When we talk about sustainable practices, our waste stream and what we do with our trash is just as important as reducing our usage on the front end.

so right now we're at our what we call a botanical service center.

it has serves many purposes.

We have hay storage over here.

We have tropical greenhouses behind me.

but one of the biggest components is our large compost pile.

and so you can't really smell it on camera, but you can definitely see it on camera.

we've had a compost facility on zoo property for over 20 years now.

so all of that animal waste, hay, feces, manure, even our compostable plates and items and all of our kitchen scraps come over here, instead of going to the landfill.

and so for us, what we do is we create a compost pile with waste, and, and we're turning it over.

So we're turning it over till it breaks down into soil.

And then what we do with that soil is we take it back over to the zoo and then mix it with our mulch and use it in all of our planter beds around the zoo.

So, when you're traveling around the zoo and our tropical gardens and our outdoor areas that are mulched and look beautiful, it's because the animal waste is helping, reinvigorate it.

When you treat wastewater, you generate clean water.

There's some carbon dioxide that's generated in the treatment process, and then, you make sludge, so.

And the sludge is a resource that we can use to make energy from.

And that's really what this is about.

So basically, when you flush your toilet or run water down the drain, that water ends up in the sewer, which ultimately comes, to the wastewater plants.

We have an east plant.

down here.

We have a west plant over on the west side.

those two plants actually.

Are there to remove something we call B-O-D. which is, organic chemicals that are in the water.

And if those were just released into the river, organisms in the river would, would consume that material and use up all the oxygen and kill the fish.

So our job is to take that stuff out before it goes to the river, So basically, we've industrialized the natural process that happens and would have happened in the waterway.

And then from that we end up with sludge.

we take that sludge and put it into something called an anaerobic digester.

in an anaerobic digester, there's a different kind of organisms that live in the water.

They operate without oxygen, and instead of releasing carbon dioxide, they release methane gas.

And we collect that methane gas and use it to power generators that make electricity.

That offsets part of the, electrical demand for the plant.

which is obviously going to reduce our carbon footprint,