Amid the trash-barge news stories and cross-border garbage dumping controversies of the 90s, there was another story about garbage happening, much more quietly, here in the Upper Peninsula -- a story that continues today.
At the
Marquette County Solid Waste Authority, instead of building the landfill ever bigger and burying old trash in layers of more trash, director Rick Aho was pioneering a new way to deal with garbage.
It's called an aerobic wet landfill, and uses the natural process of decomposition, aided by plenty of moisture and air circulation. Using existing liquid runoff from the landfill, called leachate, plus trash-eating bacteria and exposure to air, the garbage inside the landfill is constantly broken down and digested into smaller and smaller pieces until it takes up much less space than in a traditional dry landfill.
The wet processing, when active, is essentially the same method used in a home composting pile, on a much larger scale, of course.
"It's a natural solution to an unnatural situation," Aho says.
It's different from other wet landfills -- mostly in Canada and Europe, with some experimental sites in the U.S. -- in some important ways. Some others use anaerobic processing, which produces methane and carbon dioxide. Aho's methods only produce carbon dioxide, not methane. The Marquette County landfill also is not actively processing all the time, but just when needed.
"We're the only ones doing it this way that I know of," says Aho. "What we're doing deals with the longevity of the facility, and liability, and protecting the future of Marquette County."
And the results have been as good as anyone could ask.
"The site has a hundred years of life left yet," says Aho, who has been the director for 18 years.
The method requires different controls and monitoring than the old way of just dumping and burying trash. But Aho says it's more efficient in the long run, and has meant not only a longer life for the landfill, but a more direct benefit for local taxpayers: The landfill has kept the cost of dumping around the same low rate for years.
"The landfill is pretty much tweaked in terms of running effectively with the finances," Aho says. "We've had the same rates for a long time based on these methods."
So what is a forward-thinking, environmentally-conscious landfill director going to do next?
Aho is far from out of ideas. He's implementing another way to make the landfill more sustainable, and cut down greenhouse gas emissions further.
With some garbage sources -- like municipalities and trash haulers -- the trash coming in is now being separated by type before it enters. Organic materials are diverted, or never taken inside the landfill, but processed with composting methods outside the landfill.
One reason this works is 60 percent of the trash brought to the landfill is organic. Food waste, paper, and other biodegradable materials fall into this category.
Another 30 percent is recyclables like glass, plastic or metal, which are separated out before the rest goes into the landfill.
The rest -- less than 10 percent -- are things that won't decay or be recycled, like foam, plastic bags and other non-reusable plastics.
"What it amounts to is if you get organics out of the system, then the recyclables become a lot more obvious and easier to separate, and the stuff we can't use becomes a lot more obvious as well," says Aho.
It's necessary to separate the organics out beforehand because that way they don't go in with the rest of the trash and risk contamination with non-compostable materials, he says. It's part of the rules Aho and the solid waste authority have helped to write in cooperation with the state of Michigan and federal regulators as the idea of diverting organics to compost developed.
They're the first ones to do it, so the regulations have taken some time to figure out, but the rewards are worth it.
"What we're talking about is a sustainable system where there's more use out of it rather than just putting it into the landfill and forgetting about it," he says.
The clean compost produced this way can actually have uses outside of the landfill, for landscaping or resale. But the logistics are still being worked out, as the separation requires a commitment from municipalities and haulers.
"We have some advantages in that it's a lot less expensive to process organics outside the landfill, so the rates for diverted organics are 20 percent less," says Aho. "So this is really the next step to bringing costs down further."
And since Aho's not one to forget about the bigger picture, he's also exploring other ideas for the landfill, like the possibility of getting carbon credits on the global carbon market for their composting.
"We always have room for improvement," he says.
Kim Hoyum is a freelance writer based in the Upper Peninsula. Her credits include contributor to Geek Girl on the Street as well as a regular writer for several weekly and monthly publications. Hoyum is a graduate of Northern Michigan University where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in writing.