For those of us in the solid waste and recycling industry it is difficult to remember a time when there were thousands of garbage dumps (read: holes in the ground that communities buried and/or burned their waste in) scattered about the Country. Mostly, these dumps were developed to service the communities close by, within a 5-15 miles radius. Also, many of these dumps were family owned and operated by local residents out of a need to provide an essential public health service: managing community waste.
Fast forward to 1976, peace and love were not the only things in the air and water. Open combustion of garbage and other manufacturing processes have created the need for major environmental legislation and subsequent increased Government oversight of industrial activities. For this industry, it came in the form of Subtitle D, or Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). According to the landmark legislation, “[RCRA’s] primary goals are to protect human health and the environment from the potential hazards of waste disposal, to conserve energy and natural resources, to reduce the amount of waste generated, and to ensure that wastes are managed in an environmentally sound manner.” What happened over the next several years was a transformation of the industry and how communities handled the management of their waste.
This legislation, among many other things, required an enormous investment of capital for garbage dumps to stay in business. They had to become landfills, highly engineered holes in the ground, that cost millions to design, develop and operate. Operating these facilities now required skill sets underdeveloped in most small family owned operations. For the most part, these businesses closed down or were sold to large waste firms backed by established financial institutions. The high costs to build and operate within new regulations required Cities and Counties to pool resources and develop regional landfills that serviced many communities. This eventually evolved into the disposal model we see today: regional mega-fills that service a large radius, are highly capitalized and have huge O&M costs. This new disposal model required long term and robust contracts to build and maintain. Because the economy of scale was so great, the larger these facilities were built, the more volume they took through their gates, the more profit they made. This dynamic helped keep disposal costs relatively low for municipalities, making it difficult for other waste management options to compete in the marketplace (like, recycling for example).
Enter an emerging industry: commercial composting. It is true that composting has been going on for ages, since the beginning of flora and fauna on earth. However, now urban and suburban planning and sprawl required collection and management of communities’ yard debris: plants, flowers, trees, etc. Thanks to the same environmental awareness that sparked the mega-fill model, many earth conscious entrepreneurs saw the value in processing and managing that material to manufacture a product: compost.
The commercial composting industry has continued to grow over the last 20 years or so thanks to environmental advocates, and innovative and earth conscious cities and regions supported by local and state government policies. As the desire to compost organic material grew, so did the variety and volume of material being composted. Once we discovered that the organic food material creating methane emissions at landfills could be returned to the earth via compost, the industry took on a whole new frontier.
To read the full story, visit https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/subtitle-c-regional-mega-facilities-future-commercial-rachel-oster?articleId=8535307474272996877.