Garbage Solutions: Buried in Compost?
When Thomas Metzger learned his mountain county spent $6,000 a day to ship its garbage to Nevada, he was outraged.
Why not get back to basics? Why not set up a big compost plant to get rid of the mess? That may astonish backyard gardeners who prize compost, but the science behind the idea is sound and simple, and it doesn’t stink.
And it’s catching on--with the Environmental Protection Agency, the state, University of California researchers, members of Congress, landfill operators, even service groups who invite Metzger to deliver a 15-minute speech, then keep him an hour answering questions.
The goal is to turn the humble compost heap into a garbage-eating dynamo.
“I talk to people about this, and the first thing they’ll say is, ‘If it’s such a good idea, how come nobody is doing it?’ So I tell them, ‘You tell me one thing that’s wrong with this.’ And they can’t,” said Metzger, a retired publisher and business consultant in El Dorado County.
Metzger and retired engineer Walter Harmon, a friend and fellow compost activist, want the world to know about the joys of composted garbage.
And they want El Dorado County, in the Sierra 40 miles east of Sacramento, to set up a pilot project to show the benefits of composting, which may cost a sixth of traditional disposal and is nonpolluting.
The county is interested: Metzger and Harmon are scheduled to give formal presentations to supervisors on Oct. 24.
What began as two retirees pushing for local change has turned into an impassioned crusade. They are formidable advocates, plowing through reams of research and disseminating their findings.
“What we really want,” Harmon said, “is a national compost research and data-collection center. We want to bring everybody into a research center and solve the problem. That’s the bottom line.”
Others are starting to agree.
“It appears that this particular technology well may be coming of age as a potential contender on the industrial landscape,” David Zilberman, head of UC Berkeley’s Center for Sustainable Resource Development, wrote to Harmon recently.
Zilberman, along with others, suggested that Harmon and Metzger convene a national conference of compost experts. Local legislators and members of Congress, also persuaded, want the federal government to take a lead role.
The irony is that the idea is not new.
But it seems to have been lost in the search for better ways to dispose of municipal waste. Composting plants do exist for so-called “green waste”--lawn clippings, leaves and the like.
But using the same principle to eliminate smelly, polluted, large-scale landfills that leak methane and leachate--a nice term for “garbage juice”--has not yet caught on.
A plant in St. Petersburg, Fla., closed in 1978 because there was an inadequate market for compost. Another, a well-known facility in Madisonville, Ky., across the street from a shopping mall, shut down in 1984 because the supply of garbage was not adequate.
“You couldn’t smell it, there were no odors or complaints from the neighbors,” Harmon said.
The state’s top waste authority, the Integrated Waste Management Board, likes composting but noted that its popularity so far is limited.
“It absolutely makes sense. We encourage it up and down the state, but the decisions are made at the local level,” said board spokesman Chris Peck.
El Dorado County shut down its landfill after pollutants damaged the soil and threatened ground water. Months later, the county still ships waste to a disposal site in Lockwood, Nev., 125 miles away.
The county isn’t alone in using Lockwood, which has built a cottage industry for California garbage.
At least 10 California cities, including Sacramento, send garbage to the Reno-area landfill through private contractors who truck the trash to the neighboring state. Last year, the cities accounted for perhaps 2,000 tons a day--about a third of the total daily load.
Gardeners are familiar with compost heaps, those backyard piles of leaves, loppings, twigs, scraps, peels and gook that over time are transformed into great soil by moisture, air and microbes.
Industrial-level composting is similar, but on a far greater scale.
Garbage, sans recyclables and inert material, is moved gradually on a series of conveyor belts through a temperature-controlled, specially ventilated warehouse.
As the material moves slowly along, it is sifted, moistened, dried and refined, reduced by the natural action of microbes in what Harmon called “the closed-cell digester procedure,” developed in Norman, Okla., in the 1950s.
After a week of processing at roughly 160-degree heat, the material has become compost--a soil-like substance familiar to gardeners, farmers and landscapers. A plant can handle 200 tons a week.
Typically, a ton of garbage is about half organic material--the stuff that can be composted. Most of the rest is recyclable--glass, cans and plastic, for example--and it is taken out before the composting starts.
Compost is known mainly as a soil enricher, and it does that without chemicals--one of its benefits.
But even more valuable is its ability to eliminate garbage without pollution, Harmon said.
“What we’re talking about here will benefit the entire United States,” he said. “We have a garbage problem everywhere.”
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Some composting sites on the Web:
https://www.oldgrowth.org/compost/
https://www.vegweb.com/composting/
https://www.compostingcouncil.org/
