League of Women Voters forum participants discuss merits of large-scale composting facility

Apr. 15—Panelists in a Wednesday night online forum hosted by the League of Women Voters of Boulder County reviewed the potential benefits of locating a large-scale compost facility in the county.

The compost products produced in such a facility could help Boulder County and its communities attain their goals of diverting solid waste from landfills, reducing emissions from landfill organic waste, enriching soils to which the compost is applied, increasing water holding capacity of those soils, reducing farmers' use of synthetic fertilizers and ultimately increasing plant and human health, said Tim Broderick, senior sustainability strategist in Boulder County's Office of Sustainability, Climate Action and Resilience.

Dan Matsch, manager of Eco-Cycle's Compost Department, said he's excited about the possibility of a county-owned compost facility because of how it could be used for carbon sequestration on agricultural and other private public lands, as well as its potential for treating wildfire-burned areas and reforestation.

"There is no shortage of uses for compost," Matsch said.

Bob Yost, the vice president and chief technical officer for A1 Organics, a Keenesburg company that is the Rocky Mountain Region's largest commercial composting company, said the family-owed Weld County business recycles 425,000 tons of organic material a year.

Charles Kamenides, Longmont's city waste services manager and chairman of the Boulder County Recycling and Conservation Advisory Board, said community outreach about the benefits of composting and the construction of a facility in Boulder County may be needed — as well as more public input while any plans for a large-scale center are developed — in order to ensure "we could all find a good approach" to making it a reality.

Elizabeth Black, founder of the Citizen Science Soil Health Project, said, "From a grower's perspective, a Boulder County composting facility makes a lot of sense."

The League of Women Voters of Boulder County organized and moderated what it said beforehand would be a "community conversation" about "large-scale composting" in the region. League officials said the webinar was intended to clarify what composting is, where compost comes from, where it goes, the costs and benefits of a compost facility "and where ... we go from here."

Not part of Tuesday night's panel discussion was the controversy that erupted among some critics and skeptics of Boulder County's onetime plan to locate a commercial-scale compost facility on county-owned open space property on the former Rainbow Tree Nursery at 5762 N. 107th St., which lies near U.S. 287 between Colo. 52 and Lookout Road, south of Longmont and northwest of Erie.

Boulder County commissioners decided on March 4 to have county staff withdraw a land use application for siting and developing a facility and since have stated that if one eventually is developed, it will not be on that North 107th Street site.

During Tuesday night's webinar, panelists answered questions people had submitted in advance or during the forum itself about such things as how odors would be controlled and managed in such a facility, how groundwater would be monitored for contamination.

Matsch said a challenge that emerged during the controversy over the possibility of such a county compost center last fall and this winter was a lack of familiarity among the public about how compost production is accomplished and how the resulting product is used. He suggested that if Boulder County proceeds with developing a new plan for such a facility somewhere in the county, part of that process could include sending delegations of people to existing facilities elsewhere across the country so those people could see and evaluate them for themselves.

Yost said there is "a lack of knowledge and understanding" among many members of the public about the environmental and economic advantages of such a facility. He said getting one situated should be done in a way that would allow the community "to accept it" and that once it's in operation, "to embrace it."

Disagreeing with the points made by the panelists was Nancy Davis, who with her husband Jeff own property adjacent to the 107th Street site and still have a Boulder District Court lawsuit pending against the county over the choice of that site.

Nancy Davis said in an interview after the forum, "I think it was a complete waste of time."

She said she'd submitted 30 questions for the League members to ask the panelists, and "they did not speak to any one of them." She challenged the accuracy of a number of things the panelists said, based on her own research, and she said, "You can't have a conversation without the truth."

Davis said, "It was very condescending" for some of the panelists to suggest that foes of a compost facility are only against it "because we're afraid and we don't understand it."

The Boulder County League of Women Voters will be posting a link to the video of the webinar on its Climate Action web page, tinyurl.com/4pnx6xj3.