Some of the most ingenious solutions come about from having limited materials to work with: whether it's a DIY Solar Heater, an easily manufactured water filter, or any other project that could be listed in the Howtopedia, a resourceful design can make up for a lack of material, expertise, or other supply. For several decades in the late 20th century, Jean Pain worked to develop a method of composting “useless” material, wood pruned from southern France's dry forests, or garrigue, and turned it into a complete process that provided heat and hot water to a home, as well as a biofuel to run the machinery necessary to undertake the entire cycle.
Composting is a deceptively simple process of building a pile of waste material, such as leaves or food scraps, and waiting for several months until it converts it into a fertilizer with the help of bacteria or some other agent. Other than the labor needed to gather up the pile and the water needed to it, there isn't much else necessary. Since composting can be done in a variety of ways, from tub-contained vermicultures to intricate humanure systems, it is highly adaptable to the needs of different climates and cultures. Pain's own method of composting grew out of the specific needs of Provence, where poor soils and wildfires present logistical problems to both gardening and development, but it is equally well suited—perhaps even can be more fruitfully used—to any area that a sufficient amount of woody biomass can be sustainably harvested.
The essence of Jean Pain Composting, or the Jean Pain Method, as proponents of his composting technique have taken to calling it, is the pruning of excess growth of a wooded area, which promotes the hardiness of remaining plants and reduces the risk of fire. The material that has been pruned is then shredded—not chipped—using a wood chipper of Pain's own design into toothpick like splinters no more than an inch long and 1/16 of an inch in diameter. The entire mass of this material is assembled into large piles of around 18 tons or 20 cubic meters, and then saturated with water. This sets in process its bacterial decomposition into a nutrient-rich humus that brings the temperature of the pile up to about 140ºF and lasts anywhere from one to two years.
Now, it is only a small leap to realize that the heat generated by the pile might be used for all manner of things, from heating water to heating homes. Which is exactly what Jean Pain used it for. But this is not all. Since woody material that is broken down in an environment without oxygen produces combustible methane gas, it is possible to take a certain amount of the wood splinters that would otherwise compost with the rest of the pile and put it into a hermetically sealed tank to convert it into methane usable to drive cars or cook. The best part comes at the end of the process, when the fully composted material can be used in gardens or farmland: there is little, if any, waste in the entire cycle.
The exact yields of this sort of composting would vary from location to location, but an old article of Mother Earth News demonstrates that it is certainly adaptable to the United States with promising results. Though the need to have a specialized chipper (the raw material of compost) means that a not insignificant amount of capital needs to be invested to get started, the possibilities of the approach leaves you wondering why we don't hear more about it in the heavily wooded rural areas of the East Coast and South. As the demand for organic fertilizers continues to rise with the cost of oil, it's worth a wager that Jean Pain's method will see a resurgence in popularity.
