U.S. Senator Mark Udall (middle left) speaks with FLC professor, Dr. Laurie Willams (left) and FLC students, Mesa Hollinbeck (middle right) and Rachel Ballantyne (right).

DURANGO - If the Fort Lewis College Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter has its way, the people they work with in Ecuador will soon be using cow manure to cook their meals in a safe and environmentally-friendly way.

For some time, Drs. Don May and Laurie Williams, both professors in the Fort Lewis College Physics and Engineering Department and leaders of FLC’s EWB chapter, have been working on a design for a safe and sustainable stove for the villages in the Mount Chimborazo area of central Ecuador. Currently, the villagers burn wood, dried dung or unused crops in open fires to cook their meals. This practice is inefficient, contributes to poor air quality and accelerates the deforestation of the region.

For the past year, Dr. Williams and two FLC students, Mesa Hollinbeck and Rachel Ballantyne, have been testing a prototype bio-digester on campus. The digester breaks down cow manure to create methane gas that can then be used to fuel a stove for cooking and heating. Acting much like a compost pile, the digester greatly increases the speed in which the breaking down process works.

“It’s a bacteria that’s present in the manure already as part of the digestive system in animals and you’re just encouraging it to grow,” says Mesa.

In addition to a fuel source, the digester also produces sludge from the broken down manure. Rachel has been studying how effective this sludge is as a fertilizer.

“We’re getting biogas and we’re getting a fertilizer material and so far the results are really promising and we’re looking forward to some field tests,” she explains.

Seeing the potential for the digester, Dr. Williams applied for the Environmental Protection Agency’s P3 (People, Prosperity and the Planet) Grant. Liking the idea, the EPA awarded $10,000 to help move the digester project forward.

The award also allowed Dr. Williams, Mesa and Rachel to travel to Washington D.C. at the end of April for the Fifth Annual National Sustainable Design Expo. Only 43 colleges and universities were invited to the Expo, held on the National Mall.

“It was a really good opportunity to collaborate with other schools and see what they had tried and what worked for them,” Rachel recalled of the Expo. “It was a really unique learning process.”

While the FLC group did not have time to actually demonstrate the digester at the Expo—it takes about 25 days for the digester to start producing methane—they were able to detail the process to the government and industry experts that were acting as judges.

The team recalls that one judge who had done work in Ecuador was particularly interested in the digester idea and offered a great deal of advice.

“[The judge] helped us out quite a bit as far as steering us in the right direction and confirming some of the stuff we’d found out,” Mesa says.

Also impressed by the Fort Lewis College group’s work was U.S. Senator Mark Udall. Dr. Williams, Mesa and Rachel were able to meet with Senator Udall to explain the digester to him.

“I’m impressed and encouraged by these students’ interest in using their skills to design sustainable, outside-the-box ideas that solve real problems and reduce waste,” Senator Udall said in a press release. “And I’m very pleased that the EPA and Fort Lewis College are working to encourage creative problem solving with an eye to practical and sustainable uses. This is one important way we’re going to solve some of our planet’s biggest challenges.”

The FLC EWB group is currently down in Ecuador proceeding with plans to build a digester there for field testing. The group needs to see if the digester can be constructed from local materials and if it will work at Ecuador’s elevation. Dr. May already made the trip to Ecuador to begin the legwork.

The digester tests will continue all year. The FLC EWB group has teamed up with university students in Riobamba, Ecuador to help with the tests. The Riobamba students will study the digester’s progress and report their observations to the Fort Lewis College students. If all goes well, the FLC EWB team will return to Ecuador in the future and construct larger digesters that can be used by entire villages.

Beyond the positive impact the digester project will have on the people of Ecuador, Mesa and Rachel have enjoyed a unique educational experience that will benefit them far into the future.

“Getting a little bit of experience and doing research with groups and trying to coordinate all of that would help with graduate school quite a bit,” says Mesa.

“It looks good on the resume,” Rachel adds. “It was a great experience builder. I can tell somebody, ‘Yes, I already know how to construct one of these experiments and write the paper.’ That’s a huge leg up and I wouldn’t have had that opportunity as an undergraduate anywhere else.”

The digester built at the FLC campus has since been moved to the old Fort Lewis College campus in Hesperus, CO. The FLC Agricultural Department has expressed interest in using the digester as both a demonstration tool and a source of fertilizer.

The other occupants of the geosciences wing of Berndt Hall were not sorry to see the digester make its move as the manure had to be stored close by.

“We bagged the poop and it’s been in the Biology refrigerator this year,” says Dr. Williams. “Everybody in this wing was not sorry to see us move it out.”

To learn more about the Fort Lewis College Engineers Without Borders chapter, visit www.fortlewis.edu/academics/school_arts_sciences/physics_engineering/ewb_webpage/ewbflc.htm. Donations can be made to the chapter by visiting the website and clicking on the “Donate” link.

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