The Shape of Stinks to Come: The Green Revolution Devours Boulder County’s Open Space

 

I’ve written here several times about composting, the high-minded effort to turn waste into re-usable mulch. When it comes to setting up large-scale composting operations, these efforts tend to follow a familiar sad sequence. The initial proposal assures the public that the facility will be run according to the latest best practices and result in minimal odor, if any. Once the operation gets underway, nearby residents start to notice objectionable smells. The facility may deny being the source; there may be a back-and-forth as the town tries to document the stink and locate its origin. The facility may own up to being the source, and offer assurances that the smell is a mere hiccup that will disappear once the operation is fully optimized. When the smell and local objections continue, the town hires consultants who recommend installing some sort of odor remediation system. The result: the entire project comes in heavily over budget and leaves a lot of ill will in its wake. 

A common feature of these episodes is a failure to take potential odor issues seriously from the very start of the project. Why does this happen? I think it’s because proponents of large-scale composting don’t anticipate issues of scale. 

Home composting enthusiasts maintain little heaps of banana peels, apple cores, and lawn clippings in their backyards. These produce a small amount of innocuous odor. So what’s the problem in just adding everyone’s little heap to a town compost pile? 

The problem is that the amount of biomass in a commercial or municipal composting facility is exponentially larger than a backyard heap, and that the resulting odor production will also be exponentially larger. Massive odor generation is a certainty—it’s an operational issue that ought to be dealt with in detail at the preliminary engineering stage. It is not enough for planners and proponents to blithely claim that proper “turning over” and aeration of the pile will minimize odor. 

Now comes a story out of Longmont, Colorado, roughly 35 miles south of FirstNerve headquarters. Three residents have filed a lawsuit against a proposed composting facility—one that hasn’t even been built. Among other things, the lawsuit anticipates loss of property values should the facility-to-be emit “noxious odors.” Is this simply a case of NIMBYism or is there something more to it? 

What is at issue is a proposal by Boulder County to build the facility on ~40 acres of land that was purchased, with voter approval, as preserved open space with a perpetual conservation easement. By law, the county’s open space “can be used solely for passive recreation, agriculture or environmental preservation purposes.” But that’s no problem for the three county commissioners. By using an obscure real estate doctrine and a recent land purchase they claim to have extinguished the conservation easement, giving themselves the ability to build a compost facility on the land. The commissioners pushed their plan through with a minimum of public notice. 

The 235-page plan is a classic instance of blithe disregard for potential odor issues. It mentions odor only four times:

(1) In the architect’s narrative under “Buildings”, it states that waste will be delivered to a 17,590 square foot “tipping building”: “This building is a fully enclosed, fully contained component of the operation that will minimize odors, provide visual screening, and prevent any leaching of feedstock liquids into the surrounding soil.” 

(2) In the “Operations” section under “Odor control”: “The CASP [“covered aerated static pile”] bunkers have been shown to reduce odors by 90-95% over conventional open pile windrow systems.” 

(3) In the “Proposed Conditions” section under “landscaping: “Newly landscaped areas are strategically located for visual screening and to reduce sound and odor impacts of the facility.” 

(4) And on page 12: “The existing site border of trees creates a natural setback from the road and would provide visual and odor screening.” 

The idea that a line of trees and other landscaping features will reduce and screen odors is laughable. The tipping building may indeed contain odors—as long as the doors are never opened. And once the dumped waste is moved out of the building for composting, the odor issue pops right back up. Finally, even assuming that the claim about CASP bunkers is correct, that residual 5 to 10% of odors may still reach obnoxious levels, especially since the county intends to process “125 million pounds of animal manure, sewage sludge and food waste per year.” 

Yes, that’s right: this is not just a food waste compost pile. It includes massive amounts of animal manure and sewage sludge (i.e., human manure). 

The city of Boulder gives Berkeley, California a run for its money when it comes to progressive politics. Boulder County has a “Zero Waste Action Plan” that aims for a goal of zero waste by 2025. The three county commissioners (all Democrats) seem hell-bent on getting there, even if it means overriding the declared intent of county residents. Will three residents be able to stop the onrushing tide of sludge? Stay tuned. You can track their battle here.

UPDATE March 22, 2021

The Boulder County commissioners caved and will no longer consider placing a composting facility on the open space in question. The county has filed motions to dismiss lawsuits by neighboring property owners. Story here.

When Compost Attacks, Blame Peabody

A bad smell drifting through Danvers, Massachusetts on Monday had residents in an uproar. How bad was it?

“We were making broccoli rabe and garlic and it was ruining my dinner because I could smell it,” Public Health Director Peter Mirandi told WBZ NewsRadio 1030.

If you can smell it while cooking garlic, it’s pretty bad by definition.

