Cutting-edge landfill in Rapid City, SD??

Now, you might expect a "cutting-edge" landfill, one voluntarily diverting 50-55% of the garbage entering its facility out of the landfill and with a goal to get to 100% diversion through various means, to be located in Portland, OR, or San Francisco, CA (#1 and #2, respectively in a Popular Science ranking of 50 US cities in 2008). This week I organized a homeschool tour of the local landfill in Rapid City, SD and learned a lot that made me proud to live here.

Several of the steps they take to reduce the amount of trash entering the landfill:

• Encourage consumer-level recycling by making it as easy as possible to recycle. This includes providing blue mixed-recyclable containers for metals, plastics and glass and 3 dumping stations throughout the city for mixed-recyclables as well as corrugated cardboard, newspapers and yard waste.
• Increase business recycling through education programs and outreach to local businesses.
• Statewide law already bans yard waste in landfills and Rapid City ordinance prohibits yard waste going into residential and commercial bins. This yard waste collected separately is composted at the Rapid City landfill and the compost is sold for about $25 per pick-up load or $1 per barrel.
• Composting the trash itself using a process of mixing sewage sludge and solids with the garbage and composting until it becomes usable compost. They are the only facility of this type in the United States and this is part of what makes this a "cutting-edge" facility. I will write more on this process in a separate post and link to it here when it is complete.
• Diverting usable working appliances and electronics at the gate as much as possible and encouraging those to be dropped off at local thrift stores or nonprofit organizations instead.

Through these measures, the Rapid City landfill is currently able to keep 50-55% of its waste out of the landfill. Considering the industry standard is about 20-25% diversion,* (except in California where the Integrated Waste Management Act of 1989 mandated 50% diversion which was finally achieved in 2006, when 52% of their trash was diverted and the IWMA goals finally met), I thought this was pretty impressive.

The Rapid City landfill has set its sights high, with a goal to divert 100% of the waste out of the landfill. One of the projects they hope to add is waste-to-energy technology to generate electricity from waste (that could then be sold as another income source). They also hope to improve the recycling rate at collection points, continue to encourage usable electronics and appliances to be donated rather than dumped, and encourage outside recycling of items that cannot be recycled through their facility (such as computers and similar electronics that may contain hazardous waste but that often have salvageable, recyclable parts also).

The Rapid City Solid Waste home page links to a brochure that was put together by South Dakota Democracy in Action that lists resources, both local and national, for recycling and donating items so we can all help them achieve their goal.

The Rapid City landfill does not receive any tax dollars. Instead, all operations are supported through utility bills and sales of recyclable items and compost.

* NOTE: The 20-25% figure was quoted to me by the tour operator at the landfill. I tried to find confirmation of this from a web search, and found numbers on various sites ranging from 27% to 44%. Most of them did not provide the source of their data. If anyone knows of a site where I could get a current number, please post in comments below and I will update this post to reflect that.