Green Intentions?

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Surrounding counties came later to the game but are catching up quickly in green-waste management. In Placer County, Rocklin and Auburn were two years overdue complying with the state mandate to reduce landfill dumps by 50 percent, but after rolling out a voluntary green-waste program in 2002, both cities have surpassed that level.

Because Placer County contracts the collection and hauling to one vendor, Auburn Placer Disposal Co., it doesn’t set the charge to residents nor does it receive any revenue. Apparently, no one is complaining. “All our residents like it and don’t want it to go away,” says Megan Siren, Auburn’s recycling coordinator. “And the city likes it because it doesn’t incur costs, and the program helped it reach that mandate.”

It’s also catching on in most urban areas of the county, says Michelle White, environmental resource specialist at the Western Placer Waste Management Authority. “The quantity of green waste we’ve seen has increased dramatically over the last two years, and it’s been fueled by growth in the region as well as the rising implementation of this program.”

The newest entrants are Lincoln, Roseville and Loomis. Combined, 14,000 Placer County households send 7,000 tons of green waste annually to Placer’s Materials Recovery Facility in Lincoln, where it is sorted, ground up and then transferred to a 9-acre compost pile. Compost is divided into rows up to 6 feet tall and 8 feet wide. It sits there for 60 to 90 days, heating up to 180 degrees while a bladed machine routinely churns the compost to keep it well mixed.

Placer County licenses the process to Roseville’s Nortech Waste, which sells two types of compost to the public straight from the facility. It also grinds trees and used lumber into wood chips, then sells them to factories that do cogeneration (burning wood to generate electricity) or uses them to make recycled-wood lumber and furniture.

Cities across California are also evaluating the cost of the living organic materials they maintain, most notably, Los Angeles, which intends to uproot its iconic but high-maintenance palm trees over the next several years and replace them with trees indigenous to Southern California.

Sacramento touts it has more trees than any other city besides Paris, but how much does it cost it to maintain them? “Well, we are different from Los Angeles, because here we need every tree we can get,” jokes Joe Benassini, urban forest manager for Sacramento’s Dept. of Parks and Recreation.

His department is kicking off a program to create an inventory of all Sacramento’s tree types and locations, which will be managed through a GPS system. “With that information, we can look at the amounts of wood waste we generate annually based on the volume of work we’re doing and what is the cost to the city,” says Benassini. Similar to the city and county, the parks department licenses two private vendors to mulch its wood chips for electricity cogeneration; the vendors keep the sales revenues.

Because of the state mandate, governments have no choice but to make their green-waste programs work economically, although it will take some time to find the best money-making process.

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