IowaWatch (https://www.iowawatch.org/tag/landfills/)
Many small Iowa communities no longer can afford to maintain their local dumps when faced with increasing regulation and permitting fees by the EPA and Iowa Department of Natural Resources. That has forced new ways of thinking about waste management.
Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources sampled trash from 10 landfills and five transfer stations across Iowa for a study published in December 2017, looking to answer the question, “What are Iowans landfilling?” Tom Anderson, of the Iowa DNR’s Land Quality Bureau and the study’s project manager, has an answer to that question.
Iowans dumped 2.7 million tons of garbage into landfills last year. One method the Iowa Department of Natural Resources promotes to reduce the negative influence of dumping all that garbage has on the environment is called the Environmental Management System, but many Iowa landfill operators are reluctant to adopt this new system. How much do you know about Iowa’s efforts to reduce garbage put into landfills?
Each year, landfills must turn in information on the tonnage taken in, which is reported to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
The Environmental Management System, or EMS, was seen as an alternative to relying simply on giving credits to Iowa landfills that serve as incentives for accepting fewer tons of garbage. But adoption of this approach has been slow.
What if we could turn our everyday trash into fuel that could power our cars? That time is closer than you think, and Iowa is on the forefront of this new technology. It’s called “trashanol”, turning garbage into gas.
WMT radio show host Bob Bruce interviewed IowaWatch Executive Director-Editor Lyle Muller about a variety of things, including the landfills story by Sarah Hadley and Sujin Kim, on Feb. 21. Listen to the podcast here:
Reo Menning is giving a reporter a tour of Metro Park East Landfill, Iowa’s largest landfill and looking over the expanse when she brings up the fact the they are standing on 30 feet of compacted garbage. That’s the result of taking in 1,700 tons of waste each day during the six days the landfill is open each week, for a grand total of almost half a million tons of waste annually from fiscal 2003 through fiscal 2012. For perspective: that is a little more than 17 percent of the state’s waste. “What we receive can vary day to day and is affected by seasons,” said Menning, public affairs director for the Metro Waste Authority that runs the huge landfill, whose 1,800 acres could hold 2,380 football fields. Garbage is dumped in about 500 of those acres.