What to do with tons of unused compost?

CEDAR RAPIDS — No small or inexpensive effort is made to collect and haul off yard waste from He-Man-sized Yardy carts here where additional city trucks vacuum up leaves raked to the curb each fall and spring.

All of what is collected becomes a part of Iowa's largest municipal compost operation — a behemoth of decomposition on 28 acres that still can impress though it sits at the base of the 208-foot-tall Mount Trashmore landfill along the Cedar River downstream from downtown.

If only someone wanted all the compost.

Well, now maybe someone will.

City officials, the Stormwater Commission and the City Council are working to come up with an ordinance that would require builders and developers to leave a top layer of absorbent soil on new building sites.

The idea is that a healthy, deep top layer — rather than a cover of grass sod atop what often is cement-like compacted soil and clay — will help sustain lawns and hold in rain water, reducing the potential for flooding.

City Council member Scott Olson, chairman of the council's Infrastructure Committee, said the topsoil discussion is needed in a city where a 2014 flash flood damaged dozens of homes and sent two teens into a storm sewer, killing one; and where the city only is beginning to build a flood protection system to avoid a repeat of the historic 2008 flood.

Any 'top layer' ordinance isn't going to become law without objection from builders and developers.

However, city officials are working to disarm them on one front: The proposed soil rule won't require expensive loads of topsoil to be hauled to a building site.

As proposed, the city rule offers less expensive options to building a healthy top layer of soil. Compost, a relatively inexpensive soil amendment, might become a key player.

The Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency operates the compost site, and City Council member Ralph Russell, who is a member of the council's Infrastructure Committee and chairman of the Solid Waste Agency board, said the agency's large supply of compost is at the ready if the city passes a topsoil rule.

Karmin McShane, Solid Waste Agency executive director, called it 'kind of a no-brainer' for cities to add nutrient-rich compost to building sites. The agency's compost is 'black gold,' she said.

Nonetheless, the agency's ability to make compost long has outpaced an ability to market it.

McShane joined the agency as a planner in 2001, at a time when compost dreams were big and the agency was bagging compost for sale in stores in the Midwest. That didn't last long.

She ended the bagging operation two years later when she took over as agency director. It was losing too much money, she said.

Ever since, the agency has given away compost to individuals while selling it in bulk to businesses for $20 a ton.

In the fiscal year that ended June 30, the agency took in 38,215 tons of yard waste but sold or gave away only 13,338 tons of compost. About 100 tons of what comes in can create about 60 tons of compost.

Another 10,060 tons of wood material came to the compost operation in the last fiscal year. It was sold, not composted, as wood chips for $4 a ton to a Wisconsin power plant, which since has closed.

The agency has 46 active windrows of compost and six employees to tend to them, turning and watering them as the organic material decomposes.

The agency estimated that it has 50,000 tons of compost in some stage of 'curing,' and another 2,500 tons that has gone through a final screening and is ready for sale or giveaway.

An 'egregious' rule

McShane said some cities, such as Iowa City and Waterloo, are able to use all their compost. She surmised that the Cedar Rapids/Linn County agency doesn't because of all that Cedar Rapids, in particular, hauls in from the large Yardy carts and its leaf pickup program.

The city's businesses also steer some organic waste to the compost operation, she said.

According to the city, it spends $1.4 million a year to collect yard waste and vacuum up leaves in the fall and spring. The city uses six to eight trucks for yard waste collections from March into December, with fewer trucks in January and February.

The city also has 11 leaf vacuum trucks that operate for 10 weeks in the fall and four weeks in April.

And look for more compost, too, via the increase in wood waste coming to the landfill now that the tree-killing emerald ash borer has arrived in Cedar Rapids, McShane said.

Drew Retz, vice president of operations at Jerry's Homes in Cedar Rapids and past president of the Iowa Home Builders Association, successfully helped the lobbying effort that convinced the Iowa Environmental Protection Commission this year to set aside the state's 4-inch topsoil rule as unenforceable and too costly for homebuyers.

Retz said the proposed city rule, which he called 'egregious' and a 'feel-good' one, will adopt a soil standard not unlike the soil that was in the state before settlement.

As for the Solid Waste Agency coming to the rescue with its surplus of compost, Retz said the supply is apt to be exhausted quickly, and the cost of it is likely to climb if the soil rule is adopted. The costs then are passed on to the homebuyer, he said.

New homebuyers, Retz said, want an established sod lawn when they move in.

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