transformed residue was his idea. “Our processes are highly technified and mechanized at industrial level,” he explained to me.

 

The Project lasted four years to make real. He got in and out the MPS, the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Agriculture. Everything began wwhen he wanted to have his operations license in Sullana. The organic waste gathering was relatively simple to work in paper, but when he passed to the solid residues management, he was requested for a government authorization. What they didn’t say to him was which government office had to give it.

 

His odyssey began just there that included to interview in person to a Health Minister who sent him to the Agriculture Minister, official who individually spoke on behalf of Mr Acevedo to resume the legal trouble. “I became an expert in the general Act of Solid Residues 27314 and its Rule,” he remembered.

 

When Mr Acevedo came back to Sullana, astonished everybody –beginning with the Mayor—after getting the damn paper and proving that if the province had a plant at the level he projected, he opened a legal field to MPS for dogwatching and punishing (putting a fine to)the companies not fitting the current legal code – more gas than anything, but a code anyway.

 

“They did numbers and realized that easily, just applying the law, MPS could turn into a punisher agency in few months and it would receive the so-called directly charged funds, which it would buy directly, for example, trucks and cycles for citizen security, electronic surveillance video equipment for Sullana,” he told.

 

In spite of that, his license lasted too much that he offered to train the Corp of City’s Security (Serenazgo) in Piura and Sullana for free, although he ended to train National Police officers in personal defense techniques because he is a certified martial arts trainer. Many sterile punches (and luxations) later, former Sullana’s Mayor Carlos Távara Polo ordered GEMA-RS to open, although a municipal employee understood everything upside down and the paperwork was almost crashed down.

 

Unwasting the waste

Basically, GEMA-RS used any organic trash to transform in compost, a fertilizer made mostly of died vegetal matter and what is the most appreciated food by underground worms. The excretions of the tiny animal are the humus, another highly appreciated fertilizer by the organic agriculture and gardening.

 

“Our projects main goal is achieving the adequate management of solid residues from agrindustrial sector, so we will collaborate to disminish significantly the contamination levels in the project’s influence zone and improving the quality of agricultural products planted in our region by producing organic fertilizers since the proper solid residues of agrindustrial sector with a high quality level and significant volumes,” Mr Acevedo stated.

 

He was not a pioneer in compost and humus, but he actually could say he was the first to install a plant that could manage big volumes. One of his friends notes that inclusive it could fertilize organically every park, garden, street, and avenue of Sullana Metro Area, that is seen to the north of the estate where he worked.

 

“Every composting process ever considers temperature, humidity, pH, the balance between carbon and nitrogen and the oxygen level, “ former GEMA-RS plant chief Iván Mazo Valencia details. The specialist in composting and organic solid residues management processes is experienced in related plants around Medellín, Colombia, his hometown until July 2015, when Mr Acevedo proposed him to join his Sullana crew.

 

Mr Mazo explains that the temperature allows to control the decomposition process of the organic matter (it must be upper 140°F), the humidity accelerates or slows it down (it must be 40% to 60%), the pH allows to verify the product quality according to a technical rule (it must be neutral or a 7.6 index), the balance between carbon and nitrogen favors the presence of micro-organisms to feed the soil (because they are the constitutive elements of life), and the oxygen level stimulates a correct biodegradation (on the Earth, this gas forms one fifth of the air we breathe).

 

He warns every parameter has to be verified strictly, if not, there will be decreases. So, if the mix is not approppriately wet, the solar radiation will evaporate it, or if there is too much nitrogen, it will lose as ammonia gas. “The compost is useful because it feeds the soil and allows it most water absortion, and inclusive it can recuperate soils or prepare them for planting ever that the crop were appropriate for that zone,” he adds.

 

Flies & stench free

From GEMA-RS terrace the 37 acres of the property were watched. The first one calling the attention was the fresh wind and the stench absence linked to the organic matter decomposition. There were no flies neither. This shocked MPS employees  and moved an Environmental Management official smelled the compost pyramids few inches away and asked tfor the formula of such as prodigy.

 

Mr Acevedo said that everything is doing the process as exact as recommended and Mr Mazo checked out it was so. The compost produced there was submitted to strict lab controls that were satisfactorily confirmed and certified by Lima-based La Molina National Agrarian University.

 

About, there were cleaning non-written rules in the facility, not at the edge of the absolute safety but every waste was reused. Its competitors were the farms that feed the cattle with waste from agrindustry and little bio-fertilizer entrepreneurships across Chira and San Lorenzo Valleys.

 

But Mr Acevedo did not pretend to fixate his market offer there. In fact, it was the last step of his idea. What he estimated was to transform bigger organic residues in plastic wood resistant to almost everything: moisture, fire, excessive noise, insects… and time. In Brazil, it has began to build houses until four floors, and the service providers are giving warrant… until one century! “It’s a turning wood and you can put cap screws to it,” he affirmed.

 

“He’s crazy”

For the companies generating solid residues or organic liquids, GEMA-RS was one choice not to violate the law, although the most have been in trouble. GEMA-RS could help in the solution of the last part of process, but Mr Acevedo himself admitted his plant was insufficient to manage all what Piura produces. Then, it might create more like –or better—his.

 

He said it to the authorities expressly, but he suggested they don’t make the companies wait for it four years like it happened to him, and that they don’t let to enforce environmentally dogwatching. “He’s crazy – it’s the first person who request competitors,” one of his friends commented.

 

NGO Plan Verde (Green Plan), that is dedicating to reforest the whole Piura Coast with neem and moringa, was receiving the GEMA-RS’ compost. The better proof of its effectiveness was its own facility that served to hold an orchard and a little plantation of limes and tamarinds. “The families also can make their compost and having low-cost food,” the former plant chief Iván Mazo recommends.

 

The idea was not GEMA-RS only opened a market with the organic fertilizers and the plastic wood in the future but to create eco-friendly areas. If just all the squid processing plants that ddon’t have a final treatment of their residual water had left it to GEMA-RS, Chira River pollution levels beside Sullana Metro Area probably would be dramatically reduced, remaining just dealing with home and little companies spill for the projected residual water treatment plant

 

Will it be 80% less pollution, as the manager of one of the processing plants suggested?”Everything holds on a simple will game,” one of Mr Acevedo’s friends affirms. The problem is the visionary could not proving if his dream was feasible. He passed away in April 2017 due to a health complication. The plant, eventually, has been shut down.

 

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* One of our followers say the correct affirmation is “the ammonia is one of the forms which the urea decomposes, and this one (the ammonia) is a toxic gas for alive beings. The useful form used by the plants is the ammonium.”