Page 6 - July- August 2018
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SEVIER COUNTY                                                                            By Shannon Carey
Composting Facility Gets Upgrade

  Tom Leonard, general manager               like the Great Smoky Mountains              from a landfill as possible.
of Sevier Solid Waste, is tinkering          National Park and Dollywood, Sevier           “Of course, we live in the foothills, and
towards a goal: to make SSW, the waste       Solid Waste is home to the largest co-
management corporation serving the           composting facility in the United States,   we want to preserve the beauty of our
tourism capitol of Tennessee, into a zero-   a system analyzed and imitated around       community,” said Howard. “We would
waste facility.                              the world.                                  have to start transferring waste out of the
                                                                                         county, which is more expensive. It does
  That’s not an easy task considering          And thanks to Leonard’s tinkering,        cost to bury your garbage.”
Sevier County and the three                  that system is about to get even better.
municipalities of Sevierville, Gatlinburg                                                  But, with the composting facility,
and Pigeon Forge generate an average         No Space for a Landfill                     organics like food waste and paper
400 tons of trash per day. The county has                                                products are turned into soil, diverting
around 100,000 residents, but more than        The Sevier Solid Waste composting         60 percent of that massive 400 tons from
14 million people visit annually. While      facility was completed in 1991, after       the landfill.
a residential area can tackle the problem    Sevier County and the three cities
of trash through single-home recycling       struggled with what to do about the         From Trash to Treasure
efforts and subscription services, those     increasing problem of waste. A landfill
tactics aren’t appropriate for Sevier        was proposed, but the idea was quickly        The facility works like a backyard
County.                                      abandoned.                                  composter, just on a larger scale. All the
                                                                                         waste that comes into SSW is loaded,
  “For every resident, we have three           “People did not want the landfill in      unsorted, into huge digesters, and
visitors here any given day,” said Laura     their backyard,” said Laura Howard,         biosolids are added. The waste stays
Howard, recycling coordinator at             recycling coordinator at Sevier Solid       in the digesters for three days before
Sevier Solid Waste. “There is a huge         Waste. “Also, in Sevier County land is      it is unloaded and the large inorganic
amount of waste from tourism, and            very hard to come by, so there are not a    materials like plastics and metals are
most people when they’re on vacation         lot of opportunities to add landfill if we  screened out.
are not thinking about recycling and         have to.”
composting. It’s easier for us to take care                                                Next up is a 28-day process of daily
of it on the back end.”                        The county mayor and the cities           turning as the material continues to rot
                                             teamed up to do a waste study and           and turn into soil. Finally, the compost
  So, behind the scenes of attractions       discovered that the best tactic was to      is screened for lingering, tiny pieces of
                                             tackle the organic portion of the area’s    inorganic material. The end result is
                                             waste, keeping as much material away        that infamous “black gold,” nutrient-

                         The inorganic materials travel from the hopper (right) to manual sorting (middle), then to additional pieces of

6	 TPW July/August 2018
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