BTW it’s worth listening to the audio of Mr. Mirandi’s comment just for his glorious Boston accent. Who says regional accents are fading away?

Mirandi pins the odor on neighboring Peabody, which one might think is a Public Health Director’s version of blaming the dog. But Peabody’s PHD Sharon Cameron raises her hand to accept the foul. She points to large local composting operations and give a cogent and honest explanation of how they can get stinky.

UPDATE June 6, 2013

Well it wasn’t compost. It was lime cake—a byproduct of gelatin production—spread on a local farm as fertilizer. No, I’ve never heard of it before, either.

La Jolla versus Nature: “A Stinky Mess for Too Long”

Massive amounts of stinking guano in a nature preserve finally prompt La Jolla, California, Mayor Bob Filner to go all DefCon3:

Filner issued an Emergency Finding under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, declaring the area a public health hazard. 

The declaration exempts the city from the normal permitting required to clean the state-designated area of “special biological significance,” Filner said.

The city has hired a company to do the cleanup. How will they do it?

Non-pathogenic bacteria will be used to digest bird guano and any smelly organisms it hosts, thereby eliminating the smell coming from the droppings.

Hey, what’s a little bio-engineering of the environment when residents of coastal Blue California get annoyed by endangered species?

Expect backlash from pro-guano environmentalists in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

Oh, and pass the popcorn.

Don’t Blame the Methane

There is a popular misconception that methane gas is stinky when, in fact, it is almost odorless. Methane (CH₄) is the chief component of the natural gas delivered by your utility company. The company adds an obnoxious sulfur-containing chemical to the product as a warning agent for leaks. People who don’t know better conclude that the methane itself stinks.

The misconception is reinforced in local press reports about odor problems at garbage dumps and landfills. Methane and other gases are generated by bacterial activity as food scraps decompose. However, the rotten smell emerging from the trash heap is not due to the methane, but to other molecules that do stink. Depending on the type of waste and local conditions at the dump, the smell can get pretty intense.

In some landfills the volume of methane is large enough to create a threat of combustion. Then it must be collected via pipes and vented or burned. Sometimes it pays to use it to fuel a steam plant or electrical generator. These systems collect and burn foul-smelling non-methane gases as well, which may make the landfill somewhat less stinky. Then again, it may not.

Now consider yesterday’s headline in the Taunton [Massachusetts] Daily Gazette: “Company vows to eradicate foul odor at Taunton landfill.”

The story, by staff reporter Charles Winokoor, begins this way:

The smell that has elicited complaints from residents living near the city’s landfill should soon be a thing of the past, representatives of a methane gas conversion firm told city councilors Tuesday night. 

“It concerns us as well. We want to fix this,” said Anthony Falbo, senior vice president of operations for Fortistar Methane Group. 

Fortistar has a contract with Waste Management, which manages the city’s landfill. 

Falbo said he and his staff weren’t aware of a growing odor problem until recently, when City Council solid waste committee chairman Daniel Barbour publicly raised the issue.

Fortistar says it will soon add more methane gas extraction wells to those already on site. Yet reading the entire story, it isn’t clear whether Fortistar’s Mr. Falbo or Taunton councilman Barbour are clear on the concept: do they blame the odor on methane or do they just assume that collecting more gas of all types will eliminate the odor problem?

Should the new methane extractors not solve the problem, it’s a question that may come back to haunt the town and its vendors. Clarity now could head of a PR kerfuffle later.

Related: My Green and Stinky posts document the unwillingness of municipal composting operators to come clean about the inherent stinkiness of their facilities. Communities should be better informed and more skeptical about airy claims of odorlessness by all waste management vendors.

Biosolids in the Punch Bowl

Mullumbimby, NSW

There’s been a disgusting stink hovering over the delightfully named Australian town of Mullumbimby, south of Brisbane in New South Wales. After being swamped with complaints, the shire council investigated and finally got to the . . . uh . . . bottom of the problem.

Turns out it was man-made, in more than one sense of the word. The stench—variously described as pig manure, farm yard, or animal enclosure—was the result of biosolids from the sewage treatment plant being spread on local properties as fertilizer. [No shit?—Ed.]

But not to worry.

“The work has been since been stopped due to weather conditions,” [Byron Shire Council acting general manager Mr. Phil] Warner said.

The weather conditions—of course. That’s the only possible explanation why a county’s worth of processed poop would smell bad. When will greens own up to the fact that their shit does stink?

Environmental Regulations Preserve Unbearable Stench in San Diego

The San Diego Union-Tribune editorializes:

The buildup of feces isn’t some saintly natural process that must be allowed to run its course lest there be some terrible consequence down the line. It happened because of a combination of circumstance, climate and official decisions. It’s not part of Mother Nature’s grand scheme for La Jolla Cove or the planet.

The most pungent phrase: California’s excessive regulatory culture “effectively sanctifies animal waste.”

