Kent County, Michigan, Department of Public Works completes materials sorting study

The Kent County, Michigan, Department of Public Works (DPW) has completed a waste characterization study it undertook in 2021 to determine how many total thrown-away materials can be recycled or processed instead of being sent to a landfill. 

The county enlisted Vienna, Virginia-based Gershman, Brickner & Bratton Inc. (GBB), a solid waste management planning and consulting firm, to complete the survey. It has discovered that Kent County generates 612,000 tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) annually, and that 75 percent of that material—roughly 465,000 tons—can be processed at a mixed waste processing facility, diverting it from a landfill.  

According to the DPW, the study shows that the top three categories of materials sorted were fiber, such as cardboard and paper, at 23 percent, organics such as food and yard waste at 19 percent and plastics, such as soda bottles, milk jugs and other plastics, at 17 percent. 

“The waste characterization study was intensive and involved picking through Kent County residents’ trash over two weeks,” GBB Senior Vice President Jennifer Porter says. “From it, we were able to learn just how much waste can be processed in a much more sustainable way versus continuing to dump it in a landfill. There are materials in the waste stream that have value, so long that they can be successfully recovered from the waste stream and made available for processing.” 

The DPW says the study shows that Kent County has enough divertible materials to support the creation of the Sustainable Business Park, a planned 250-acre site that will be located adjacent to the South Kent Landfill in Byron Center, Michigan. In a planning timeline, the DPW says it expects to finalize financing and a service agreement by the second quarter of 2023. 

Study results further make the case for creating a more sustainable system that catches and moves discarded materials to their best possible use, the DPW says. The department has set a goal to divert 90 percent of Kent County-generated trash that goes into landfills by 2030 and to build the Sustainable Business Park. Along with the county’s waste-to-energy facility and Recycling and Education Center, the DPW says the three facilities will allow it to make significant progress toward meeting their its material diversion goal. 

“Landfills are not the legacy we want to leave our children and grandchildren, and Kent County has a real opportunity here to become a more sustainable community,” Kent County DPW Director Dar Baas says. “We know through this informative study that county residents and businesses generate enough of certain types of waste to support the first tenant at the Sustainable Business Park. We look forward to continuing the conversations that will help the park come to fruition.” 

In addition, the DPW is working on a project development agreement with Kent County Bioenergy Facility LLC to build a facility at the Sustainable Business Park that could accept and process 400,000 tons of materials from residential and commercial sources per year. The proposed facility would recover traditional recyclables to be sold as commodities and organic material, such as food waste, to be converted into renewable natural gas and organic fertilizer via an anaerobic digestion process.  

Materials that cannot be processed at the facility would still need to be sent to a landfill or combusted at the waste-to-energy facility.