Kent County is moving forward on plans for a roughly $370 million sustainable business park which public works officials hope will resolve the region’s fragmented and disjointed organic waste management infrastructure. Late last month, the Kent County Department of Public Works publicly released a report on the status of its organic waste handling system, detailing how much food-related waste is going to landfills. The findings were relatively bleak, but there’s hope on the horizon. “We have to own the fact that we as a department are not delivering, in my opinion, the amount of organic waste management that the county really needs,” Department of Public Works Director Darwin Baas told MiBiz.
He described a “fragmented” system with an unclear economic model in which food waste from homes, restaurants, grocery stores and food processors lacks a clear path to composting facilities or plants that can repurpose it into renewable energy or fertilizer. However, the county is inching closer to the development of the nearly $370 million Sustainable Business Park in Byron Center and, hopefully, create a more efficient system that keeps organic waste from consuming space in traditional landfills.
Five years ago, the Department of Public Works set a goal to reduce waste going to landfills by 90 percent by 2030. Organic materials make up about half of all of the waste going to Kent County landfills, or about 400,000 tons a year. Capturing and converting that waste to marketable compost and selling it at current prices could be valued at up to $9 million annually, according to a 2017 estimate by the county.