Shahab Bashar, the Yazidi cultural liaison for Community Crops, stands in plots in Prairie Pines, northeast of Lincoln, after adding biochar in an attempt to improve the soil for planting. Those beds had standing water in them, and biochar absorbs more than two times its weight in water.
COURTESY PHOTO
Tim Rinne, co-founder of the Hawley Hamlet neighborhood garden and chairman of the Lincoln-Lancaster County Food Policy Council, stands next to two beds of Sudan grass planted last year in soil enhanced with biochar. The biochar and Sudan grass were used to improve soil in problematic beds in Hawley Hamlet. Tillering the grass with biochar allows a plant to invest more energy in its roots thereby increasing soil organic matter. Today, vegetables are growing in those beds.
COURTESY PHOTO
Biochar, a product of wood waste, is a carbon-rich charcoal that promotes plant growth, water retention, fertilizer reduction, carbon sequestration, waste management and soil health.Â
Lincoln’s fledgling initiative to produce and use biochar — a charcoal-like material produced from plant materials that can be used to improve soil quality — just got a big boost.
Bloomberg Philanthropies awarded the city a matching grant of up to $400,000 for a project to turn ash trees felled because of emerald ash borer infestation and other wood waste into biochar that will be used for tree plantings, urban agriculture, public gardens, composting and stormwater treatment.
City leaders plan to build a biochar production facility at the solid waste management facility on North 48th Street, which should be operational by 2023. The grant also will give the city access to technical support.
Biochar is produced by heating biomass in the total or partial absence of oxygen, most commonly by a process known as pyrolysis, and has benefits beyond a soil enhancement. When used as a soil fertilizer it also absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, known as carbon sequestration.
“Biochar is proven to improve soil health, reduce stormwater runoff, and minimize the need for chemicals on crops and plants,†said Liz Elliott, director of the Lincoln Transportation and Utilities Department.
Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird, who has made resiliency and sustainability one of her administration’s priorities, said the grant will help the city advance the goals set out in its Climate Action Plan.
It also will allow the city to explore biochar’s potential for agricultural carbon credits, recovery and resale of energy byproducts, and direct sale to gardeners and farmers, the mayor said.
The University of Nebraska and the Nebraska Forest Service have spent nearly 10 years testing and analyzing biochar, and the forest service is contributing $100,000 to the Lincoln Biochar Initiative. That money makes up a portion of the matching funds necessary for the grant, Gaylor Baird said.
Lincoln isn’t producing biochar now — and much of the grant will be used to buy equipment so it can do that, said Frank Uhlarik, the city’s sustainability and compliance administrator.
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But it is using about 20 tons it got from Oregon, which the Nebraska Forest Service paid to get to Lincoln. City staff have distributed about half of it to groups such as the Historic Hawley neighborhood garden and Community Crops, Uhlarik said. It’s also been used to enhance soil at Sunken Gardens.
Once the city can make its own, Uhlarik said he hopes the city will be able to produce 600-700 tons a year.
Among the possible uses will be to enhance soil on city-managed farmland and an urban agriculture pilot program in the West Haymarket, expand the number of local groups that use it, and add to mulch, city officials said.
Lincoln Transportation and Utilities, city Parks and Recreation, UNL, neighborhood organizations, the Nebraska Forest Service and the Natural Resource Conservation Service are all part of the city’s initiative.
Lincoln is just one of six cities in the United States and Europe to receive the grant, which builds off a program in Stockholm, Sweden, that won a Bloomberg award in 2014.
Since opening its plant in 2017, Stockholm has produced more than 100 tons of biochar — the equivalent of taking 700 cars off the streets — and distributed it to 300,000 citizens, according to Bloomberg Philanthropies. The plant has also begun to send energy back to the city’s power grid and is heating 80 apartments.
The other grant recipients are Darmstadt, Germany; Heinsingborg, Sweden; Sandnes, Norway; Helsinki, Cincinnati and Minneapolis.
In total, the projects are expected to produce 3,750 tons of biochar, which would sequester almost 10,000 tons of CO2 per year — the equivalent of taking 6,250 cars off the roads every year, according to Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Shahab Bashar, the Yazidi cultural liaison for Community Crops, stands in plots in Prairie Pines, northeast of Lincoln, after adding biochar in an attempt to improve the soil for planting. Those beds had standing water in them, and biochar absorbs more than two times its weight in water.
Tim Rinne, co-founder of the Hawley Hamlet neighborhood garden and chairman of the Lincoln-Lancaster County Food Policy Council, stands next to two beds of Sudan grass planted last year in soil enhanced with biochar. The biochar and Sudan grass were used to improve soil in problematic beds in Hawley Hamlet. Tillering the grass with biochar allows a plant to invest more energy in its roots thereby increasing soil organic matter. Today, vegetables are growing in those beds.
Biochar, a product of wood waste, is a carbon-rich charcoal that promotes plant growth, water retention, fertilizer reduction, carbon sequestration, waste management and soil health.Â