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Team tackles water contamination issue

Feb. 23, 2005

By JOSHUA FLANAGAN, staff writer

Baylor environmental studies professor Dr. Peter van Walsum heads a project sponsored by the 3M Foundation that might solve controversy between dairymen and Waco residents who have placed blame on Central Texas dairy farmers for the city's water quality problems.

A Waco High chemistry class, a Baylor undergraduate class, two graduate students and a local dairy farmer have joined forces with van Walsum in a project to turn excess cow manure into an organic salt and eventually into chemicals like vinegar, ethanol and other alcohols.

Courtesy photo Graduate student Erin Doyle and undergraduate student Staron Faucher examine manure samples.

Residents have reasoned that cow manure carries most of the blame for bad water. Dairy cows produce excess manure that farmers place on their fields as fertilizer. The plan would work if there wasn't such a surplus of waste. When it rains, the extra manure flows into the watershed and the Brazos River. Manure carries nutrients and minerals that nourish algae in the river, which then causes distasteful drinking water.

The Texas Dairymen's Association approved van Walsum's project because of the benefits it could bring to dairy farmers.

"Benefits are two-fold," van Walsum said. "Farmers produce a higher market product and they can diversify."

Coal power plants use organic salts to clean their emissions. Organic salts can also serve as animal feed and road salt. Alcohols produced could be used as fuel and nail polish remover, an acetone, could also be formed. These products carry the potential to bring four to ten times the profits to farmers compared to other proposals of how to use manure such as composting or producing biogas. However, not all dairy farmers focus solely on profits.

"The dairymen I know would be open to ways to help the environment," Ed Jackson, a local dairyman, said. "We need to look at ways to use the waste."

Jackson allotted a portion of his land to van Walsum to do necessary research to complete his project.

Profits aren't the only factor in van Walsum's project. Educational integration has grown in the area of research, and it has given van Walsum an opportunity to learn more about that.

"It's been a good learning experience for me," van Walsum said.

Waco High students also have learned from the project.

"It is a fun learning experience," Paula Robinson, a Waco High chemistry teacher, said. "The students really enjoyed it."

The research the high school students do has given Robinson a new teaching tool. Her students do experiments without previously set answers, which is a change for most students.

"It's a real-life application of chemistry right here in their own community," Robinson said. "It's a real problem with a real solution using chemistry."

Two graduate students, Michael Flatt and Erin Doyle, also contribute to the research by doing a share on their own, and undergraduate students took a class offered for research on van Walsum's project. The project is still young and van Walsum has only done research for a year, but it will conclude this summer.

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