Cold Can't Stop Alaska Sewage Composting [View All]

[Omaha Steve]

Full story: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20060812/D8JF5SC80.html

Cold Can't Stop Alaska Sewage Composting
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Aug 12, 7:03 PM (ET)

By DAN JOLING

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) - Environmental consultant Mike Pollen remembers standing on a pile of sewage sludge composting outside the Fairbanks treatment plant on a November day in 1997. The temperature was 40 degrees below zero but his feet were warm. Then sweaty. Then uncomfortably hot inside his insulated rubber boots.

"They felt like they were going to melt," he said.

He figures there was a 180-degree difference between the compost cooking at his feet and the frosty temperature freezing his head.

Prevailing wisdom said sludge composting wouldn't work north of North Dakota. Pollen, the author of several wastewater system training manuals used in Alaska, remembers turning to a utility official and remarking, "You know what you just did? You just rewrote the textbook."