Our Green Future: Compost-Fueled Cars

Heh. Someone finally pantsed the TED people.

The Church of Ecology Asks: Are You Without Sin?

Answer truthfully:

Did you thoroughly rinse that empty bottle of Louisiana hot sauce before you tossed it into the recycling bin?

Did you drain every drop of Lightly Sweetened Cherry Pomegranate Tea before putting that Snapple® bottle into the blue bucket?

Are you totally, absolutely, 100% sure?

Because if not, you may be responsible for an eco-catastrophe in Attica, New York, a little burg about 30 miles east of Buffalo. That’s where Hillcrest Industries collects recycled glass and grinds it up. The colored stuff is sold as a sandblasting agent, and the clear stuff becomes beads in the reflective paint used for road markings. Hillcrest started taking recycled glass about two-and-a-half years ago. They now have a pile of it estimated at 60,000 tons.

That’s right: 60,000 tons.

And all it takes it a few lazy bastards like you leaving some foam at the bottom of a PBR and BOOM! the Hillcrest pile becomes an enormous bio-reactor wafting a putrid stench over the hapless souls of Attica.

Matt Surtel of The (Batavia) Daily News has been all over the story:

“Once the warm weather came and we were able to open our windows, then we’re really affected by it,” said Julie Huber, who lives on Georges Drive with her husband Jeff and their family. “There are days we can’t open our windows because it smells like rotting garbage.”

“It’s terrible,” [Attica Trustee John] Perry said. “Some days, depending on how hard and where the wind’s blowing, it’s horrendous. I’ve got calls from some people who say it’s making their kids physically sick and nauseous.”

Hillcrest Industries is baffled by this totally unexpected malodor problem. Really, who could have predicted that the dregs in 60,000 tons of glass bottles would, you know, smell bad? The company has hired an environmental consultant; they’ve tried a deodorizing chemical, a venting system, a blower system, and another odor-counteractant product. As Surtel reports, “it’s a trial-and-error process.”

Attica residents have held town meetings to complain, and the state Department of Environmental Conservation has issued the company a violation notice. Meanwhile, Hillcrest has announced it will bring in no more recycled glass, and will grind up the pile it currently has on hand, a process that it expects will take 18 months, and which residents say is too long.

500,000 Tons of Sewage Sludge a Year . . .

[Kings Co., Calif.]

. . . coming to a 14,500-acre mega-composting site in Kings County, California.

What could possibly go wrong?

UPDATE JUNE 17, 2012

This also sounds like a lot of crap:

“This is a top-notch, Cadillac system,” said Ajay Malik, supervising engineer with the L.A. [Sanitation] districts. “We have addressed the concerns about this project.”

When Worlds Collide

The headline from KEYT-TV:

“Bird Refuge Smell Upsets Neighbors”

OMG! What sort of heartless, Gaia-hating bastards could possibly object to the smell of a bird refuge?

Apparently the sort of unenlightened troglodytes who live in . . . uh . . . Santa Barbara, California.

Oh.

In that case, toss a bag of popcorn in the microwave then watch reporter John Palminteri describe the green-on-green action: nature-loving Californians upset with the smell of nature.

Composting: Green and Flammable

From NY1’s reporter in Staten Island:

The city fire department says about 200 firefighters were dispatched to fight a wind-fueled compost fire that started on a compost pile at the former Fresh Kills landfill and delayed traffic in the borough for hours Monday.

This isn’t your local food collective’s compost heap of organic radish tops and kale stalks.

Fresh Kills is roughly three times the size of Central Park and surrounded by many local roadways, including Richmond Avenue.

At one point, the West Shore Expressway was closed in both directions and smoke could be seen for miles.

Check out the video to get the flavah and to hear some classic outer borough accents.

When High School Stinks

KIII-TV in Corpus Christi, Texas, posts a video segment with the awesome, all-purpose headline “Strange Smell Coming From West Oso HS.”

Had news anchor Katia Uriarte dug a little deeper she would have hit comedy gold: West Oso High School is located at 754 Flato Road.

[Not nice to make an entire student body the butt of your joke.—Ed.] [Hey, res ipsa loquitur.]

Speaking of strange smells in high school, something’s amiss at Spanish River Community High School in Boca Raton, Florida, and it’s getting big-time attention over on the Powerline blog under the headline: “Rivers of urine.”

“Epic Greenfail” indeed. It’s a topic we’ve covered before on FN.

“A Little Touch of Paris”? Public Toilet Failure in S.F.

[Original image by Wally Gobetz]

San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius steps into one of the “automated, self-cleaning public toilets,” scattered around town and doesn’t like what he sees—or smells. His report pretty much jibes with my experience. Nevius reports that many of the city’s 25 self-cleaning toilet kiosks have problems or are not even operational.

