About Titan Gold

We are taking a whole new approach to composting, making compost the Titan Gold Way! Titan Gold closes the loop in organics waste management. It starts as local organic material such as food scraps, is used to produce clean energy and heat at the UW Oshkosh campus biodigester, and then is composted to produce premium organic compost.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates, the single greatest material reaching landfills today from our everyday trash is food, making up more than 21 percent of municipal solid waste*. If food is sent to the landfill, the nutrients from the organic waste do not return to the soil, and the methane gas is released as a powerful greenhouse gas. The first step in our process is to collect organic materials, such as food scraps, which may have been sent to the landfill otherwise.

Once the organic waste is collected, it is taken to our campus biodigester, an urban anaerobic dry biogas system. The organic material is then carefully mixed into batches and loaded into a fermenter chamber, where it will sit for 28 days as the methane gas is used to produce combined energy and heat. After 28 days, the remaining material, called digestate, is a great soil amendment we call Titan Gold.

The digestate is taken to a separate facility to be composted further in windrows. When the process is complete, the material is ready to be tested to STA Standards at the Environmental Research and Innovation Center. Once we are sure we have quality compost, the material is sent on to our Titan Gold team to be processed, bagged and prepared for sale.

But the story doesn’t end there! Not only does our compost give great hands-on experience to our students in groundbreaking biogas technology and lab testing, the proceeds from Titan Gold go back to students as scholarships through the UW Oshkosh Foundation.

* United States Environmental Protection Agency. Sustainable Management of Food Basics (2015, Sept. 14). Retrieved Oct.14, 2015.