Two Du Page County panels found themselves on a potential collision course Wednesday in trying to figure out what to do with the tons of garbage and yard waste generated in the county each year.
At one morning meeting, a commission of environmentalists appointed by County Board Chairman Aldo E. Botti urged that all the trash and yard waste generated in Du Page be recycled or otherwise kept in Du Page.
At another meeting taking place about the same time, Du Page County’s Solid Waste Committee was listening to a plan to convert the county’s composting facility into a privately operated transfer station that would reduce yard waste to clippings-with the residue to be hauled out of the county.
The conflicting proposals go to the heart of one of the major crises facing Du Page County: Garbage.
A Du Page County judge already has ordered that the two current county landfills be closed because they are operated on Du Page Forest Preserve District land, and he has ruled that the Forest Preserve Commission has no right to use land for that purpose. The landfills must be closed by Dec. 31, 2000.
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Meanwhile, the county has been preparing to close its composting facility on Du Page Airport Authority land in West Chicago-until a new plan arose Wednesday to turn the property into a yard waste grinding and transfer center.
Some county officials had hoped to start a new composting facility in Aurora, but that idea recently was torpedoed by a public outcry over odors. A similar outcry prompted the 1991 shutdown of the Settler’s Hill composting site in Kane County. Du Page had been shipping its yard waste there.
Now the Du Page Environmental Commission is about to recommend a policy statement for County Board adoption this month that garbage not be shipped elsewhere, but sent to dumps in the county.
“Those wastes that cannot be recycled in the county,” excluding glass, cans, plastic, newspapers and hazardous materials, “should be relocated within the county,” said commission member Gerould Wilhelm, a botanist at Morton Arboretum.
“We have to be responsible for our waste,” Wilhelm said.
“If people took on the responsibility of relocating their waste within the county, our attitude toward the generation of waste would be modified,” said Commission Chairman John R. Sheaffer.
“We would buy material and containers that could be recycled and compost our garbage in our home gardens,” said Sheaffer, a hydrologist who heads an engineering consulting firm in Wheaton. Otherwise, he said, “the newest landfill would be next to you.”
About the same time as the Environmental Commission meeting, though, a waste hauler was proposing to the Solid Waste Committee to transform the county’s present Du Page Airport composting facility into a transfer station, keeping the site open for at least one more summer.
To the surprise of virtually every member of the joint county-municipal committee and the county staff that works with it, Continental Waste Industries Inc. of Crestwood disclosed that it has held talks with airport personnel about grinding yard waste that is sent there, hauling it out of county and then restoring the site.
“The idea is not solid waste transfer, but in lieu of compost, we would put a grinder out there, process it the same day, then send it to permitted composting facilities,” said Continental President Thomas Volini.
The surprise news wasn’t well received by all members of the committee.
“My direction is to discuss closure, not the other issue,” said Acting Solid Waste Director Rodd Elges. “My opinion is the county’s (environmental) permit is not a transfer permit. To do this, it would need a transfer permit.”
“We were proceeding on the premise that we were getting out,” said Naperville recycling coordinator Kris Kaar, a member of the committee and a liaison in negotiations with the airport authority. “This question is about the site. It shouldn’t confuse the county’s role. We want out.”
Kaar and Elges hope to meet with airport personnel before next week’s scheduled Solid Waste Committee meeting to discuss alternatives.
The proposal did not go over well with representatives of Waste Management Inc. and Browning-Ferris Industries which, together, haul more than 80 percent of the county’s yard waste, and were miffed that they were not also allowed to present proposals.
Nor were municipal representatives pleased.
“We’re muddying the waters,” said Glen Ellyn Village President Arthur Angrist.
As for the Environmental Commission’s recommendation to dump Du Page garbage in Du Page, the idea sounds noble, but there is precious little space in the county of 781,666 to put it.
“We’ve been looking for six years, and the consensus is, there are no sites” for landfills or composting, said Wallace Brown, chairman of the County Board’s Solid Waste Committee. “But if somebody were to come forward with a suitable site, the committee wouldn’t reject it out of hand.”
Brown said his committee has had talks with officials at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory about developing a composting site or some kind of solid waste facility on the grounds of the 6,800-acre facility, which straddles the Du Page-Kane County border.
That is about the only place in the county that Brown believes holds any possibilities. But so far, talks have been fruitless.
According to the 1990 census, Du Page’s population increased by 19 percent during the 1980s, all in an area of 332 square miles, the smallest county of the six Chicagoland counties.
The county’s development department predicts Du Page will house 985,000 residents by the year 2010. Much of that population growth is moving toward the west, areas where dumps are being replaced by people.
The county is running out of time to find new ways to incinerate, landfill or recycle waste. Its two Forest Preserve-owned landfills, Greene Valley near Naperville and Mallard Lake near Hanover Park, are under court order to shut down around the turn of the 21st Century.
Both opened in 1972 and were expected to fill the county’s garbage needs for another 20 years. But a lawsuit was filed in 1990 that successfully argued that state law does not authorize forest preserve districts to operate landfills.
Only a small fraction of the county’s tons of trash currently is sent to either Cook County or Settler’s Hill Landfill in Kane County.
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Closing the dumps could leave Du Page with disposal headaches much more serious than dumping excess grass clippings. But there could be alternatives.
West Chicago Mayor Paul Netzel said that private haulers have approached his community about siting a transfer station there. West Chicago isn’t alone. If incentives to put waste disposal units are attractive enough, cash-starved communities might listen.
“I established a citizens advisory commission to get feedback and discuss the pros and cons,” Netzel said. “It’s as much public relations as anything. If you let people know the alternatives ahead of time, then they’ll all work to try to resolve it.”
Botti, who opposes dumping yard waste in Du Page, pushed the Solid Waste Committee this week to present the County Board with alternatives for disposing of solid waste within a year.
“We need to implement a plan, then go to the board and say `Here’s what we have, let’s start doing something with it,’ ” Botti said. “If it takes too long, it will be more of a reaction than a philosophy.”