Living Desert Turns Animal Waste Into Garden Gold

It's Compost Awareness Week, and the Living Desert Zoo & Gardens is marking the occasion by pulling back the curtain on one of its more unusual operations: turning tons of animal waste into usable fertilizer.

Sustainability Manager Lizze Ferrari walked NBC Palm Springs’ Thalia Hayden behind the scenes to show how it works. The process starts with raw materials collected on-site, including wood chips from the zoo's own landscaping trimmings. From there, raw animal droppings are layered in and broken down, with the zoo's giraffes and rhinos serving as the operation's primary contributors.

The finished compost gets sifted and tested before it goes anywhere. Once cleared, some of it will be made available to the public at a future giveaway date, while the rest stays on zoo grounds.

What makes the system stand out, Ferrari explained, is how neatly it loops back on itself. The zoo uses finished compost to enrich the soil at its on-site browse farm, where trees are grown and trimmed for the animals to eat. The rhinos and giraffes eat the trees, produce the waste, the waste becomes compost, and the compost feeds the next round of trees.

"It creates this beautiful closed-loop system," Ferrari said.