At the Oct. 29 meeting of the Board of Dakota County Commissioners, the county submitted its draft of the Dakota County Solid Waste Management Plan for 2024-2044 to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) for approval.
This new plan features updates to the county’s practices regarding solid waste as it continues to work towards the goal of a 75% recycling and composting rate across the seven-county metro area by 2030.
In order to work towards this goal, counties across the metro will need to work together. This cooperation includes “consistent uniform ordinances, greater collaboration between staff and leaders in each of the seven metro counties, and planning for facilities through a regional lens,” according to the MPCA’s Metropolitan Solid Waste Management Policy Plan 2022-2042, adopted in January of this year.
According to the MPCA’s plan, in 2021 the seven-county area had a 45.2% recycling/composting rate. In order to achieve a 75% recycling/composting rate in the next six years, the MPCA lays out a broad hierarchy of actions that should be relied on in descending order from most effective in reducing waste to least. The most important of these actions is to simply reuse materials and to reduce the amount of waste generated in total: “Waste reduction and reuse methods are the most effective waste prevention strategies.” Other strategies further down the hierarchy include increased efforts of recycling and composting. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the strategies of turning waste to energy, waste to landfill with gas recovery, and finally simply bringing waste to a landfill.
In 2022 Dakota County produced more than 500,000 tons of waste. While the county has produced more tons of recycling and organics recovery than waste sent to landfills since 2013, the overall recycling rate for the county has actually gone down since 2014. Dakota County’s recycling rate has dropped from nearly 50% in 2014 to less than 30% in 2022. Dakota County’s drafted plan lays out several potential reasons for this decline including changes to how Minnesota calculates recycling rates, less overall paper in use and therefore being recycled, as well as recyclable plastics becoming lighter and therefore fewer tons being recycled overall.
Despite the decrease in Dakota County’s recycling rate, the county’s rate of organics recycling has more than tripled from 10% in 2014 to more than 30% today. Dakota County’s current organics recycling rate is already above the draft’s goal for 2042.
The plan’s goal of reducing the county’s landfill disposal rate to a mere 5% by 2042, down from the current rate of 43%, paints a drastic picture of how the county’s waste systems will need to change in the coming decades. Dakota County’s landfill disposal rate has remained consistently around the 40% mark for the last decade, and cutting that figure by more than 87% in less than 20 years presents a massive challenge that is acknowledged by the plan: “achieving the Twin Cities Metro Area’s landfill objective of 5 percent by 2042 will be extremely challenging, unless aggressive, new approaches can influence and shift waste management to methods higher in the State’s waste hierarchy,” said Dakota County’s drafted plan.
Toward the goal of reducing the overall amount of waste in Dakota County, Dakota County’s waste management plan offers several strategies including establishing partnerships between food rescue organizations and restaurants and stores, offering grants or rebates for organizations to transition to reusable food and beverage service ware, and establishing a repair ambassador program.
Other policies meant to reduce waste include the creation of pre-processing at disposal facilities and residential curbside organics collection by 2030. At the meeting, councilors spoke to the importance of the extended timeline for these requirements so that more of the services that would fill them would exist.
Another component of reducing waste is education. “Counties are responsible to provide education to the public on how, when, and where materials can be recycled and promote activities to encourage recycling at least quarterly,” according to Dakota County’s drafted plan. These efforts include outreach via regular county communication tools, as well as an update to Dakota County Ordinance 110 that would compel haulers to provide customer feedback if customers aren’t “sorting recycling or organics correctly,” according to the drafted plan.
If the MPCA approves of the plan, implementation will begin in early 2025.
For more information about Dakota County’s Solid Waste Management Plan for 2024-2044, visit the Dakota County website at https://www.co.dakota.mn.us/Environment/ReportsStudies/solid-waste-master-plan/Pages/default.aspx