Nor is the problem confined to S.F.

As other cities have found, the automated route just hasn’t provided much help. In 2004, Seattle spent $5 million to install automated public toilets. Four years later, lamenting that they had become so dirty and dangerous that even street people refused to use them, the city put them up for sale on eBay.

Nevius contrasts this with a study of the well-received supervised public washrooms in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library.


[Image by Irus Braverman]

That 2010 paper was written by Irus Braverman, an Associate Professor at the SUNY Buffalo Law School.

In it, she interviewed Jerome Barth, Director of Operations for New York City’s Bryant Park Corporation, who gave several reasons the public prefers facilities with attendants over the automated ones. First off, he says, “People are just not accustomed to the automated toilets.” They can be puzzling and frustrating to use.

Secondly, Barth continues, people prefer washrooms with attendants. “Beyond making sure that the place is clean throughout the day,” he says, “the attendants send a strong message that someone is in control, that this place is safe. It allows you to let your guard down.” Finally, Barth suggests that “the automated toilets are designed as functional machines, not to create an environment for real people to use. The only reason they are constructed in the first place is for advertising companies to win large bids for outside furniture.” “We had tried them and it’s very hard to keep them up, keep them clean, and we weren’t finding the right level of maintenance,” adds Lindsey Boylan, BPC’s Operation Manager, in an interview. “We would have to do a great deal more and staff it even though it was supposed to be an automated public toilet,” she adds. She says about the attendant toilets that “We really wanted something that would be an attraction for people and would bring them here. I mean, when they walk into the bathrooms they should say: ‘is this a public toilet? It feels as though you’re in a private space.’”

The last time I was on a New York subway malodor hunt with a reporter, I kept pointing out the many padlocked public restrooms in the station. I’ve never actually seen one open for use. Wouldn’t clean, well-lit and attended restrooms reduce the smell of urine and feces that plague the subway system?

As a rugged, low-tech solution, the pissoir can’t be beat. (I know, how often do I praise anything French here at FN?) It’s essentially a wall of running water, discretely hidden from view by shrubbery or a baffle wall. My favorite pissoir is the one on the Île de la Cité in Paris, located in the gardens behind the cathedral of Notre Dame. You stroll in, unzip, and relieve yourself in the fresh air, under the towering chesnut trees. What could be better?

Green Puzzle: When Is a Soil Recycling Facility Not Like an Indian Casino?

We recently looked in on the controversy in Mecca, California about malodors allegedly produced by a contaminated-soil recycling company located on land belonging to the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians. The dispute has been heating up:

State hazardous waste regulators cracked down on the business earlier this month, notifying Western Environmental that it should not accept California waste because it lacked the required permits. The state also told Western Environmental’s customers not to bring their waste to the plant.

But in a letter sent to its customers this week, Western Environmental claims the state’s toxic substances control department “does not have authority to regulate such waste” at the Mecca facility because it’s on tribal land.

Right on! Tribal marketing is already rolling out a casino + hazmat-recycling + convenience store concept.

The state contends it has jurisdiction since the plant is neither owned by the tribe nor a tribal entity.

Tricky lawyer mumbo-jumbo. But then . . .

It’s unclear why the state allowed the plant to operate for seven years without the permits.

Why? Because California believes in green jobs! Oh, wait. California believes in clean air! Uh . . . let me get back to you.

Plant officials stress that no environmental agencies investigating the odor have been able to pinpoint Western Environmental as the only source of the problematic odor.

We don’t stink but even if we do there’s nothing you can do about it.

ISDP: Special Earth Day Edition

“Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend”

I collected a lot of material about the Ira Einhorn/Helen Maddux case for What the Nose Knows, but ended up not using it.

Via Instapundit.

Quick Sniffs: A curated collection of smelly links

Wendy Zukerman, Asia Pacific reporter for NewScientist, blogs about a perfumery course she took. Can you spot the two glaring errors in her post? (Hint: You don’t have to be a scientist to play!)


Karl Lagerfeld is coming out with a bookish new fragrance. As usual, Marie-Helene Wagner at MimiFrouFrou is all over the details:

The fragrance will be sold encased within a hard-cover book entitled Paper Passion. The creators see the packaging concept as a throwback to the times when British aristocrats liked to hide their whiskey in hollowed books.

Wait . . . hasn’t this been done before? Yes, and yes.

The smellscapes of Arkansas memorialized: an entirely different way to think about chicken shit.

Peeuuw, it’s springtime in West Fargo, North Dakota. (Flush hard, it’s a long way to Bismarck.)

Busted! Sgt. Terry Waikel of the Noble County Sheriff’s Department in Indiana has a fine nose for police work.

