Green Intentions?

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That takes care of 80,000 tons of green waste annually. The cart-based is also 24 percent less expensive than the “loose in the street” bag program because trucks can pick up the wheeled bins mechanically instead of picking up flimsier plastic bags by hand. Despite including the services in residents’ overall trash fees, it still costs the city $1.5 million a year, gripes Edison Hicks, integrated waste planning manager in the city’s utilities
department. “It costs us manpower and overhead, plus we have to pay our partners to take it away, so there is no revenue coming back to the city.”

The city has to pay Waste Management a chipping fee of $25 per ton, and Grover Landscaping $34 per ton for the long haul to Modesto. Because of those costs, the city isn’t aggressively rolling out the program. Other than sending informational inserts in customers’ utility bills and discussing the program at community meetings, it waits for residents to approach first. “We don’t want to go into an area that doesn’t have a lot of interest,” says Hicks. So far, the neighborhood showing the most interest has been Natomas, while East Sacramento and Land Park have only a few pilot programs.

Innovative Cost Cuts

Sacramento County is more optimistic in its efforts. It serves the unincorporated parts of the county from North Highlands to Rio Linda, and green waste makes up 200,000 tons, or 25 percent, of its total waste stream. Every two weeks, liquid-gas-powered trucks pick up residents’ green waste (the service is included in the flat fee for trash pickup) and take it either to the same North Highlands recovery station the city uses or to its 1,000-acre landfill near Rancho Cordova.

The county also pays Grover Landscaping $33 a ton for its composting services. However, it doesn’t pay a dime for disposal of its woodier material — Sierra Pacific, an energy company that converts it to biofuel used by power plants, hauls it away for free. “That basically saves us $33 a ton,” says Paul Philleo, principal civil engineer for the county’s Dept. of Waste Management and Recycling. “And because our green waste is split in half between grass and wood, those two contracts work in tandem.”

To cut costs more, the county plans to develop its own composting facility. “There’s no operation like that anywhere in Sacramento, and we don’t want to rely on an out-of-county operation for the long term,” Philleo says. The advantages: reduced hauling distances and truck emissions and the production of a high-quality compost the county could sell. “It could be our big, marketable money-maker,” says Philleo. The proposed “Green-cycle” facility is planned as a public-private partnership in which the Sacramento Regional Solid Waste Authority (which includes Sacramento and Sacramento County) owns the site, a private contractor runs it, and the two parties split the revenue.

It’s still a couple of years away, because the county is just starting its environmental analysis on four sites (two in southern Sacramento County along I-5, one on the eastern edge off Hwy. 50 and one at its existing landfill). That analysis will be followed by the inevitable hearings and meetings about where to locate an aromatic compost pile. “It is a smelly process, so, obviously, no one wants a compost facility in their backyard,” says Philleo. “But the benefits definitely make it worth a debate.”

Waste Not, Landfill Not

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