Composting operations at Lafayette College have been suspended for over a month, halting a campus-wide sustainability initiative to reduce food waste in dining halls and select buildings on campus.
The pause in operations is due to ongoing repairs on the machinery used to mix the compost, according to Connor Elliott-Knaggs, a sustainability manager and head of the composting program.
Elliott-Knaggs said the composting machinery, or vessel, breakage was first diagnosed by Lafayette’s facilities department on Oct. 23 after workers arrived at the vessel to transport compost to LaFarm and noticed the compost had not been mixing properly. He added that repairs are estimated to be complete by late December, but deferred comments on the particular time frame to facilities.
Assistant Vice President of Operations Geoff Labe did not respond to request for comment in time for publication. Sustainability Director Delicia Nahman wrote in an email that she did not know the total costs of repairs as of Wednesday.
Elliott-Knaggs said that a chain that allows the auger, or mixing rod, to move “side-to-side,” was broken. He said that the vessel, purchased in 2023, was likely damaged due to general overuse.
“When the vessel broke, the vessel itself was at full capacity with compost material,” Elliot-Knaggs said, explaining that there was no more space to continue adding food waste after their overflow receptacles were also full.
He estimated that around four tons of food waste that would typically have been composted had to be thrown out. He clarified that the remaining compost in the vessel was still able to be used at LaFarm.
Despite being out of commission starting in late October, the Office of Sustainability did not report the pause on composting operations until Nov. 20 in a Lafayette Today campus-wide email.
The announcement said that students can continue to use the compost buckets at the dining halls so the Office of Sustainability can continue to collect ongoing metrics on food waste.
“The vessel being out of commission is disappointing but not entirely surprising,” Nahman wrote in an email, adding that the “constant use” took a toll on the vessel’s machinery.
Meanwhile, student composting interns have been out of work as a result of the interruptions.
“I haven’t been paid, I think, for two weeks,” Ben Nelson ‘29 said. “I hadn’t done anything, because there’s not much else we can do.”
Elliott-Knaggs said that this Friday would normally have been the last day of composting for the semester. Even with the pause on composting, he said that around 27,000 pounds of compost have been sent to LaFarm this year.
“Compost isn’t the only thing that’s keeping the crops thriving,” said Josh Parr, the college’s manager of farm and food.
“This brief maintenance delay isn’t gonna cause the problem for us,” he continued.
Disclaimer: Editor-in-Chief Elisabeth Seidel ’26 and Assistant News Editor Makenna McCall ’27 are both employees in the Office of Sustainability. Neither contributed writing or reporting.
LafayetteReader7 • Dec 5, 2025 at 9:51 am
The article should mention that this composting system and machinery was designed by a group of Mechanical Engineering senior capstone students several years back. Perhaps their design was not robust enough…