Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 24, 1993 TAG: 9307240117
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WRIGHT COUNTY, MINN. LENGTH: Long
It's called composting.
The process is the same used by gardeners to turn kitchen scraps and lawn clippings into natural fertilizer. The difference here is scale. The county's centralized composting facility takes all types of garbage - more than 100 tons a day - and transforms half of it into a dark, rich material with the texture of peat moss.
Wright County is one of a small but growing number of communities around the United States that have turned to composting as an alternative to landfills.
The idea has intrigued officials in Salem, Va., where the city's landfill is scheduled to close this fall.
"It's the ultimate recycling," Salem City Manager Randy Smith said, "when you take all your solid waste and make a product you can use again."
Salem is looking to hire a compost consultant - the first step toward possibly becoming the first locality in Virginia to go organic with municipal solid waste.
In making their decision, Salem officials might want to venture to this central Minnesota community.
Located just beyond the Minneapolis suburbs, Wright County is a predominantly rural area of 70,000 people spread out over 700 square miles. Each day, the county generates an estimated 110 tons of garbage and trash - slightly less than what is produced in Salem.
People here are proud of the $14 million composting plant that opened in March 1992. The Swiss-designed facility is considered a model in a state that pioneered composting. More than 300 people, some from local governments around the country, toured the plant last month.
Some Wright County politicians, however, are having second thoughts.
"Environmentally it's good," said Pat Sawatzke, chairman of the Wright County Board of Commissioners. "Financially is where it gets more difficult."
Sawatzke's advice to Salem: Look before you leap into compost.
Chuck Davis scoops a handful of compost from a pile that sits behind the steel-framed buildings that make up the Wright County Composting Facility.
The material feels and smells like peat moss sold at feed stores in town. Small flakes of plastic are the only indicator that the soil-like material is decomposed garbage.
"Who would have ever thought?" said Davis, a county environmental health officer.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine that this stuff was derived from the foul-smelling garbage that is trucked each day to the waste-receiving building.
This is where the trash begins a garbage-to-compost journey that will take about six months.
Private haulers deliver about 110 tons of garbage to the facility each day. Another 50 tons of food waste and yard clippings are brought from outside the county.
The trash is spread out on a concrete floor, where two men wearing respirators and carrying long sticks poke around for water heaters, tires, old baseball bats, copper tubing and anything else that could foul the compost or hurt the machinery.
Such items - called rejects - are sent to a private landfill next door. In fact, nearly half the garbage that comes into the facility will end up in the landfill.
The precomposting processing is geared toward removing as many rejects as possible. The garbage is sent on a conveyor through a sorting room, where a team of workers pulls out recyclables and an endless variety of rejects. Radiator hose, garden hose, pantyhose. Sorters have rescued dozens of decoy ducks.
The garbage then passes through a series of shredders, screens and magnets, which draw off ferrous metals.
Some rejects slip through. Especially troublesome are batteries - even the tiny ones used in headset stereos - that can decompose and taint the compost with heavy metals.
Laboratory tests show the Wright County compost contains elevated levels of zinc and polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), a pollutant found in industrial wastes. Under Minnesota regulations, the compost can be used as landfill cover and for restricted agricultural purposes.
There is little demand for the compost - even though the county is giving it away free. A small mountain of the stuff, 6,000 tons, is stockpiled on the back lot.
"It's a major problem," said Davis, the county environmental officer who has been assigned to the project since planning began in 1984.
Professional Services Group, a Texas company that manages the composting plant, has sought to refine the screening process and has ordered additional lab tests.
After the initial screening, the garbage is mixed with water and is stored in rows in a building 165 feet wide and 590 feet long.
Decomposition begins as naturally existing microbes begin to eat the shredded and wet garbage. A machine designed by the Swiss company Buhler periodically turns the rows to add oxygen and water.
After about 60 days, the compost is shredded again and screened to remove plastic, glass and other inorganic material. It then is moved to the back lot, where it cures for an additional four months.
