County begins to ponder zero waste

Two companies vie for recycling prospects

By FRITZ MAYER

MONTICELLO, NY — With landfill space shrinking and the permits required to expand the facility nowhere in sight, county officials are starting to take a serious look at different ways the county might dispose of its garbage.

At a meeting of the Sullivan County Department of Public Works committee on March 13, chairman Kathy LaBuda said county officials had been in contact recently with two different groups regarding aggressive recycling programs that might represent part of the future of the county’s waste disposal operation.

One group is Think-21, a New York City-based company that since 2005 has been researching opportunities to set up a system of recycling organic waste. Organic waste, as defined by Think-21, includes food waste, wet paper or cardboard and yard waste. It also includes waste from agricultural operations, such as animal parts. The company has been working with local hauler Sullivan County First Recycling and Refuse for slightly more than a year to establish a recycling operation in the county. According to Sameer Rashid, one of the founders of Think-21, there is an estimated 18,000 tons of this sort of organic waste now going into the Sullivan County landfill each year, out of a total of 65,000 tons of waste.

The plan for Think-21 is to build an “anaerobic digestion” operation that would break the organic waste down into gas that could be used to create heat or electricity, compost that could be sold commercially and, perhaps, liquid that could be used as fertilizer. The system is currently in use in commercial applications in Europe. The company has received grants from Empire State Development Corporation and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), and was seeking to obtain about $60,000 from the county to move forward with a feasibility study for the project.

Rashid said the system could provide a financial benefit to agricultural and food-processing operations in the county, which currently pay to have waste that is not accepted by the landfill shipped out of state. Initially, the company would be interested in creating arrangements with institutions or businesses that generate large amounts of organic waste, as opposed to households, to supply waste to the operation. The organic waste would be separated from other waste and traditional recyclables, such as metal, plastic and newspapers, at the source. Rashid said there are already models for this sort of separation in communities in the San Francisco Bay area.

Shirley Felder-Morton, the president of Sullivan County First, said she and Think-21 were considering various sites for the installation, which could process up to 24,000 tons of organic waste per year, with the ability to expand. One site would be at the proposed agricultural park in Liberty.

The second recycling group the county had contact with was Greenway Environmental Services, which has a facility at Vassar Farm in Poughkeepsie, that produces commercial amounts of compost by recycling organic waste. The company also designs composting systems for municipalities. Greenway proposed developing a pilot composting project for Sullivan County.

The key component of the systems used by Greenway also involves separating the food and yard waste from the other waste, and using that to make various products. However, the facility used by Greenway, unlike the one proposed by Think-21, is an open system. County officials wondered if an open system would create odor problems, and also questioned whether residents or institutions, such as schools, would be willing to separate food waste from other wastes.

Proponents say that once a community has been taught how to separate the food waste from the rest of the garbage, it makes recycling everything else much easier. And there has been a recycling law in place in Sullivan County since 1992.

That topic led to a discussion of recycling enforcement. Sullivan County residents currently recycle less than 30 percent of what they are required to by law, such as newspapers, plastics, metal, cardboard and glass. The exception is the Village of Liberty, which has reached a recycling level of up to 60 percent. Much of the reason for the difference is that Liberty officials have employed a fairly strict enforcement program, including the mandatory use of clear plastic bags for the disposal of garbage.

Janet Newburg, a member of the group Special Protection for the Environment of the County of Sullivan, which has been fighting the expansion of the landfill, said that without enforcement the recycling rate in the county would never be expanded.

After the meeting, LaBuda expressed frustration that the county is still uncertain about whether or not it will receive the necessary permits to expand the landfill, and said that any decisions about which direction the county should head will be heavily influenced by the outcome of the permitting process.