On the Cutting Edge: Will Iowa City be Able to Reduce Landfill Intake by 70 to 80 Percent?

For public works director Rick Fosse and his staff, writing up a Request for Proposals for landfill diversion technology was a little like drawing up an expedition to an undiscovered country: Barely anyone has traveled there, yet, so all that remains is the desire to set out on the voyage and see what happens.

Fosse presented before the Iowa City City Council at its work session Tuesday night, roughly a year after first broaching the topic as something worthy of study. At that meeting, a Maryland-based company called Fiberight gave a presentation to the council explaining how it planned to take municipal waste and convert it to ethanol at an ethanol plant in Blairstown. After the sorting out of waste for both recycling and fuel conversion, less than 30 percent of the 400 tons of waste that is transported to the Iowa City landfill daily would remain.

He updated the council on the city staff's progress on developing a realistic project, which now has reached the stage of asking for proposals from companies, which could include Fiberight, to see if they are interested in pitching projects to Iowa City.  

Fosse said the challenge facing the city staff in writing up the RFP was that the technology is so new the language in the request had to consider the possibility of the waste being converted into several different types of "energy products," such as ethanol, synthetic gas, refused derived fuel or electricity, using a wide variety of technologies that are still being developed.

"Typically when we're putting together a request for proposal, we're buying apples and only apples, so we can write a request based on that," Fosse said. "Because of the different technologies that are out there, we might get apples, oranges or bananas or fruit we've never even heard of.

"It's hard to write requests that encompasses those (technologies) that still has the flexibility to allow for negotiation."

Fosse explained that in its current state, the plan (see attached diagram) calls for the construction of a second municipal waste sorting facility on site, where waste that is currently sorted at the Landfill Scale House would be sent for further sorting into potential recyclable material and "feedstock" for fuel conversion. That feedstock would then be converted into an energy product of some type that would be transferred off site.

"Once this new facility is in place, we cut off the sending of most of the solid waste directly to the landfill," Fosse said. "There will still be some sorting, but most of the waste will be diverted to the municipal solid waste sorting facility."

This more comprehensive second sort will increase the amount of landfill diversion by not only revealing feedstock for conversion, but also increasing the amount of recyclable waste that can be diverted to the recyclables market.

Fosse said that when considering proposals that city staff will consider a variety of criteria, including the favoring of proposals that will keep net costs down and also limit the environmental impact.

"Because what we do not want to here is achieve our goal of reducing land fill volume at the expense of other environmental parameters," he said. "We don't want to solve one problem and make another problem worse."

Fosse said the goal is to bring a contract back for potential council approval by the end of the calendar year, but the complexity of the project makes a timeline hard to nail down.

Council member Terry Dickens asked Fosse what amount of landfill waste would be diverted by a successful project and if it would have a net zero cost due to the company that would be profiting from the converted trash fuel agreeing to build the sorting facility.

Fosse said that he expected the waste diversion rate would be around the 70-80 percent rate mentioned by Fiberight in their initial proposal. As for cost, that is another element that can't be predicted until actual proposals are submitted to the city.

Council member Susan Mims asked if Fosse had contacted any other municipalities for advice on how to proceed in a project of this type. Fosse responded that besides some correspondence with Cedar Rapids, as well as Marion, which is also considering an agreement with Fiberight, there are not many other cities in the state or even the country pursuing technology of this type.

"This is truly cutting edge technology, and it is just by happenstance of our proximity to a commercial scale production facility in Blairstown that we're here, we're a part of it," Fosse said.

"You said this is a cutting edge, is it bleeding edge or is it truly cutting edge?" asked city council member Michelle Payne, asking Fosse if the technology might be too new to be reliably pursued.

Fosse responded that included in the project would be bonding language that would protect the city if the contracted company was unable to deliver on its promises after a year.

When interviewed following the meeting, Fosse said that it is hard to find comparable projects out there right now because there are only "a handful" of companies that have been able to bring the technologies to a commercial scale at this point. He said that also complicating matters is the fact that many of the companies that do exist are catering to cities on the east coast where landfill situations are more dire, and thus the companies have more leverage in negotiations.

Also, even if the companies do have valid technologies, will the companies be able to realistically produce a project without the nearby infrastructure developed? This would seem to indicate Fiberight as the most likely suitor for the city in this quest for landfill diversion, but Fosse said as is the nature of this proposal, not even a Fiberight proposal is a certainty.

"We're not even sure who is going to make proposals to us at this point," Fosse said.

The next six months should reveal whether Iowa City will be able to join the cutting edge of waste reduction or whether the city will have to wait for a later time. One certainty: the race to find the new world for recycling and waste deferral is already on.