Photo: Jim Doten and Faatemah Ampey. Read about their Lake Street Beautification Project that uses biochar in planter boxes to help restore a Minneapolis neighborhood damaged by riots.
Jim Doten - Environmental Services Supervisor, City of Minneapolis
How did you get started in biochar?
For me it started in Afghanistan in 2012. I was working for the city then, but got deployed with my National Guard unit. As a geo-hydrologist, I was asked to help poor farmers improve their soils that were depleted of nutrients and carbon. I developed a program for using crop waste to make biochar, but unfortunately, it was late in our mission and the follow-up unit was cut short. When I got home, I brought the idea of using biochar back to our city.
The programs you have developed in Minneapolis seem to fully deploy the potential of biochar. You cover all the bases, using biochar in urban agriculture, urban forestry, stormwater management, surface water cleanup, landscaping and remediation of toxic soil. What came first in this work?
Our first project was working with the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, who work with other Native Americans who live in the city and are marginalized with limited access to healthy food. The tribe operates the largest organic waste recycling facility in the region, so they have plenty of compost to combine with biochar to use in the community gardens they are developing. It’s a good fit because it relates to their traditional practice of smoldering crop waste to produce biochar in the field. Now they are using biochar to help propagate and preserve native seed lines of corn, beans and squash in the Three Sisters planting technique. We are here as a resource for them, but we are not directing the program. We are “on tap,” not “on top.”
You have multiple projects addressing storm water management, landscaping and surface water clean-up. How have you managed to do so much in such a short time?
Things were a bit slow to start. I was the crazy guy in the corner bringing up biochar all the time. But when Bloomberg Philanthropy brought people from our City Council and Public Works to visit the Stockholm biochar project, that really helped everyone understand the potential, and started freeing up more resources. Now we have multiple agencies working on incorporating biochar into environmental management at all levels in the city and the region, including the Minnesota Department of Transportation, and the University of Minnesota’s Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI). For instance, NRRI is testing biochar characteristics for us and is helping monitor the pilot projects.
What are you learning about matching biochar characteristics to applications?
A lot. For instance, we found that biochar on its own won’t do much to keep phosphorus out of waterways, but when we combine it with an iron-sand filter, it works really well. We are now exploring biochar characteristics that will work best for removing e-coli from our lakes and streams, as well as organic toxicants such as PFAS. NRRI is also building a biochar stakeholders network to define markets, opportunities and barriers. We are really getting a lot of people on board with biochar in this state.
What is next for the city and for you?
My current big project is to get local biochar production going. There are no commercial biochar producers in the state. We are in the early stages of an innovative district heating project that would use the heat generated by biochar production to augment a ground source heat pump system. As for me, I went from spending 20% of my time on biochar to about 50% now. My goal is to make sure we have at least one full time position in biochar in the Department of Health. I want this program to continue and grow after I retire.
An installation using an iron-sand and biochar filter is effective at removing e-coli from surface water in Minneapolis, “City of Lakes".