Tom Ford launches ads for his new fragrance Neroli Portofino, and guess what they are full of nakedy people. Although not Ford himself, for a change. [NSFW]

Karyn Khoury talks about her seasonal preferences in perfume. I’m surprised this doesn’t get more attention; I’ve always thought it was a big factor in choosing what to wear.

Over at Forbes.com, Dorothy Pomerantz relays the 2010 celebrity fragrance sales numbers from Euromonitor International. The late Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds tops the charts with $54 million in the U.S. Driven, by Derek Jeter, slides into second with $27 million. (For real?)

Wear a VR headset, bite into a cookie, and we control your nose!

It's sooooo transgressive, yadda yadda.

As Long as Grass Grow and Wind Blow and the Sky is Blue

Fire up the popcorn, it’s time for another installment of When Worlds Collide, our series on what happens when PC meets NIMBY. This week features an entertaining two-on-one grudge match.

The unincorporated town of Mecca, California lies at the north end of the Salton Sea in the agriculturally rich Coachella Valley. Since December, residents have filed 66 complaints about a bad smell from a 10 acre industrial site a couple of miles northwest of town. According to David Danelski of the Riverside Press-Enterprise, who’s been covering the story, the smell was bad enough that some elementary school students vomited.

The source of the stink appears to be Western Environmental, Inc. And what might it be—some outrageous industrial polluter? Why no, it’s a green company.

With the motto “making dirt clean again,” the plant recycles petroleum-contaminated soils that are trucked to Mecca from throughout Southern California. The tainted earth comes from former gas stations, oil derricks, industrial sites and other places where oil, gasoline and hydrocarbons have spilled or leaked.

The company uses special strains of bacteria and heating methods to remove hydrocarbons from huge volumes of earth that can be seen in big piles at the site. Once treated, the soil is re-used as road base, landfill cover and landscaping material.

What’s not to like? The smell, apparently. As with so many other green, eco-friendly environmental services, there’s an invisible cost borne by local residents: malodor.

In Mecca, residents got the attention of the local Air Quality Management District. It should have been a simple matter of citing Western Environmental, Inc. [WEI] for regulatory violations. But not so fast. WEI, is located “on land owned by the Cabazon Mission Band of Indians”. Which raises an interesting question:

Q: Can AQMD enforce its air quality regulations on tribal lands?

A. AQMD and other local and state agencies have no regulatory authority over activities on tribal lands including those located on the Cabazon Band of Mission Indian reservation. However, AQMD is working closely with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency which has authority to enforce applicable federal environmental rules and regulations for activities located on tribal lands.

More popcorn, please!

As a result of our ongoing investigation into the odors affecting the community of Mecca, the AQMD has determined that a major source of foul odors impacting the community is an oil/water separation pond located at the Western Environmental, Inc. facility and an adjacent Waste Reduction Technologies’ soy-whey treatment pond, both located on the Cabazon Band of Mission Indian tribal lands and both operated by Western Environmental, Inc.

So far the EPA hasn’t found any federal violations at WEI. And since there is no federal statute against nuisance odors, the residents of Mecca may be shit out of luck. To be fair, however, WEI management has voluntarily responded to the odor complaints.

Mark Patton, a project manager at the plant, said the company did its part to reduce odors by shutting down a pond where oils were separated from wastewater.

The company this month moved about 20,000 gallons of oily water from a pond to a sealed metal tank at a cost of about $75,000, excluding labor, Patton said.

Oddly, a 20,000 gallon oily water pond does not seem to be one of the three processes touted by WEI on its website: thermal treatment, bio-remediation, or chemical fixation. Why would they leave oil contaminated water in a big pond? The oil would just evaporate . . . Oh! . . . [But that wouldn’t be green, would it?]

Here’s a fun fact about Native American culture: the tribe in question was last seen in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, 480 U.S. 202 (1987) which blew open the doors for the fabulous Indian casino binge.

Follow the legal logic, follow the money, and where do you end up? With an Indian Composting Facility coming to a neighborhood near you!

What’s Green and Stinky? S.F.’s Low-Flow Toilets

San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross rudely call attention to the aesthetic consequences of green narcissism:

San Francisco’s big push for low-flow toilets has turned into a multimillion-dollar plumbing stink.

Skimping on toilet water has resulted in more sludge backing up inside the sewer pipes, said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the city Public Utilities Commission. That has created a rotten-egg stench near AT&T Park and elsewhere, especially during the dry summer months.

This isn’t news if you’ve been paying attention. A entire range of green gambits—from industrial-scale composting to biofuel plants to waterless urinals—generate offensive megasmells that make life unpleasant. Somehow this entirely predictable outcome catches the recycling advocates and Gaia-friendly plumbers by surprise. The usual result is a lot of money spent on odor remediation efforts. San Francisco is no different—but the sums involved are eye-opening:

The city has already spent $100 million over the past five years to upgrade its sewer system and sewage plants, in part to combat the odor problem.

