Despite its name, Villa Park is not a particularly park-like suburb, wedged as it is between Illinois Highways 64, 83 and 38.
Yet last year, the DuPage County village produced 420 tons of yard waste–about 40 pounds of clipped grass and raked leaves for every man, woman and child.
This fall, Villa Park will join a growing number of suburban communities hoping to relegate yard waste pickup to the great dust heap–or compost heap–of history.
Ever since the state banned yard waste from landfills in 1990, suburbs have struggled to find creative and inexpensive ways to deal with the bulky leftovers of their neatly coiffed lawns.
Usually, that has meant large-scale composting, the process of helping natural decay turn the waste into a rich garden mulch.
Different communities took different approaches.
Lake Forest, in Lake County, opened a municipal composting center, a great open field filled with row upon row of rotting plant matter. Naperville took the same approach, as did DuPage County government and the cities of Elgin and Crystal Lake.
Other communities, like Villa Park, relied on their private garbage haulers to take the yard waste to massive composting centers elsewhere in the state. Residents bagged the clippings, added a $1.90 sticker to each bag and sent them away. Out of sight, out of mind.
But six years later, many of those composting centers have closed, victims of the marketplace, regulatory demands and, sometimes, protests from neighbors.
Carrie Gurski, chairwoman of Villa Park’s Environmental Concerns Commission, said she believes the future lies in individual back-yard composting–and she is not alone.
“It helps the village, it helps the residents save money, and it’s good for the soil in their yard,” Gurski said.
Gurski said that in her back yard she keeps a composting bin, an open-ended tube peppered with vents to allow air into the mulch. Every few weeks, she uses a shovel to turn the mass around to get air to the center.
Once the pile has finished decomposing and has turned into a cool black humus material, she spreads it around her garden.
“Instead of chemical fertilizers, you can use this naturally. It can be used for weed control, (and) it retains moisture and reduces soil erosion,” she said.
This fall, Villa Park and its volunteer environmental commission will pilot a back-yard composting program for 70 households, with an eye toward expanding it.
The 70 residents this month will receive free composting bins, a quick organic chemistry lesson and a list of composting do’s and don’t’s.
The City of McHenry in McHenry County tried a similar experiment last year. The not-for-profit McHenry County Defenders, a Woodstock-based environmental organization, distributed about 900 composting bins at a cost of $40 apiece, along with instruction booklets.
McHenry County is watching to see how much of an impact the program will have on the 4,000 tons of yard waste hauled in the county last year.
Hank Fisher, McHenry County’s solid-waste coordinator, said, “It’s an expensive proposition today for one to merely rake up the grass clippings, put them in a bag and set them out on the curb.
“If you don’t have a place to take it within a reasonable distance, then those costs are going to go up, sometimes up to $3 a bag.”
DuPage County also has seen rising interest in back-yard composting, said Kevin Dixon, the county’s solid-waste manager.
“People in DuPage know that the landfills are closing, that the yard waste has been banned,” Dixon said. “I’d say the number of inquiries has doubled since last summer.”
Gurski said back-yard composting can flourish without the problems faced by mass composting: chiefly, the smell. And it can save money, for residents who have to buy stickers and yard waste bags, and for the village, which pays $40,000 a year for hauling.
The stench, sometimes described as ammonia-like or sulfurous, can develop if a compost mixture has too much water, not enough air or the wrong combination of materials.
At the large composting centers formerly in Coral Township and West Chicago, odors sometimes got bad enough to trigger protest from neighbors, helping to speed the closure of both facilities.
“The smell is similar to what you notice if a bag of grass clippings sits around and gets sour,” said Geoff Sutton, spokesman for the Bureau of Land for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. “It’s just unpleasant, sharp.”
It does not have to be.
Proponents of composting speak almost poetically of the pleasant mustiness, the loamy subtleness of a properly functioning compost pile.
A proper mixture has dry, carbon-rich material–such as leaves–and moister, nitrogen-rich, material–such as grass clippings or non-fat table scraps–experts said.
It needs to stay slightly damp and to have a supply of air. That allows microbes to flourish. As the microbes do their work, the pile heats up to more than 100 degrees, sometimes emitting steam in colder months.
Eventually the compost pile shrinks to about half its former volume, cools off and acquires an earthy smell.
Susan Grupp, horticulture specialist for the University of Illinois Cooperative Extension Service in DuPage County, said the material then can be worked into the garden or spread near trees.
