Executive Report

Municipal garbage: Government goes all out to reduce, recycle it

THE city of Rockford recently made the news in the New York Times with an ingenious scheme to reduce the size of its garbage collections. Rockford has instituted a garbage lottery called "Cash for Trash." You can win $1,000 if a weekly random inspection zeroes in on your garbage bag and finds no paper or aluminum cans. If there is no winner, another $1,000 is added to the pot for the next week, Like other cities, Rockford has to deal with ever increasing quantities of solid waste. That's a bland generic term for what gets loaded into trucks and hauled off to the local landfill — garbarge, general household and commercial trash, landscape, construction and demolition debris. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) estimates that Illinois produces 40 million cubic yards of solid waste every year, which is about 3.47 cubic yards per person.

The situation in Illinois is not as bad as in some eastern states. For example, New Jersey, because of its sandy soil, has only three landfills and has become an exporter of garbage. Nevertheless, Illinois' 170 public and privately owned sanitary landfills are filling up fast, and it is hard to find sites for new ones because of public opposition. Current methods of disposing of waste simply do not work anymore in the state's major metro areas. In downstate rural counties there's more room for landfills, but you're also using prime farmland to bury garbage.

Facing up to these dilemmas, the General Assembly at the end of this session passed its own version of cash for trash. House Bill 3548, sponsored by Rep. John W. Hallock Jr. (R-67, Rockford), makes it state policy to encourage recycling and waste reduction and to discourage reliance on landfills. To provide some money, the bill also sets up a $10 million Solid Waste Management Fund. The fund is financed by a surcharge to be paid by landfill owners and operators on the cubic yards or tons of solid waste delivered to them for disposal. Ultimately, of course, households and businesses will pay the surcharge in the form of higher garbage and trash collection bills.

The fund will be used for local government planning, for recycling projects and new waste management technologies, and for marketing of recycled products and long-term research. The three-pronged approach — planning, demonstration projects and marketing — is something Illinois learned from the experience of other states and one of the bill's main strengths, according to Steve Apotheker, director of the Community Recycling Center for Champaign-Urbana and Champaign County and president of the Illinois Association of Recycling Centers. He believes that this approach will help recycling both in the short-term and the long-term, although he noted that it falls short of direct cash incentives for communities that recycle. In New Jersey, not surprisingly, cities get rebates from the state's waste management fund based on how much they recycle.

The Hallock bill was a Thompson administration initiative based in part on legislation introduced last year by Rep. Jill Zwick (R-65, East Dundee). In its final version the bill had the support of everyone from the League of Women Voters of Illinois, the Illinois Environmental Council and the recycling interests to the Illinois State Chamber of Commerce (ISCC) and the Illinois Manufacturers' Association (IMA) — although the Illinois Municipal League would have preferred a waste management program one-tenth the size and financed from the the state's general funds.

To get support for the surcharge, the environmentalists and recyclers made a deal with industry. The ISCC and the IMA have long complained of the red tape and high disposal costs caused by the state's classification of industrial wastes as "special wastes." A mid-category between "municipal" and "hazardous," a "special" waste can range from something harmless like off-quality cookies to something toxic like off-quality paint. As a concession to industry, the bill allows companies to seek exemptions from the IEPA's special waste permit and reporting regulations. Exemptions would be granted if the wastes in question were found innocuous.

According to Tom Reid of the IMA, an exemption from the special waste category would allow a firm to dispose of the waste more cheaply at a municipal landfill or to bargain with a big commercial landfill for a lower charge. Recycler Apotheker is chary of the move: "Pandora's box gets open." But IEPA director Richard J. Carlson said that the change is no big deal because businesses can already appeal special waste listings. He pointed out that this is an interim measure pending the adoption of new rules by the Pollution Control Board for classifying special wastes according to their degree of hazard.

To satisfy environmentalists another provision was added; it requires the board to adopt those new rules by September 1, 1988. The aim is to ensure that toxic wastes are stringently regulated whatever their bureaucratic category. The Department of Energy and Natural Resources (DENR) is currently working on ways of classifying special wastes.

