ZELIENOPLE — Three municipalities are exploring the prospect of building a composting facility that also could serve as an outdoor educational resource to the Seneca Valley School District.

The vision of Zelienople, Harmony and Cranberry Township is for the facility to compost brush and leaves, and for mulch materials to be sold to help defray the costs of operating the facility.

Attorney Wes Hamilton updated borough council Monday on what he has found out about similar efforts in other communities.

An idea to include an educational component as part of the facility has gotten the attention of the school district as a potential replacement for the program students attended at the McKeever Environmental Learning Center, which is a Slippery Rock University facility in Mercer County.

That outdoor learning program was one of the programs cut from the district last year because of budget shortfalls.

Although the idea hasn’t been presented to the school board because it is still in its infancy, Seneca’s assistant superintendent, Jeff Fuller, told borough council Monday that such an educational facility would be a great opportunity for the district.

Hamilton, who has helped coordinate electronics recycling in Zelienople and Cranberry in recent years, has been talking with several communities in Erie and Cumberland counties about their work to establish the facilities.

Lorin Meeder, Cranberry’s environmental programs coordinator, said the township has partnered with Zelienople and Harmony to host electronics recycling, which will be held again this year on April 21 in Zelienople and April 22 in Cranberry.

Meeder said he had earlier talked with Hamilton about the value of having a composting facility in the area that is open all year round.

Those discussions turned into the effort to see if such a facility could be accomplished.

“The key to it ever being built is that it needs to pay for itself,” Meeder said.

Zelienople manager Don Pepe said early discussions looked at putting the composting site in the Zelienople area and having it built as part of a new public works facility.

This type of composting operation is being studied because of the growing expense to dispose of brush and the difficulty in the area to find a place to dispose of the materials, Pepe said.

Other composting sites

Compost sites such as the one that Zelienople, Harmony and Cranberry are proposing are rare in Butler County, according to Sheryl Kelly, coordinator of the county recycling and waste management department

SRU has an educational composting site on Harmony Road. In addition to other functions, the site has an agreement with Slippery Rock borough to compost residents’ leaves in the fall.

Noneducational compost sites include Seneca Landfill in Jackson Township, Stirling Landscape’s “Back to Nature” compost in Center Township and Penn Township’s compost site started by its public works employees.