Parks partnership brings the biochar business to Cincinnati

CINCINNATI (WXIX) - Cincinnati Parks, Great Parks, and other local organizations are teaming up to bring the biochar business to the Tri-State.

There are many pieces to this partnership, but the goal is all the same: to reduce the city’s impact on climate change.

Cincinnati Parks received Bloomberg funding to build a biochar-producing facility. Biochar is a charcoal with many environmental benefits, but to maximize these benefits, it must be supercharged with organic materials.

Biochar itself is created using local wood waste. Crystal Courtney, the division manager of natural resources for the Cincinnati Park Board, says this keeps carbon out of the atmosphere and in our soil.

“If you allow wood chips to break down, all that carbon is just released, versus if you create biochar, you’re essentially holding all of that carbon in a little wood chip that you can incorporate into the soil,” Courtney said.

This is where Great Parks comes in. The horses at the Winton Woods Equestrian Center produce over a ton of manure a day, according to Stephanie Bacher, the sustainability coordinator for Great Parks.

“It is a natural pairing for us to supercharge that biochar with manure with have sitting around,” Bacher said. “We will also be turning it into compost. So we’ll be using that then to help us with our tree plantings, which we would normally do anyway”.

Combining biochar with manure creates a soil that is especially beneficial to trees. Sam Dunlap, the owner of Carbon Harvest LLC, which is another partner in this initiative, says this mixture also retains water.

“That’s a really important one for the urban environment — drought resilience,” Dunlap said. “It can also provide flood resilience to the city as a whole, which is interesting because it can do both of those things.”

The idea is that Cincinnati Parks will take this mixture and fertilize city trees. This will strengthen the tree canopy and manage localized flooding and drought concerns around the city.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that fewer trees is bad for folks,” Bacher said. “So here at the parks, we obviously have a lot of trees. We want to continually plant and strengthen that along with Cincinnati Parks as well.”

See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.

Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.