Now officials are stocking up on a $14 million, three-year supply of highly concentrated sodium hypochlorite - better known as bleach - to act as an odor eater and to disinfect the city’s treated water before it’s dumped into the bay. It will also be used to sanitize drinking water.

That translates into 8.5 million pounds of bleach either being poured down city drains or into the drinking water supply every year.

Say, what?

Imagine the uproar if a private company proposed bleaching its effluent to the tune of 8.5 million pounds of sodium hypochlorite annually. The Board of Supervisors would demand a halt to this unconscionable pollution, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe would produce a three-part people’s opera about it.

But if the dumping is done by the environmentally righteous . . . well, then it’s merely $114 million well spent to de-stinkify the new Green Utopia.

Just for giggles—as of this post, here are the three most popular comments on the Matier & Ross column:

sfgreat
2:59 AM on February 28, 2011

Low flow toilets are wonderful. I now only flush 5 times to get that poop down. Then another 5 times to get the toilet paper down.
Thumbs up (374) Thumbs down (32)

NaturalNightOwl

1:22 AM on February 28, 2011

Maybe they should accept the reality that a certain amount of water is needed to properly flush toilets, and the sewer system.
Thumbs up (328) Thumbs down (18)

idiot_boy

6:05 AM on February 28, 2011

Just take a dump on the sidewalk, the city seems cool with that, no water needed. If you dont think so just watch the homeless they use the sidewalks as toilets all the time and nothing happens to them. The city council seems to encourage it, so do your part for the environment and join in the no water movement.
Thumbs up (280) Thumbs down (34)

Green and Stinky: UK Biofuel Plant Upsets Locals

Al Gore, call your aromatherapist.

Euphemism alert: According to the BBC, the biofuel company plans to reduce the offending odor by installing “oxidising equipment.” Apparently that’s how the environmentally committed media refer to exhaust stack burners.

Exit question 1: Should a biofuel company buy carbon offsets when it de-smellifies its production line by burning the exhaust?

Exit question 2: Should the people who deal with odor problems at composting facilities and biofuel plants be counted as “green jobs”?

Green and Stinky: Large-Scale Composting Blights the American Smellscape

Towns all across American are tripping over themselves to be more green. Recycling of newspapers, glass and plastic is old hat—the next big push is to recycle biodegradable consumer waste: food scraps and other wet garbage, grass trimmings and leaves, and the . . . ahem . . . “solids” left behind after the treatment of sewage. The new environmental mantra is composting.

Like most green initiatives, composting sounds good in principle. Municipal or county projects are usually promoted as a way to reduce waste volume and simultaneously save—or even make—money. The idea appeals to our thrifty Yankee heritage; why let something go to waste if we can turn it into profit or at least into something useful? Not to mention, it will appease Gaia the great earth mother in the process.

Unfortunately, like other green initiatives, composting proves to be troublesome in practice. A compost pile—even a small, well-tended one—produces some odor as the materials decompose. When composting is done on a large scale with bulldozers and dump trunks the odor can be intense enough and unpleasant enough to impact the surrounding community. And in fact it does so on a regular basis. Let’s review a few examples culled from the news in just the past year or so. They illustrate some consistent patterns that will likely become more familiar as the composting juggernaut gains speed.

The delicately named Timpanogos Special Service District is a publicly owned sewage plant in Utah. Its compost operation has been stinking up the towns of Lindon, Pleasant Grove, and American Fork. In response to complaints, the facility is installing an automated system that regularly turns the compost heap and keeps it covered with an allegedly odor-suppressing tarp made of Gore-fabric. The cost of the system: $6 million. Watch the video clip from ABC-Channel 4 in Salt Lake City for lots of happy talk about saving the earth and an interview with the German engineer for the automated system. Yes, that’s right—the system comes from Germany. Apparently we Americans can’t handle our own shit anymore.

Even more unsettling is that the Timpanogos planners didn’t anticipate that a sludge-composting operation would create a big stink. This planning failure is a consistent theme. In Verona, Wisconsin, for example, Second Season Recycling is under fire from local residents. The Verona Press ran the story under the headline “Compost center pledges to turn over a new leaf; Neighbors upset over foul odors at Second Season.”

Complaints about the smells from Second Season had been mounting for several weeks, said Kristen Bergmann, property manager of the apartments, which are just across the Highway 18-151 underpass. Bergmann said she received about 30 complaints in 60 days, including several residents threatening to move.

Second Season staff turn the compost piles to help the material break down. But without proper timing, turning the piles leads to the bad smell nearby residents have been experiencing.

The crowd’s consensus was that despite whatever good Second Season might be doing by recycling and composting, it’s too close to residential areas. One man said his daughter can’t smell the compost odors without becoming nauseated. Others complained about not being able to open windows or take walks outside.

