At a recent hearing about a Lynwood composting site, Janice Zandstra produced her “odor log,” a sheaf of papers documenting the days over the last three years when the stench of rotting leaves and grass clippings from the site has wafted into her home a half-mile away.
She maintains that because of the odors, her 2-year-old son, Brent, has awakened with his eyes crusted shut with dried mucus. Her husband Bart’s allergies, dormant for two years, resurfaced after the site opened.
The odors from the site, operated by Composting Corp. of America, diminished last summer, but Zandstra, 30, is unconvinced that the problems are solved.
“I’m hoping they will go out of business,” said Zandstra, who has written to the state and complained about the site at public hearings. “There’s nothing more I can do.”
Like the south suburban Lynwood site, the state law that bans yard waste from being dumped in landfills is 3 years old. Unlike the site, the law seems to have weathered initial controversy and most problems have now been solved, according to state officials.
In fact, by some accounts, the state that is more often associated with belching smokestacks than idyllic greenways is among the nation’s most progressive in the environmentally correct process of converting grass, leaves and brush into rich soil conditioner.
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“I would say Illinois is among the top 15 states in composting, and the reason is that it came in with a bang,” said Beng Leong Ooi, president of Organic Recycling Inc., a New York compost-consulting firm that has been called on to run eight faltering compost centers.
“I guess if the implementation schedule was less adventurous, we could have avoided some of the problems,” added Ooi, who has worked in composting for more than a decade. “But since that time, the level of improvement has been significant.”
In July 1990, Illinois became the first state to ban all yard waste from landfills, rather than just leaves as some states had done. The intent of such yard-waste bans, now on the books in 21 states, is to keep a significant slice of a state’s garbage-as much as 20 percent of a typical year’s worth of trash-out of landfills to keep them open longer.
But in Illinois, where theory is fine but politics is better, the daring entry into composting would not have happened without corn.
In the late 1980s, the Illinois Corn Growers Association and Archer Daniels Midland, the agricultural conglomerate in Decatur, were looking for a way to promote a new product-biodegradable plastic bags made with corn starch, recalled Kevin Greene, then a lobbyist for the Illinois Environmental Council.
They went to then-state Sen. Jerome Joyce, an influential Democrat from an agricultural district around Bradley, with the idea for a bill that would ban yard waste and stipulate the use of biodegradable plastic bags. Joyce sponsored the bill and, with support from Greene’s environmental group, legislators approved the measure.
But then-Gov. James Thompson, reportedly under pressure from the paper industry, added paper bags to the list of containers in which the yard waste could be stored. Since then, biodegradable plastic has flopped and most yard waste is bagged in paper.
One of the legislation’s critical flaws was the timing of the ban. Originally it had been set for Jan. 1, 1990, but that date drew a wave of protest from local governments, which argued that they didn’t have enough time to prepare. The legislature delayed implementation to July 1, 1990.
But by starting in July, compost operations received tons of hard-to-compost grass clippings and few leaves, which readily break down into humus, the end-product of composting. Putrid odors emanated from composting sites, a problem that, as opposition to the Lynwood site shows, continues to be a stigma for the industry.
From July 1990 to March 1991, the state received odor complaints against 12 of the 78 composting sites in operation.
Other problems bedeviled the yard-waste ban. Enforcement of the law was weak and remains clumsy, experts said. Equipment malfunctions also plagued the sites, and operators ignorant in the process of composting received limited help from the state.
For example, operators barraged with odor complaints were told to turn the compost piles, called windrows, more often. In most cases, that procedure only churned up acrid grass, raising a stronger stench.
“I don’t think the agency, the legislators, not even the public realized that composting grass was as difficult as it is to do it right all the time,” said Gary Cima, environmental protection specialist with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.
Out and out flouting of the law occurred on the part of individuals and, in at least one notorious case, a municipality. Fly-dumping of bags of yard waste was reported as some people sought to dodge the disposal fees.
And a Tribune examination of Chicago’s composting program in 1991 showed the city was ignoring the law. Nearly all of 20 sanitation crews observed in November mixed bags filled with yard waste and those carrying other garbage in trucks that dumped into landfills.
But by the end of 1991, operators and the state began taking corrective measures, recalled Kristina Kaar, resource recovery manager in Naperville.
Perhaps most critical, Kaar and others said, is that operators learned from their mistakes.
They stockpiled leaves, essential to successful, odor-free composting. Many extended operating hours to Saturday to accept fresh grass clippings before they became foul from staying bagged too long, and operators began turning away deliveries that had been sitting too long.
They also obtained more sophisticated equipment, including moisture and temperature gauges, to better monitor the windrows.
And last May, the state began using chemicals to destroy odors at four facilities, a measure that has worked extremely well, experts said.
“People were learning what it was to handle organics on that scale, and that includes me,” recalled Terry Miller, a projects manager for the Illinois Department of Energy and Natural Resources. “However, that learning process has taken place. I’m not saying we know everything, but the site operators really know what they’re doing now.”
Maybe, but maybe not, to judge from the continuing opposition to compost operations. At the hearing on the Lynwood site, which is seeking a renewal of its state permit, all 15 people from nearby communities opposed a new permit.
During the life of the site, the neighbors have complained of putrid odors that have forced them to stay inside, of infants’ maladies brought on by the smells, of schoolchildren being hurried off playgrounds to shield them from stench, of air so foul that pets lost their hair and children lost their appetites.
In addition to local opposition to its permit, Composting Corp. of America is the defendant in a lawsuit filed in September 1991 by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and Lynwood.
The Lynwood operation and five other sites-all in the Chicago area-are being investigated by the IEPA for odor complaints. The others are Land and Lakes-Prairie View, Wheeling; Land and Lakes-Willow Ranch, Romeoville; Compost Enterprises Inc. near Union; CDT Landfill Corp., near Joliet; and LRI Inc. in West Chicago.
The West Chicago site, the largest in the state, probably has seen its last bag of grass clippings. Hit hard by complaints, Du Page County officials decided Wednesday to close the site.
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As an alternative, county officials are considering passing the responsibility on to municipalities, which could increase costs because of longer shipping distances, said George Brabec, director of recycling and waste reduction for the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County.
Other problems threaten Illinois’ status as a progressive composter. Brabec says the IEPA’s inability to impose fines hurts the effectiveness of the law. Also, landfill fees generally remain lower than the cost of composting; the profitability of composting ventures is shaky.
And although a follow-up investigation by the Tribune last year found almost perfect compliance in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley made veiled threats in March to ignore the yard-waste ban if Gov. Jim Edgar follows through on a pledge to pull income tax surcharge revenue from municipalities.
Still, the volume accepted at composting sites grew dramatically between 1991, when nearly 222,000 tons were accepted, and last year, when the total at the state’s 83 compost operations was more than 418,000 tons. Last year’s figure amounts to nearly 3 percent of the total waste stream, Illinois EPA statistics show.
And the state is looking ahead to some new composting options. It is one of four states examining the application of leaves and grass clippings to farmland, an innovative approach aimed at reducing the burden on large composting facilities, avoiding processing costs of composting and enhancing farmland.
Large, regional facilities, like Du Page County’s site in West Chicago, may be a thing of the past. Environmentalists, compost operators, and especially neighbors of composting facilities say the best approach is to leave grass clippings on lawns, and run smaller, community compost facilities for other landscape waste.
That may be the final, stable form of yard-waste disposal to emerge at the end of the sometimes tumultuous trial-and-error period that began in 1990.
“What it did was create a statewide laboratory for composting,” Miller said, “and, when I look back on it, that wasn’t such a bad thing.”