Dollywood’s environmental solution

Eight million dollars was recently needed to repair a Jefferson Parish landfill, and noxious odors still continue to plague the public. Toxicity has required millions of dollars in brownfield clean up in densely populated Orleans, with all the environmental racist implications. Landfills have proven not to be adequate repositories of society’s waste, for these graves of trash — quite literally — eventually rise back to haunt us.

Perhaps, here in Orleans and Jefferson parishes, we should take a lesson from the Dollywood-Sevier County, Tennessee area. These Smoky Mountains communities are home to one of the best composting and recycling programs in the world. The Sevier Solid Waste Composting Facility opened in 1991 and became one of the first in the world to use large rotating drums to break down trash into compost. Just one of around a dozen of these facilities in the world where rotating “digesters” are able to send around 70 percent of incoming waste to composting and recycling, minimizing the amount ending up in landfills. Upgrades by Sevier Solid Waste (SSW) will soon increase the recycling rate to be around 79 percent.

SSW accepts waste from Pigeon Forge, Sevierville, Gatlinburg, Sevier County and Great Smoky Mountains National Park at the facility, an area of several hundred thousand people. All of the waste is mixed with bio-solids and put into the digesters for three days. During this process, anything organic, including food and paper, becomes compost. Conveyer belts move the compost to large sifters, where inorganic and recyclable items like plastic and glass are removed from the compost. The recyclable items are then recycled. It is the main reason one will not find recycling bins inside Dollywood. Sevier Solid Waste removes all recyclable materials once the composting process has begun. The only items required to be separated are construction and demolition materials, electronics and tires.

A representative from Dollywood did tell us that they are “asked to separate cardboard for recycling. Instead of including the cardboard as compost (since it is a paper product), the county is able to resell the cardboard to help offset operating costs. A separate building at the facility holds the cardboard until it is sold.”

“After the compost is thoroughly sifted,” the representative continued, “it is placed in windrows (not windows, windrows!) where it continues breaking down. After several weeks, it is sifted once more. The final product is Grade A compost. The facility produces more than 70,000 tons of compost each year. Sevier County residents can get bags of the compost for free to use at home, and local farmers also use the compost for their fields.”

Or for deteriorating wetlands. The refined compost would be the perfect infill to protect our coasts from erosion. Louisiana has lost 1,900 square miles in the last fifty years, or approximately the State of Delaware, and we stand to watch another 1,700 sq. miles waste away in the next fifty years, roughly Rhode Island. The ability to put millions of tons of compost to block saltwater incursion could buy us time, at the very least, and save endangered communities at most.

Such an SSW-type plant could prove a cost effective way to achieve that goal. Much of the price for the refining process is offset by metal and materials sent to recycling. Even pounds of gold number amongst the separated materials since the SSW plant commenced. For a citizenry such as ours that possesses little desire to comply with putting recycling bins on curbs, and all the trouble that involves, we can shoot to the forefront of environmental standards, and still save money on the landfills for which we pay.

Obviously, a “digester” plant here would prove larger than the current SSW facility, and therefore more expensive – especially one capable of taking the waste from a multiparish area. Still, as an investment, would not investigating how we could save millions from landfill costs and devote them to such a recycling facility prove worthy of a little time from the Jefferson and Orleans Councils?

This article originally published in the December 2, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.