“The smell drifts across the road, and you just want to scream,” one woman said shortly before the meeting began.

(Second Season representative Jeanne) Whitish asked the crowd for patience and said that finding when to turn the compost piles will probably take some trial and error because it is not an “exact science.”

Not an exact science indeed. Translation: Second Season Recycling failed to plan for an obvious consequence of its operation. And Ms. Whitish wants the nosey neighbors in Verona to cool it while she and her colleagues tinker with the trash pile.

The town of Woodbridge, New Jersey has been tussling with a Boston-based food waste recycling operation called Converted Organics, Inc. The company converts “biodegradable food wastes into dry pellet and liquid concentrate organic fertilizers that help grow healthier food and improve environmental quality.” The problem is that the plant stinks so much workers at nearby companies have vomited. Converted Organics has racked up over $90,000 in fines from the county for its odor issues.

The company already has installed two odor-control devices and recently conducted various studies to find the source of the odor.

“We have done significant renovations and modifications to this date,” [a company official] said.

Significant renovations and modifications would not have been necessary if the company had planned for odor control in the first place. Are these folks stupid or do they take us for rubes? You decide: on the application to the town’s Planning Board, Converted Organics stated “that there was a 99.7 percent chance of no odor at all.”

When Flint, Michigan placed its new leaf and lawn waste composting operation right in the middle of town, residents began to complain of the “putrid smell”.

“At first we thought it was our garbage, but the smell is so bad, we realized quickly it was something bigger,” Eashoo said. “It makes people not want to go outside or eat outside.”

Steve Montle, Flint’s Director of Green Initiatives, has a whole sheaf of excuses at hand: (1) it’s still a brand-new operation, (2) they need to adjust the process as the temperature warms up, and (3) “it’s something to do with the amount and mix of materials we have coming onto the site.”

Why not tell the truth, Mr. Montle? Tell the citizens of Flint that composting generates smell and that’s the price they’ll have to pay for your Green Initiative?

BTW who is Steve Montle? An engineer? A horticulturalist? No, he’s a political hack:

Montle previously served as the executive director of the Genesee Conservation District. He also has served as the executive director of the Flint River Watershed Coalition and was a legislative staff coordinator for senator John Gleason, D-Flushing. He also was a high school teacher at Hamady High School for the Westwood Heights School District.

In Bloomingdale, New Jersey (“The Jewel of Passaic County”), residents have been complaining about the smell from the compost pile at the borough’s Department of Public Works Yard. Forty-one of them signed a petition objecting to the odor.

According to a town council member, “There are days and evenings when the smell is unbearable. Someone thought it was a dead body.” [We know just what you mean—Ed.]

Bloomingdale pays a private company to manage its compost pile. The contractor’s spokesman was upfront about the issue:

When material, which is natural ground-up brush, is broken down, there is an odor, Flockhart explained. No dyes or toxins are being used, he said.

All natural—no artificial ingredients! Doesn’t that make you feel better?

Even the U.S. Army is going green. In May, 2009, the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base in southern California

launched a 5-year pilot program to test transporting green waste for composting at the base in an effort to divert waste from landfills, help with agriculture, reduce pesticides and water usage.

What’s not to like? The smell, apparently. The neighboring towns of Cypress, Garden Grove, Los Alamitos and Seal Beach are unhappy enough about it to write the Secretary of the Army demanding that the project be stopped. The Secretary has refused to do so, but the composting is currently on hold.

In Hammond, Indiana, the Mayor and city council members threatened legal action against a composting company in the adjoining town of Gary, after complaining of a smell described as “the most unbearable smell anyone should have to put up with.”

Faced with complaints by residents, local jurisdictions have tried to regulate the troublesome operations out of existence. A company in Gainesville, Georgia, spray irrigates its farm fields with treated effluent from human and commercial waste. The county commissioners passed ordinances to stop the practice, but the company, LHR Farms, filed a federal lawsuit against them charging that the ordinances are pre-empted by state law. (LHR Farms is already regulated by Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division.)

In a number of cases, cities have decided that the ecological benefits of composting are simply not worth the grief caused by the smell.

Here’s a blunt New York-style headline: “City To End Contract with Smelly Bronx Sewage Plant.” The plant takes sludge from fourteen New York sewage treatment facilities and recycles it into organic fertilizer. It’s green and Gaia-friendly. But residents in the Hunts Point section of the borough can’t stand the stench.

But what about all the green jobs that will be lost?

New York’s environmental protection commissioner says the city could save $18 million a year by sending the sludge to landfills rather than having it recycled.

Wh-wh-what? Isn’t recycling supposed to save money?

Another one bites the sludge: Seabrook, Massachusetts unplugs the green technology at its new treatment plant because it stinks.

