Two competing plans to get rid of sludge–187 tons of the slimy stuff every day, by one estimate–are at the heart of a fight between Waukegan and the North Shore Sanitary District as the city struggles to revitalize its lakefront.
The city has imposed a moratorium on development along its 1,500 acres of shoreline while its consultant prepares a comprehensive plan to reverse decades of neglect. Meanwhile, the Sanitary District is moving ahead on plans to build a $21 million sludge-treatment plant on part of the land.
The shoreline in Waukegan, a center of industry in Lake County and the county’s only international port of entry since the mid-1800s, stretches from Illinois Beach State Park to the 10th Street border with North Chicago. City officials have hired the Urban Land Institute, a non-profit group based in Washington, D.C., to study the lakefront, and consultants are scheduled to arrive in Waukegan next Sunday to gather information and conduct interviews.
The North Shore Sanitary District wants to build the treatment plant on a piece of land below the bluff near Dahringer and Pershing Roads, near a sewage-treatment facility. A Wisconsin firm will build the plant.
Now, the district and the city are facing off in court.
Waukegan filed suit against the Sanitary District in December to stop the project, charging district officials failed to consult with the city. Environmentalists have leaped into the fray, trying to persuade the Sanitary District to dump the Wisconsin firm, Minergy, in favor of a Swedish firm, Bedminster AB. The activists say Bedminster has a cleaner disposal method.
The result has been a public discussion about sludge, a byproduct of sewage treatment that most people would rather not think about.
Illinois Citizen Action, a non-profit group, urged Bedminster to bring its proposal to the Sanitary District, which it did at a recent meeting.
Ludvig Nobel, Bedminster’s North American representative, described Bedminster’s approach this way: “We take two regulated substances, sewage sludge and municipal solid waste, and turn it into one unregulated commodity: compost. . . . Compost is perfectly safe. You can hold it in your hands. You can also sell it or just give it away.”
Bedminster’s process mixes one-third sludge with two-thirds municipal solid waste in a rotating drum that encourages natural processes to break down solids into compost, which looks and feels like soil. Compost is then sifted so that inert waste such as plastic can be removed.
The compost is dried and distributed. A Bedminster-licensed plant in Texas sells about $1.5 million in compost every year, with the proceeds used to subsidize operations, Nobel said.
Minergy takes a different approach. The company’s glass aggregate system uses only sludge, not garbage. Sludge is melted using a process that starts by using natural gas. When the temperature is high enough, the sludge is used as fuel for the rest of the process.
Sludge is reduced to a glasslike aggregate that can be used in various industrial applications, such as paving and roofing, said Brian Jensen, executive director of the Sanitary District.
“The Minergy system will reduce our daily intake of 187 tons of wet sludge into 7 1/2 tons of glass aggregate that won’t have to go into a landfill,” Jensen said. “And in any case, we don’t deal in garbage. Our responsibility is sludge. The Bedminster plan may be a good fit some other places, but it wouldn’t be a good fit here.”
Members of Illinois Citizen Action disagree. They say the Bedminster process would be a better way to deal with all of Lake County’s waste.
“It’s an incredibly efficient process,” said the group’s spokesman, William Holleman, who visited a Bedminster facility in Cobb County, Ga. “We hope we can inform the public that there are better ways of meeting the same goals.”
The Sanitary District already has spent $10 million on the Minergy system, or almost half what the plant is expected to cost, making a change in plans unlikely, Jensen said.
The district has made arrangements should Waukegan prevail in the lawsuit. The Minergy facility would be built in Zion at a cost of about $39 million–$18 million more than what it would cost in Waukegan because there is little infrastructure at the Zion site. The Waukegan site would tap into water and other necessities already present at the district’s sewage-treatment plant.
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency might also play a part in the dispute. It must determine if the proposed sludge-treatment plant is a pollution-control facility. If it is, it needs approval from the city. If it isn’t, the IEPA can issue a permit with or without the city’s consent, said Jeff Jeep, an environmental attorney representing the city.
IEPA officials who moderated a public hearing on the sludge-treatment facility in January said they intended to determine its status by the end of February. The city will continue to pursue its suit regardless of the outcome, Jeep said.
“There has to be some coordination here, a common objective for the good of everyone involved,” he said.
