By Bruce Karnick and Pam Onnen
Smelly garbage in your trash can? Overflowing garbage bins? Are you tired of having that smelly garbage in your kitchen? Are you like millions of others who must harbor the REALLY OLD leftovers in your refrigerator until the night before your trash pickup? Well, no more! Dakota County offers Organic Recycling stations for its residents. Our county has not two, not four, but FIVE organics recycling stations. That is right! Five.
Six months ago, the City of Hastings opened an Organics Drop Site with the intention that residents could bring their organic waste to the site for disposal which would then be composted back to the earth. ‘But I thought that is what is happening when I throw my organics in to the garbage?’ No, Hastings garbage is required to go to a processing facility. Processing facilities recover and recycle a variety of commodities and organics tend to hamper that recovery. Once the commodities are recovered, the remaining waste is converted to energy, usually through burning.
How are the facilities setup? These stations are well lit; they are also secured with a keypad lock at the entrance door. The station in Hastings, located at the Dakota County Transportation Shop at 900 County Road 47, is open from 5:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m. daily. This no-wait facility is in an open area with room for many vehicles at one time. Inside the open-air locked station, there are two dumpsters available. Simply lift the lid and put your organics in one of the organics dumpsters. There are compostable compost bags available for you inside the locked facility. The one caveat is absolutely everything that goes in those dumpsters must be compostable. The good news is the bags you need are available on site when you drop you full bags off. Please only take what you need so there is enough for everyone.
According to the MRC Program Training Manual, food waste now represents the single largest component of waste being sent to landfills and incinerators. Currently there are 574 registered households in Hastings on the program, about 6.3% of Hastings roughly 9,000 households. Each week, these households reduce 1,850 pounds of trash by disposing of their food scraps in the organics container at the County Transportation Shop. Yes, 1,850 pounds of organics per week, 3.22 pounds per house per week. Imagine if every house did it. That weight will blow you away.
If every house in Hastings were to participate in the organics program, at three pounds per house, we would be able to compost 27,000 pounds per week. At 3.25 pounds, that increases to 29,250. To put that in perspective, one garbage truck hauls approximately 10 tons of trash per load. That means, there would be three trucks less going to the incinerator.
With those numbers in mind, how much do you think being on this program costs? $10 per year? $20? How does zero per year sound? Too good to be true right? Nope! Ok, so, since it’s free, that means you have to drive a 30+ miles to dump? Nope you already know the answer to that one. If you live in city limits, you’ll drive at most 4.2 miles to get to the dump site.
What NOT to do with organics? DO NOT put them in your recycle cart or yard waste bin for recycling. Those two types of recycling are vastly different than organics. Do not put them out for collection with your weekly pickup either. The wonderful folks at Tennis are not set up to keep organics separate.
DO: Join the organics program with Dakota County. There you will receive details of what to do with your organics. Participants receive helpful tips and free compostable bags to use at home.
• Online Sign-Up
• Phone: 952-891-7557
• Email: [email protected] https://www.co.dakota.mn.us/Environment/Residential/Organics/ Pages/default.aspx Once you get signed up, you will get a free welcome kit with a container label, your first set of compostable bags, details on how to drop off the organics and of course, the code to the drop-off locations.
