Waste Not: Reduce, reuse, recycle more relevant than ever

Five hundred tons of garbage is dumped into the landfill on County Home Road in Marion each day. That's 180,000 tons of garbage each year.

At that rate, it's expected the landfill will fill to the brim in about 25 to 27 years.

NOT IN MY BACKYARD

Joe Horaney, communications manager for the Solid Waste Agency, suspects this will be the last landfill in Linn County.

There are no plans for another landfill in part because garbage doesn't make for a very pleasant neighbor.

Standing at the mouth of the pile, it's pungent.

A constant flow of dump trucks load garbage onto the heap throughout the day, while a compactor pushes it into the ground. Seagulls hover above the mass searching for the remnants of dinner you scraped into the bin last week.

The facility on County Home Road opened in 1972.

Its predecessor, Mount Trashmore, opened almost a decade earlier in 1965. The heap — 6.5 million tons of garbage — represents about 50 years of refuse. It was capped in 2006 and reopened after the Floods of 2008. It was recapped in early 2013.

Without a designated space for a new landfill, the county's more than 40,000 customers' trash will mostly likely end up being shipped out of state.

Kick it to the curby

With 25 years looming not too distant on the horizon, the Solid Waste Agency and cities in the metro area are working to redirect waste from the landfill to recycling centers and compost piles.

In addition, the city of Marion has been looking at ways to convert garbage into biofuel.

'We don't want to see things being thrown away when they can be reused,' Horaney says. 'If somebody makes the effort, there's really no reason to throw anything away.'

The city of Cedar Rapids encourages residents to waste less. The bins for recycling and compost are larger — 65 gallons — than the 35 gallon garbage — or Garby — bins.

In Cedar Rapids, co-mingled recyclables — paper, plastic and cans — can go in the big blue recycling bins, referred to by residents as a Curby cart. Organic material and yard waste goes in the cart dubbed Yardy.

Sort it out

Once collected, recyclables are sent to the Solid Waste Agency's resource recovery building on County Home Road by the landfill and to Republic Services, formerly City Carton. There, the items are sorted by machine and hand.

Sorters stand at the sides of each conveyor belt, their gloved hands reaching across the belt to pick out misguided materials and deposit them into the correct bin. Once sorted, material is baled and prepared to be sent to various mills around the country for repurposing.

yard sales?

Steam rises from the 50 or so acres of piled yard waste — a mixture of leaves, grass, wood chips and organic food waste organized in 43 windrows at the Solid Waste Agency's A Street location behind Mount Trashmore. Organisms inside slowly break down the organic material, reaching temperatures up to 160 degrees.

Each year, the Solid Waste Agency produces around 25,000 tons of finished compost from the yard waste collected in customer's Yardy containers. The compost is available to Linn County residents for free.

Still, Horaney estimates at least 20 percent of waste sent to the landfill is organic material that could be composted.

Composted organic material breaks down into carbon dioxide, which is better for the environment compared to the methane (one of the worst greenhouse gases) it would produce in the landfill.

Rather than burn methane at the County Home Road landfill, the agency converts it into energy — enough to power about 1,300 Linn County homes each day. Though they don't have a gas-to-energy system at the Mount Trashmore location yet — which will likely continue to produce methane forever — the agency plans to make those changes in the future.

Rewarded for recycling

Though the Solid Waste Agency and cities in the metro area try to make it easy for residents to recycle — Horaney believes 'people want to do the right thing' — it still takes effort without tangible reward.

Blake Rupe wants to make the payoff for recycling more real.

She created a mobile app — formerly Re-App, now called Sift — to reward users for recycling.

Each time a user recycles something he enters it into the app in much the same way a dieter logs calories.

The more you recycle, the more you're rewarded with coupons, mp3 downloads and other tangible gifts.

The app is only in its beta stage. Rupp hopes users eventually will be able to see an interactive picture of the landfill filling over time.

Rupe became an accidental entrepreneur when she spent a week in Mexico while finishing her master's degree in international studies with an emphasis in marine conservation at University of Iowa. She was researching waste practices in coastal areas and collecting refuse along the beach. That experience opened her eyes to how big our global waste problem really is.

'It's trash. No one wants to think about it. The entire industry is incredibly quiet — behind the scenes every day,' she says. 'When you can see it happening before your eyes, It's really a wake up call.'

'It's astounding how much garbage ends up on those beaches,' she says. The majority of it was recyclable and 'I was literally watching it wash out to sea.'

Money matters

To Rupe, it's as much an issue of saving money as it is saving the planet.

When we throw something away instead of recycling it or passing it to someone who can put it to use, 'we're throwing away money,' she says.

According to her research, Rupe estimates that people in the United States throw $31.4 trillion worth of garbage into landfills each year. That's four times what it was 20 years ago and almost two times the national debt, she said.

Recycling makes a profit for recycling companies and the mills reusing the material, but recyclers aren't seeing any financial reward, which leaves them with little incentive to keep recycling.

'Studies show that it works when you incentivize people to recycle,' Rupe says. 'People want to be rewarded ... They want to get more out of it.'