Marion City Manager Outlines the City's Developing Garbage Diversion Plans

One way or the other, Marion appears on track to send less garbage to the Cedar Rapids landfill in the near future.

Marion City Manager Lon Pluckhahn spoke to a local Solid Waste Agency this week to outline the plans the city has for diverting much of its waste into other sources.

Marion Tells Solid Waste Agency Why it Has Better Plans For Garbage (the Gazette)

Pluckhahn explained that Marion now is working with two firms — one wants to turn garbage into ethanol and the other wants to turn it into energy and insulation — that would direct much of the garbage to a Marion industrial site that now goes to the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency’s Site 2 landfill on Marion’s border at County Home Road and Highway 13.

The businesses’ plans, if one or both come to pass, will impact the Solid Waste Agency because the agency depends on the revenue from the garage it takes in to support recycling, other waste diversion programs and community education efforts and to operate the Site 2 landfill. The agency’s revenue also is needed at its Site 1 landfill, known as Mount Trashmore, which is in the process of being closed and will need to be managed for years.

Pluckhahn described how how Marion has already been in long talks to have its trash incinerated by a plasma arc and turned into building insulation. 

Now Fiberight LLC, an east coast company with an ethanol conversion plant in Blairstown, plans to build a trash sorting plant in Marion that will potentially be able to sort out trash useable for conversion into ethanol.

Fiberight has also proposed a similar facility to the city of Iowa City, which is moving ahead with consideration of its own landfill diversion plans.