What started out as a way to reduce the town’s sludge disposal costs while taking part in technology that could revolutionize treatment of waste solids on the municipal level has ended in acrimony and costly legal bills and settlement costs.

The town of Seabrook and the owners of PMC BioTec have negotiated a settlement that terminates the contract the Boston company had with the town to install a microbiotic sludge reduction system in its sewer plant.

The litany of olfactory complaints is a familiar one:

Foul odors permeated the treatment plant and the surrounding area. Neighbors came forward with complaints that they had to live with windows and doors shut — even in the summertime — due to the constant foul odor. Treatment plant employees also complained about illness.

The stinky composting issue came to head this March in Vacaville, California.

An allegedly eye-watering, throat-closing, mind-boggling stench was the focus Tuesday night of a community meeting in Elmira that turned contentious quickly, resulting in heated eruptions and the verbal roasting of a Solano County official.

About 30 residents gathered at the Elmira Fire Station to hound officials about the reportedly noxious odors wafting from the Jepson Prairie Organics compost facility on Hay Road, just east of Vacaville, at different times during the day and night.

Noxious odors? Impossible—the company has “organic” in its name.

Portland, Oregon is charging ahead with a plan to introduce curbside composting, to hosannas from environmentalists.But the view is different in North Plains, 20 miles northwest of Portland, where the actual compost pile is located.

But if not properly maintained, composting does omit [sic] an unpleasant stench – an odor that, according to North Plains City Manager Don Otterman, has been bothering the small city for the past 10 years. “While it’s a good idea to try to compost everything you can to keep it out of the landfill, nobody’s considering the impact that this could potentially have on [the city],” Otterman says.

“We still get complaints from residents. We get people driving down Highway 26 that have told us that they know when they get into North Plains because they smell it,” he explains. “And that’s having a pretty bad impact on the city’s reputation.”

The stinky compost problem is widespread: Utah, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Michigan, California, Indiana, New York, and Oregon at the very least. The social and political dynamics are similar: a “green” initiative is promoted on the implicit or explicit promise that it is an environmentally clean and thrifty way to deal with biodegradable consumer waste. Once operations are underway, stinky reality sets in: large-scale composting frequently generates enough stench to cause an uproar among people living within smelling distance. Then comes the inevitable dance of recrimination and remediation: unhappy city councilors and county commissioners on one side, composting/recycling company officials on the other. “It stinks,” say the town fathers. “It’s not an exact science,” say the company spokesmen, “we’re trying to engineer some solutions.”

In almost every case the composters are taken by surprise. Maybe they all truly believe that their shit doesn’t stink, in which case they are deluded dreamers. Maybe they believe that the towns that hire them are populated by fools and chumps—in which case they are cynical bastards. Either way, surprise is no longer a credible response given how often stinky composting has been in the news recently. Any city attorney worth his salt should be writing nuisance odor penalties into composting contracts.

Is there a technical solution to this problem? The green lobby insists that properly managed compost produces little odor. Perhaps this is true on a small scale—your suburban backyard, for example, with its carefully tended little mound of leaves, banana peels and potato skins. But consider the analogy of pig manure. The smell of a couple of pigs in a pasture is noticeable but not objectionable. Put five thousands porkers in a feedlot and the odor problem is enormous. A similar scale-up of odor emissions is almost certain to occur in composting. The scandal isn’t that large-scale compost stinks—it’s that these operations are being set up without adequate controls in the first place.

The first step to getting clean is to admit that you have a problem. For us to make any progress on this issue, the advocates of clean composting need to come clean about the malodorous side of their business.

UPDATE May 31, 2010

In a remarkably disingenuous article on the front page of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, staff writer John Wildermuth airily waves off earlier concerns expressed about SF’s “aggressive ‘recycle or else’ law requiring homeowners, businesses and residents of apartment buildings to separate out food waste for composting.” (Aggressive as in $1,000 fines for noncompliance—the fines will kick a year from now; until then resisters get citations.)

Wildermuth quotes a spokesman for the city’s environmental department: “People are dealing with it just fine.” Well, the people in San Francisco maybe.

According to Wildermuth, about twenty trucks a day haul 24.5 tons each to the Jepson Prairie Organics composting site in . . . Vacaville.

That right, Vacaville—where the citizens are loudly objecting to noxious composting odors that waft from the Jepson Prairie Organics facility day and night (see above).

In other words, when it comes to composting progressive San Franciscans are “dealing with it just fine” because they don’t have to smell it. It’s the chumps up I-80 in Vacaville who get to do that.

How would San Francisco be “dealing with it” if the compost pile were in Golden Gate Park or the Presidio? And why shouldn’t it be; after all, it’s their garbage?

Environmental lobbyists and their apologists in the mainstream media should be called to accounts for their intellectual dishonesty.