The start-up funds were used to buy a used F-350 dump truck, 35-gallon plastic bins to collect the waste in, other tools, and to allow free service to the dorms for a year. We've got soft, cushy jobs in comparison to those pioneering composters: A composter in those days would pick up the full plastic barrels of food waste in the dump truck, and drive them to the composting site at the Gill Tract. She would then don rubber boots, and dump some straw, woodchips, and a few barrels of food waste into a plastic mixing bin. Armed with a sharpened shovel, she would then manually chop and mix everything into a slurry. The slurry would then be made into windrows -- long, skinny hot compost piles. The windrows were turned manually at first, then later with a small Bobcat tractor, and manually once again when the Bobcat broke down.

Here's a story of the sort of brave innovation that went on, courtesy of Phil Cornish:
Back then, we were picking up the barrels in the back of the dump truck, and we were talking about letting the food age -- precompost a bit -- before actually mixing it into the piles. We'd pick up on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and we realized that if we started composting in the back of the dump truck, we would only have to drive to the site once a week. So, we constructed a divider in the middle of the dump truck bed, so we could fill the front half with food waste and store the barrels in the back half. We'd dump the food in the front half on Mondays and Wednesdays, then drive to the site on Fridays to dispose of it. So, four days a week our dump truck, which was parked on campus near the sports fields, had rotting food glop in it. To let the leachate drain out, we measured the slope on our parking space, and drilled a hole in the appropriate corner of the dump truck. Then we'd put a bucket underneath the hole to catch the leachate. The softball team wasn't too happy about the whole situation, especially when the leachate bucket would overflow 'cause we forgot to empty it. Eventually we gave up composting in the truck.

Some brilliant innovations they came up with are still with us -- the worms, for instance. The Vermitopias were designed by a few collective members including Degge Hays, based on a design known as the Oregon Soil Corporation Reactor (OSCR). They were made larger and easier to construct, and were described in Worm Digest, Issue 19. A sketch of how to make them is avaliable here. The bins were built with another grant from ACWMA, which also paid for our intial marketing outlay -- bags, a bag sealer, and so forth.