An elaborate system of air filters at the Wright County facility has cut down on foul-odor complaints that have hung over other composting plants. Still, some people who live nearby say the stench is unbearable under certain weather conditions.
"There are times you can hardly stand it," said Adeline DesMarais, who lives on the farm across the highway.
`A tough go'
For years, Wright County's garbage ended up in the private landfill surrounded by fields of hay, corn and soybeans.
Things probably would have continued that way if not for a 1980 state law that discouraged localities from landfilling "unprocessed" garbage. The law encouraged the development of waste-to-energy incineration plants and made Minnesota the nation's testing ground for composting.
Minnesota is home to more than one-third of the 22 municipal solid-waste composting facilities in the United States.
Wright County had a difficult time choosing between incineration and composting. Some thought it would be easier to truck the garbage to a nearby waste-to-energy plant, but a citizens' advisory board rejected the idea as too costly.
The Board of Commissioners - in a 3-2 decision - opted to go with composting as an environmental and economical solution.
The decision has proved to be anything but cheap. The tipping fee at the composting facility is $89 a ton, which is about 50 percent higher than initial projections.
(Salem will pay less than half that - $38 a ton - to send its garbage to a private landfill near Richmond under a five-year contract. A true cost comparison is difficult, however, because of different regulations and fixed costs in the two states.)
Sawatzke, the commissioners' chairman, was elected after the decision to compost had been made. Much of his time and energy has gone toward making sure tipping fees cover the debt payments on $14 million in bonds.
The tipping fee has increased because a consultant hired by the county overestimated the amount of garbage. The plant was designed to break even at about 127 tons a day, but private haulers who collect garbage in the county were showing up with 110 tons.
The facility has had to buy preprocessed yard clippings and food waste from the nearby incinerator at the cut-rate price of $45 a ton.
"We can make it work," Sawatzke said. "It will be a tough go. Our goal is to keep it off the backs of the taxpayers."
A recent federal appeals court ruling may force Wright County taxpayers - many of whom already pay fees to the private companies that collect garbage in the county - to subsidize the operation.
In February, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a ruling that local governments have no power to demand that private haulers bring garbage to a local facility if the haulers want to transfer the trash out of state.
In Wright County, some garbage companies have talked of banding together and shipping to Iowa, where landfill tipping fees are about $30. The Board of Commissioners has discussed cutting the compost tipping fee in half to stay competitive.
In hindsight, Sawatzke believes Wright County may have spent too much for a turn-key composting plant. He said the county could have taken some financial pressure off itself by settling for a less elaborate plant.
Perhaps the best solution, he said, would have been to set up a waste processing station instead of a composting plant. The county could have shipped its garbage to incinerators and composting facilities with excess capacity.
"I think there are things I would have done differently," Sawatzke said.
His comments do not scare Salem officials.
City Manager Randy Smith said that second thoughts are natural for anyone running a large, complex operation. The same held true for Salem officials when they were running a waste-to-steam incinerator.
"The incinerator was a good thing, but anybody in business long is going to say, `If we had to do it again, we sure wouldn't do it this way.' "
In some ways, Salem officials might be unable to resist the opportunity to become the first locality in Virginia to compost its municipal solid waste.
Salem has a tradition of going its own way when it comes to garbage disposal. While Roanoke and Roanoke County were simply burying their trash in the 1970s and 1980s, Salem was burning its trash in a waste-to-steam incinerator. With the burner now shut down, Salem is looking for a new way to handle its garbage.
Smith said one important advantage of composting - like incineration - is that it reduces the volume of garbage that ends up in the landfill. That can pay big dividends in an era when landfill space can cost $400,000 an acre.
Composting also represents a challenge to Salem to prove that it can do things as well - if not better - than anyone else.
A Salem delegation led by Mayor Jim Taliaferro recently returned from touring two compost plants in Florida, confident that Salem could avoid some of the technical, environmental and financial problems that have dogged some facilities.
Smith said he came back more enthusiastic than ever about compost.
"Most of what we have learned is what you shouldn't do," Smith said. "That's important because some other people have learned some very expensive lessons."
by CNB