HOLLAND, MI - The muddy field where Adam Brent operates Cocoa Compost Corp. may not seem like a disruptive high-tech venture. But it impressed the judges at the 14th Annual Global Technology Symposium in Silicon Valley last week.
The 2-year-old Holland company captured the top prize in the Global Innovator Competition during its symposium held in Menlo Park, Calif. last week.
Brent, founder and CEO of Cocoa Corp., is turning yard waste and food waste into a rich compost that he sells to West Michigan farmers as a substitute for commercial fertilizers.
The result is "zero waste," says Brent, who claims his product will out-perform a commercial fertilizer in the field.
Brent is hoping the award will attract more venture capital so he can duplicate his Holland composting operation in other Michigan communities and eventually, across the United States and internationally.
Cocoa Corp.'s 12-acre composting operation is located north of I-196 in a field behind Chef Container's waste transfer and recycling station in Ottawa County's Laketown Township, south of the village of Graafschap.
That's where Brent mixes yard waste collected by Chef Container in the West Michigan communities it serves and food waste he obtains from food processers in the region.
Brent, a Wisconsin native with a degree in chemistry and an MBA from Loyola University, says his process creates the fertilizer by mixing the food waste with yard waste to speed up the composting process.
Without the sugars from the food waste, Brent says yard waste is difficult to compost. Blending the two ingredients speeds up the process.
The food waste he uses can range from discarded candy from Mars Corp. to apple hulls from commercial pie bakers, grains from craft beer brewers and barrels of high fructose corn syrup from food processors. Chocolate even finds its way into the mix, says Brent.
Brent said he recently met with Consumers Energy officials about taking the seaweed and zebra mussels that accumulate in the cooling intakes at the power plant along Lake Michigan.
The compost is created by blending the food and yard waste with large German-made machines that chop up the food and yard waste and mix the ingredients together.
The blended material is then placed in 10-foot-wide windrows that are mixed with a large tractor-drawn agitator. The windrows are then covered with black plastic to prevent runoff and preserve the nutrients in the mix as it composts.
Unlike anaerobic digesters which are designed to create methane gas as fuel, Brent's process is designed to break down the yard and food waste through an aerobic process that takes 10 to 12 weeks in the summer.
To keep the compost from leaching into the water table, the windrows are set on crushed concrete pads that drain into a stormwater detention pond that's designed to filter out sediments from the compost piles before it is drained away.
When the composting process is complete, Brent sells the compost to area farmers for about $35 a ton. The compost is applied with lime spreaders or manure spreaders, he said.
According to Brent, Cocoa's environmental benefits include restoring topsoil, sequestering carbon dioxide, reducing greenhouse gases, restoring fresh waterways and eliminating waterway runoff.
Brent says his composting operation can be duplicated wherever there's a source of yard waste and food waste.
Meanwhile, Brent's quest to operate a similar facility in the Ann Arbor area became controversial last month after criticized the work of a competitor.
WeCare Denali, the out-of-state company that has managed the site for seven years, has allowed it to become a "quasi-landfill," Brent told the Ann Arbor City Council.