Stinking in Seattle

Published 12:14 pm Saturday, September 24, 2011

EVERETT, Wash. A year after the city of Seattle required residents to recycle food scraps, the results have been impressive: in 2010, the citys contractor diverted 90,000 tons of Seattleites banana peels, chicken bones and weeds out of landfills and converted that waste into rich compost prized in gardens.

But the process that helped the city set an all-time high recycling rate of 53.7 percent hasnt been without controversy.

The company turning that waste into compost has come under fire by citizens and others who complain of a pungent stench emanating from its two facilities located outside of Seattle. Cedar Grove Composting has gotten more complaints than any other company since 2007, according to the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency that regulates air quality in this region.

The battle over odors got messier this summer when a tribal official and a mayor from a town neighboring one plant appealed directly to Seattle to intercede with its vendor. And a community group calling itself Citizens for a Smell Free Snohomish County is also raising a stink.

A Washington state legislator stepped in to urge parties to agree to an independent study tracing the odor sources. Seattle city officials recently met with company representatives and said the city is willing to chip in money for such a study.

We are eager to get the situation resolved for the environment out there and for the reliability of our processing system, said Timothy Croll, Seattles solid waste director. Seattle is Cedar Groves second-largest single customer.

Cedar Grove operates the largest composting facilities in the region and among the largest in the country. It takes yard waste and food scraps from homes and business throughout Puget Sound, processing about 344,000 tons last year at its facilities in Everett and Maple Valley. More than a third of it came from Seattle homes and businesses, while the rest came from cities in the region.

They reduce our garbage rate because of all the organics they take out of the waste stream, said state Rep. Hans Dunshee, D-Snohomish. On the other side, we cant have overwhelming smell driving people out of their houses. Weve got to meet both goals.

Cedar Grove says it welcomes an independent odor study. The company acknowledges some of the odors are theirs, but it says numerous other sources in the area generate odors similar to compost.

Cedar Grove has invested millions to control smells at its plants, said company spokesman Laird Harris. The company has set up a computer-based odor monitoring program and its own inspectors are out logging odors, he said.

Theres clearly not a constant amount of odor leaving the facility at any time any day, Harris said. There are periods when you have some but the periods tend to be short.

Since 2007, however, the clean air agency has received a total of 1,700 complaints 500 for the Everett plant, and 1,200 at the Maple Valley plant. The company says an aggressive mailing campaign has made it easy to report odors as belonging to Cedar Grove.

The clean air agency fined the company a total of $169,000 for 17 violations 14 at Marysville and 3 at Everett in 2009 and 2010. Cedar Grove appealed those fines. Last July, the board upheld the violations but reduced the penalty to $119,000. The board said Cedar Grove has at some points in time denied responsibility for the odors, directed responsibility towards other businesses, and been non-responsive to (violations), but it credited the company for spending $6.5 million to reduce odors.