Key points in Hallock's bill (still not signed by the governor as of August 1) include:

• Local governments can get grants from DENR to help plan recycling, composting and incineration alternatives to landfills. They can also impose a local surcharge on landfilled waste to fund their own programs for alternative waste disposal.

• For-profit and nonprofit recycling centers can get state grants for innovative methods and technologies and for expanding their recycling programs (so can businesses that recycle their own wastes).

• As lead agency, DENR gets more funding to implement the legislation and to set up an information clearinghouse on solid waste management and marketing.

• IEPA gets more money to inspect landfills. Currently, according to the League of Women Voters, the adequate inspection by the agency has been limited to major landfills, which is "a short-sighted approach that may cost us dearly," the league said in a newsletter.

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• The Department of Central Management Services gets a pilot program to recycle "office waste" from state agencies.

• The industrial materials exchange run by the IEPA and the ISCC gets more money to find uses for industrial waste.

• The University of Illinois gets a solid waste management institute.

Will all this mean less trash in the state's landfills? The bill contains an automatic expiration date (June 30, 1989), a so-called sunset provision, that lets everyone review whether the plan has worked. It better work, since no one knows what the sunset period on the state's landfills is.

Margaret S. Knoepfle

Cahokia Mounds, Rock Island Trail

BIG moments for Illinois parks and outdoor reacreation in 1986 include the groundbreaking in July of a $5.5 million Cahokia Mounds Museum and Interpretive Center and the settlement of a 17-year-old battle over recreational development of the Rock Island Trail near Peoria.

Cahokia was a major population center of pre-Columbian North America. A key feature of the new center is a mirrored box that gives visitors a sense of what it would be like to stand in the midst of a large prehistoric Illinois community, surrounded by prairie. The museum project is funded by the Capital Development Fund through the Parks and Conservation program. It will be open in the fall of 1987, although it will take another year to completely install all the exhibits.

The settlement over the uses of the Rock Island Trail paves the way for developing this 27-mile abandoned railroad right of way passing through Stark and Peoria counties. Gov. James R. Thompson said, "The compromise allows for development of the trail for hiking, bicycling, cross country skiing and snowmobiling, yet at the same time protects property rights of landowners."

Margaret S. Knoepfle

New alfalfa venture

AN alfalfa dehydration and cubing plant in western Illinois will use locally drilled natural gas and locally grown alfalfa to produce feed pellets for race horses and dairy cattle. Adams Pride Alfalfa Inc. is located five miles south of Liberty in Adams County. Production in the $2 million plant should begin at the end of this year. It is expected that 25 jobs will be created during the first year of production and 40 the following year.

Using 12,000 tons of alfalfa the first year and 40,000 the second, the plant could make alfalfa a viable cash crop for area farmers and give farmland a rest from erosive row crop cultivation. Using up to several million cubic feet of natural gas a day, it could also help drilling companies get a payback from western Illinois oil fields in spite of the decline in prices. The gas was discovered five years ago during the oil boom in Adams, Brown and Schuyler counties. Dave Wilson of the Department of Commerce and Community Affairs (DCCA) said that the gas has too much nitrogen to put into a pipeline, but it can be used to supply electricity and drying units for the processing plant. Wilson said that horse and dairy cattle farms in Illinois and other states, particularly Florida, will be a good market for the high-protein, high-fiber alfalfa cubes.

DCCA contributed $250,000 in Community Development Assistance Program funds to help with startup expenses. The Illinois Department of Agriculture recruited people interested in joining the venture. Also involved were the University of Illinois College of Agriculture, various farm groups, the John Wood Community College, the Two Rivers Resource Conservation and Development Council, the Two Rivers Council of Public Officials, Adams County officials, the Lincoln National Bank in Chicago and the Great River Economic Development Foundation.

Margaret S. Knoepfle

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