Zoo Poo And How It Can Help Your Garden

Chances are when you hear gardeners talking about their favorite manures you’re thinking of horses, cows, or chickens. But your local zookeeper hopes your tastes might run a little more exotic than that. With rhinos, hippos, zebras, camels, llamas, elephants and many other exotic animals to clean up after, a zoo produces a lot of poo. A single elephant, which spends up to 16 hours a day eating, can produce over 200 pounds of waste every single day. What to do with all that doo has been a vexing challenge for zoos across the country.

A Dirty Problem …

For decades the solution has been the same. Load the endless tons of fecal matter onto trucks and ship it off to the nearest landfill. It was as easy and simple as taking out the trash. But as landfills started to, well, fill up and disposal bills started to balloon, some entrepreneurial zookeepers started looking for a better way. That’s where Zoo Poo comes into play!

Starting in the early 90s, several zoos and circuses across the country started composting their exotic manure instead of simply throwing it away. Now, instead of contributing to the world’s environmental problems, they were recycling the manure the way nature intended—converting animal doo into nutrient rich plant food. Where once they spent tens of thousands of dollars to have the stuff hauled away, zookeepers found long lines of gardeners ready and willing to take it off their hands.

While many, like the Detroit Zoo in Royal Oak, Michigan hold Zoo Poo giveaway days, others have found a market that’s willing to spend a pretty penny to get their hands on this black gold. Riverbanks Zoo and Garden in South Carolina, an EZ-Screen customer, sells their composted manure to local gardeners to help fund their conservation efforts. Nearly every zoo that has tried this has found the response overwhelming, and many find themselves sold out quickly.

Saving Trees

Elephants produce by far the largest volume of waste of zoo animals. But an elephant’s digestive system is notoriously inefficient. It is estimated that only 40% of the food an elephant eats is digested, meaning their manure is packed with partially digested, fibrous material. Farmers near the Shimba Hills National Reserve in Kenya have begun collecting elephant manure to make paper. The droppings of a single elephant can produce, on average, up to 125 sheets of high quality paper per day. And don’t worry, since the manure is thoroughly cleaned and boiled before being pressed into paper, you’d never know the difference.

Not only does this produce extra income for struggling farmers but helps reduce the twin pressures of elephant poaching and over logging. By finding ways to use waste to create useful products, zookeepers, farmers and manufacturers across the world are finding that zoo doo might be a dirty job—but it pays.

References:

To learn more about Riverbanks Zoo and Garden’s composting and conservation efforts, visit: https://www.riverbanks.org/conservation-and-care/compoost

Don’t pooh-pooh it: Making paper from Elephant Dung -BBC