Many small Iowa communities no longer can afford to maintain their local dumps when faced with increasing regulation and permitting fees by the EPA and Iowa Department of Natural Resources. That has forced new ways of thinking about waste management.
The Environmental Management System, or EMS, was seen as an alternative to relying simply on giving credits to Iowa landfills that serve as incentives for accepting fewer tons of garbage. But adoption of this approach has been slow.
A promising new program may be the key to pushing Iowa’s landfills into action that decreases the environmental impact of their operations.
The program, called Environmental Management System, or
Farm belt state struggles in shift to recycling
More than half of what Iowans dump into landfills could have been recycled or composted. In some areas, that amount is as
Four of every five households in Iowa City, a city with an aggressive recycling program, do not have access to curbside recycling.
The availability of residential recycling gets even smaller
