SEATTLE — A company that won a bid to start trucking the bulk of Seattle’s food and yard waste east of the Cascade Mountains in April still hasn’t told city officials where that plant will be located, but is looking outside Kittitas County after neighborhood opposition.
PacifiClean Environmental is contracted to start hauling about 60 percent of Seattle’s curbside food scraps and yard waste by April 1, under a $4 million-a-year contract.
The company had proposed siting the large-scale compost processing facility in Kittitas County, but faced resistance from neighbors over odor and other issues. PacifiClean is now finalizing arrangements for a yet-undisclosed location in Central Washington.
“PacifiClean is not able to provide more details at this point, but expects to share information on their completed site agreement by Jan. 31 and have operations that will receive waste for April 2014,” Seattle’s solid waste director Timothy Croll said in a Dec. 31 memo to two Seattle council members.
The issue of where and how Seattle’s banana peels, grass clippings and weeds get recycled is thorny.
Curbside composting kept more than 90,000 tons of Seattle food and yard waste out of landfills last year, but the company that now processes the bulk of Seattle’s organic waste is the subject of hundreds of odor complaints and several citizen lawsuits.
Cedar Grove Composting Inc., which recycles much of the region’s organic waste in Everett and Maple Valley, decided not to renew its current contract with Seattle. That contract expires March 31.
The Seattle-based company, however, has agreed to accept Seattle’s food and yard waste at its Maple Valley plant if PacifiClean’s new facility isn’t ready April 1.
Regulators with the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency are studying odor issues in the Maple Valley and Everett areas and trying to determine whether the stink reported comes from Cedar Grove.
Odor-sensing monitors set throughout the area have collected real-time information about the smells for the past year, said agency spokeswoman Joanne Todd, and the agency will analyze the data and report on it in coming weeks.
The study “is going to help us understand what odors … are the problems that people are complaining about. It isn’t to increase finger-pointing,” Todd said.
The recycling companies process organic residential and commercial waste from cities across the region into products used to enrich gardens and farms.
Seattle has a contract with Lenz Enterprises Inc. to send the remaining 40 percent of its yard and food waste to a Stanwood facility.
PacifiClean dropped plans last year to build a compost facility in two Kittitas county sites.
Croll wrote, “PacifiClean continues to pursue alternate opportunities with the Kittitas County Solid Waste property and through acquiring a separate property in Central Washington for a future facility if needed.”
