Organo Compost Centre No.1

Organo Compost Centre No.1
paul conneally
2010

Organo Compost Centre
paul conneally 2010

Organo Compost Centre is an ecosplacist image made from a pencil rubbing taken at a SITA recycling plant at Lount, Leicestershire,UK.

Conneally visited the site on a coach trip with Amy Franceschini and Myriel Milicevic as part of their 'Beneath The Pavement A Garden' piece for Loughborough University RADAR.

They were told that as a security measure they could not take photographs at the site.

The site receives all the garden waste collected from the kerbside by Leicestershire County Council including Charnwood where Conneally lives and so he was effectively stopped from photographing his own garden waste as it was stored and transformed into 'Organo Compost' which is then sold on to farms and domestic gardeners.

Conneally decided instead to make a series of pencil rubbings of operational machinary on site not knowing if this broke the rule that 'no images are to be taken of the operational site' or not.

Leicestershir County Council state about operations on the site:

"The composting process is entirely natural. No chemicals are added at any time, and the process is similar, but on a much larger scale, to that of home compost heaps.When green waste is delivered from the Recycling and Household Waste Sites, it is checked, and any contaminants such as paper and plastic bags that have accidentally got into the container are removed. This is a labour intensive job, which is why it is important to ensure that only the correct materials are put into the container in the first place.

Machines are used to shred the green waste and it is then formed into large triangular shaped heaps, approximately 3 metres high, called windrows. The windrows are turned each week to keep them aerobic, this gives air to the microbes (friendly bugs) that break down the green waste.

After about 16 weeks the compost is ready. The compost is screened to remove any bits of material that are too big and the finished product is sold to a variety of customers."

A distubing element at the site is a machine that blows artificial 'cherry flavoured' odours out into the fresh Leicestershire air to mask the smell of the decomposing garden waste as it turns into compost. Organic?

"Pyschogeography is dead. The splacist revolution has begun"

Paul Conneally May 2010