Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 4, 1990 TAG: 9003014374
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Michael Parrish Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: ST. CLOUD, MINN. LENGTH: Long
Soon fish heads and candy wrappers, disposable diapers and dish rags would emerge with the look and smell of soil, and with no more harmful bacteria than fresh cow manure. For another month or so, the brown loam would be cured in piles, further killing off bacteria to a level no greater than ordinary dirt.
James McNelly was showing off his humble neighborhood compost factory - what he and others consider to be a model system of garbage disposal, as soon as the neighbors get used to the idea.
"The truck that takes solid waste away from the house could be the same truck that brings compost back," McNelly cheerfully predicted. Some day, he said, "compost plants will be as common as gas stations."
The once lowly compost process is getting some respect. Environmentalists, municipal garbage engineers and even such giant consumer-goods companies as Procter & Gamble are paying new attention to modern, fast-turnover forms of composting - a process developed by a British agronomist in 19th-century India to turn fecal matter into safe fertilizer.
Last year, the number of U.S. trash-composting projects in the works rose to 75 from 42, according to a survey by the trade journal BioCycle.
Portland, Ore., has begun construction of a plant using European technology marketed by a local company, Riedel Environmental Technologies Inc. By the end of 1990, Riedel plans to be handling 15 percent of Portland's trash. Agripost, a Florida company, just fired up a system to compost from 12 percent to 15 percent of Miami's garbage. Memphis, Tenn., is interested in compost systems. In California, Riverside, San Diego and Santa Barbara are studying composting's long-term economics.
"Composting will be a major topic of the '90s," says Jerry Powell, a longtime observer of urban-waste debates, now editor of Resource Recycling magazine.
As many Americans now realize, urban household garbage, known in industry jargon as the municipal solid waste stream, has become a rampaging river as engineers, environmentalists, policy makers and entrepreneurs debate how to bring it under control. Composting's grand opportunity comes amid growing uneasiness that other answers to the garbage problem - recycling, landfills and incinerators among them - have either run their course or don't go far enough.
"People have thrown up their hands and said, `OK, what's it going to cost for a permanent solution?' " agrees Clarence G. Golueke, an old campaigner in the field, now director of research and development for Cal Recovery Systems, a Richmond, Calif., consulting firm. Golueke conducted the first serious U.S. study of urban-waste composting in the Berkeley, Calif., dump three decades ago.
The compost process uses time and heat to break down to its basic organic components material that was once living - killing off harmful viruses and bacteria and turning such pollutants as nitrates into fertilizer.
Back yard gardeners make compost slowly, exposing their piles of leaves and grass clippings to the weather until they crumble. But operators of modern compost digesters, such as McNelly's yellow drum, measure every component and control the temperature.
As the cost of dumping garbage - so-called tipping fees - has risen wildly, the modern version of composting has become more attractive financially. Five years ago in the U.S. Northeast, tipping fees of $10 a ton were common. Now they're as high as $110 in Connecticut.
The tipping fee for St. Cloud, a midsized city that switched to composting three years ago, is $69 - a bargain compared with $95 at Minneapolis, an hour's drive away.
But cities also are taking another look at compost simply because they're running out of landfills, which have been handling 80 percent of their garbage. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that half of the nation's landfills will be sealed in five years. Neighborhoods willing to accept new ones are hard to find.
Incinerating city trash is also getting tougher, as many conservationists and community activists complain of environmental drawbacks and high cost.
Less-lavish packaging and recycling also have limits. Though Ralph Nader and others strongly argue that more is possible, the EPA will be "very happy" if these narrow the garbage stream 25 percent by 1992, says Steven J. Levy, the agency's municipal-waste technology expert.
Other solutions have fallen by the wayside. Ocean dumping ends next year. The idea of rocketing trash to the sun has become a tired joke from a former era. And shipping waste to rural backwaters has become politically unpopular. Even Louisiana, long considered a most accommodating state, recently turned back the "pooh-pooh choo-choo," a train loaded with Maryland sewage sludge.
Yet, unlike hazardous and nuclear wastes, which are destined to be isolated by cradle-to-grave regulation, household garbage will always be with us.
Advocates like Golueke and McNelly, operations director of Recomp Inc., the private waste-disposal company that serves St. Cloud, call for composting as part of a system that begins with recycling in the kitchen. It ends with cans, bottles, paper, plastics and high-quality compost sold to help offset operating costs. By then, only a fifth of the original waste stream - utterly unredeemable carpet, medical waste, old shoes - must be stuffed into the ground.
"We'll always need landfills," McNelly admits.
Compost's success, however, hinges on whether it is clean enough to be useful. McNelly and most others see a market in bulk users that include public highway departments, for soil-enhancement of median strips; landscape firms; Christmas tree growers and eventually garden-supply stores and farmers, as Americans overcome suspicions about soil products recycled, in part, from human waste.
"So the farm will become not our disposal site, but our client," McNelly predicts.
In Europe, particularly, compost systems have been generally successful since after World War II, when Europeans began to rebuild basic public services. Already hard-pressed for landfill sites, they made composting part of their new sanitation systems.
In the United States, only the relatively simple composting of sewage sludge and yard waste - leaves and tree trimmings - has caught on. Just a handful of sanitation districts are composting that main river of garbage.
Prodding sanitation districts is a fresh volley of state laws to mandate recycling. Recently, Los Angeles adopted a program that conforms to a new California requirement of 25 percent less trash going to landfills by 1995; 50 percent by the year 2000. Florida wants a 30 percent cut by 1993.
"And communities cannot go beyond 25 percent recycling without composting," says Neil Seldman flatly. Seldman, long a recycling and compost advocate, is president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, in Washington, D.C.
Unfortunately, the first wave of compost schemes arrived amid rosy promises of "garbage into gold." Cities were delighted to hear the now-defunct notion that recycling and composting could pay for their sanitation districts.
Not even close.
Today, the message from sadder but smarter public officials and environmentalists is that waste disposal is part of the cost of consumer goods and packaging. Far from being profit centers, recycling and composting are needed mostly to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills. If compost markets can be developed, the revenue may help offset the expense of environmentally sound sanitation systems, but it will never pay the whole freight.
Still, even for this task, the compost must be of high quality.
This is why many sanitation districts limit their compost to leaves and tree trimmings, to avoid the main waste stream with its diapers, car batteries and, literally, kitchen sinks. Chunks of plastic can make an unsightly mix. Worse, batteries, particularly, can taint the compost with heavy metals, including lead, mercury, zinc and chromium. If concentrations are high enough, environmental regulations leave it with only one legal use - disposal in the very landfills it was meant to avoid.
So far, the St. Cloud composters, particularly, have been getting favorable reviews.
"I think it's a great facility myself," says Robert L. Spencer, a biologist specializing in environmental planning. Spencer just surveyed municipal-waste composting projects around the nation, including Recomp's.
"They have a unique patented system with two operating digesters in this country, and that gives them a distinct advantage," Spencer says. "If you're a county commissioner who can go see it in operation, that's a lot better than for someone to say, `Just trust us.' "
Indeed, on McNelly's desk these days are plastic bags of experimental products from the big drum below. They all look like dirt of various shades. Yet one is an "ultralight" potting medium for hanging-basket plants, made from ground-up, sanitized plastic diaper liners; another, a cactus mix made from ground glass; another, soil-fungus-fighting compost for golf courses.
by CNB