Save Sonoma Compost

Here in Sonoma County we take our carbon footprint very seriously. Together as residents, businesses and local governments we have done much to lower our energy use, resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. We have been repeatedly recognized as conservation and sustainability leaders across the country.
Today, we have a very “smart” carbon footprint but we might be getting one of our big toes chopped off soon. Without a quick response from county government leaders, our countywide composting service, Sonoma Compost, will be displaced and shut down.
Last week, the county supervisors accepted a resolution to a neighbors’ Clean Water Act lawsuit against the composting operations at the county’s Central Landfill on Mecham Road near Stemple Creek. The settlement imposes a closure of Sonoma Compost by October because of wet season wastewater runoff into nearby waterways.
In the big numbers game between the county and its private landfill haulers and operators, Phoenix-based Republic Services and the Ratto Group )which runs Empire Waste Management), Sonoma Compost has become the “odd man out.” A $1.5 million fix to expand a wastewater catchment and a much more expensive relocation option so far have been rejected by the county’s Waste Management Agency and the Board of Supervisors.
For a community with such an excellent reputation for its environmental conscience, not having a composting program seems outrageous.
We all have a stake in this outcome. Our individual carbon footprints are measured both by what we fill our curbside garbage containers with and, by where all that garbage eventually ends up. Already, we are exporting 100 tons of garbage every day to landfill locations outside our own county. Besides, shutting down Sonoma Compost, the entire Central Landfill site must be shut down within the next two decades.
Sonoma Compost for 20 years has led community, business and school composting programs that have diverted one-fourth of our waste from the landfill. County studies show it would cost $5.5 million a year to export our yard, food and other green waste outside of the county. Local farmers and gardeners would lose a prized source of clean, organic and biodynamic compost, mulch and growing materials.
Normally, we would count on common sense and our past environmental record to prevail. But garbage hauling and landfill operations are a big money business, now dominated by private, high-profit corporations. That is the opposite of what locally-owned Sonoma Compost has always been.
There has been an encouraging upwelling of support for Sonoma Compost. More than 2,000 signatures have been collected, urging the county supervisors to preserve the county’s composting services. Besides individual residents, leaders from the winegrape industry and Farm Bureau, smaller-scale farmers and backyard gardeners all testified at a recent pubic hearing of the Waste Management Agency, a joint agency with both county and local city representatives.
The Agency is set to select a replacement location for the county’s 170-acre Mecham Road landfill but the overall process of site planning, environmental reviews, potential lawsuits and ecalating cost estimates is likely to result in the closure of Sonoma Compost.
A better approach would be to separate the community’s needs for recycling our green waste and providing a continued resource for high-quality compost materials from the other issues for relocating the Central Landfill.
The locating of Sonoma Compost next to the Mecham Road landfill was supposed to be temporary. Instead, for 20 years now, county leaders and their for-profit hauling and landfill partners have failed to support a superior plan for the county’s composting needs.
Yes, any solution will now cost several million dollars. But isn’t that what all those fees for our blue, green and gray waste cans are for?
We should not let Sonoma County become known for abandoning its community compost service — or for exporting more garbage to places with reputations less sustainable than our own. That’s the wrong footprint to set.
— Rollie Atkinson