The way Usoshi Chatterjee sees the world, just about any form of trash should be considered a potentially useful thing. To her, chicken poop is like gold that can help save environmentally critical wetlands known as peat bogs.
“I’m fascinated by the idea of converting resources that are typically considered unusable and causing issues in the environment and turning them into something beneficial,” she explained.
A PhD student in AGNR’s Department of Environmental Science and Technology, Chatterjee’s primary research focuses on finding uses for chicken waste, also known as poultry litter, from farms on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore. Chicken farmers often struggle to dispose of the copious amounts of waste their birds generate, but burning it through a special process can turn it into a carbon-rich, absorbent material called biochar.
“I’m trying to understand the different characteristics and applications of waste-derived biochar, and seeing if we can scale up the use of it for things like absorbing nutrient runoff at the edge of agricultural and industrial fields, or replacing nonrenewable peat, which is currently used in gardening soil, and helping with agricultural management,” Chatterjee said.
Finding a replacement for peat would help in mitigating climate change, because peat, which is formed by the partial decay of plants in wetlands, holds a tremendous amount of carbon. And peat bogs store more carbon than all other vegetation types in the world combined, including forests. When peat is over harvested and the wetlands are damaged, all that carbon is released into the environment and the bogs become a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
This March, Chatterjee presented her work at the national Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Related Sciences (MANRRS) conference, and took first place in the oral research presentation category.
It was an affirming experience on many levels.
“I grew up as a woman of color in the Midwest, where I thought this field wasn't really for someone like me,” she said. “But MANRRS helped me see there are a lot of us out here, and there is a place for us in this work.”
Chatterjee said she was driven to waste conversion by her desire to approach environmental problems from an engineering perspective.
“I realized that I would find a little bit of existential peace by trying to bring peace to the Earth in whatever way I can. I’m hoping that the research I do can create self-sufficient systems that can be translated to all scales and areas.”
by Kimbra Cutlip : Momentum Summer 2022
