The following message was sent to the participants in the organic recycling program and I thought you would find it interesting.
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Hi,
I hope that you had a great Labor Day weekend and that we were able to get everything picked up on time today. In August we diverted 11.14 tons of material in the program. I think that is great.
I was able to take a tour of the new dry fermentation digester that has been built at the UW Oshkosh last week. The facility was quite impressive. It is just starting to process its first loads of organic material from some Oshkosh grocery stores and it will be getting into high gear when the university starts classes this week.
The Oshkosh facility is small, built to handle 9-10,000 tons of material each year. It was built by Bio Ferm, a German firm, whose North American headquarters is right here in Madison. There is an illustration of a Bio Ferm system on our web site at https://www.cityofmadison.com/streets/compost/anearobicDigester.cfm
Staff is very active in planning for a digester for Madison. We are currently doing analysis of several sites that are owned by the City. I really believe that we could break ground on a facility as early as 2013. Any new facility would begin with material collected by large generators such as grocery stores as well as material from the pilot program (if it is still going, which I hope is the case). We would then move into collecting material from households by expanding the program throughout the City over a period of 2-3 years.
We may need to move quickly because we have been informed that the Dane County Landfill may have as few as 2.5 years of capacity left. There are other landfills available but they are much further away and sure to cost significantly more.
These are exciting times for our office. Tonight we expect the Common Council to approve a new contract for the processing of our recyclables. Starting January 1, 2012 Pellitteri Waste Systems would build a facility right here in Madison to sort and market our recyclables. The curbside recycling program will expand at that time to include plastic dairy tubs and lids, other plastic containers, steel pain cans, metal pots and pans, and plastic bags. Be on the lookout for more recycling updates as we get closer to the date.
Again, thank you for your help and interest in our programs.
George Dreckmann