Iowa

Agriculture

Most of the state is used for agriculture—60 percent is crop-covered—and 30 percent is grassland, consisting mainly of pasture and hay. Iowa has had to use legislation to protect its agricultural interests from the adverse effects of waste disposal, such as open burning. This legislation has had instant impact on the way people in Iowa dispose of their garbage. In 1953, a state law was passed that required garbage fed to pigs to be cooked at 212 degrees F for 30 minutes in order to reduce swine disease pathogens in the feed. Prior to the law going into effect in June 1953, there were over 400 garbage feeders in Iowa, mostly small-scale operators running their operations as a side business. A month later, there were only around 60, and 70 percent of these were using homemade garbage cookers. Of the 64 percent of Iowan garbage cookers that were direct fired, 66 percent were homemade. Non-farmers operating these usually set up on or near garbage dumps and typically use wood or waste tires for fuel.

Ethanol production uses around one-third of the Iowan corn crop, and Iowa is the biggest producer of ethanol in the United States. In the 21st century, doubts have been expressed in the scientific community about the amount of logistics required to harvest, transport, and store the crop biomass needed for making cellulosic ethanol. This problem, however, is avoided by using municipal solid waste (MSW) and paper production waste as the feedstock. In 2010, Fiberight, in Blairstown, began production at the first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant in the United States to use enzymatic conversion technology and industrial and municipal MSW as a feedstock. The biorefinery was converted from a former first-generation corn ethanol plant in a $24 million investment projected to reach a commercial production capacity of 6 million gallons of renewable biofuel in 2011. Fiberight believes its core extraction and processing technology can potentially derive 9 billion gallons of renewable biofuel from 103 million tons of nonrecyclable MSW generated each year in the United States. On reaching full production, the Blairstown plant should be able to process over 350 tons of waste per day, producing biofuel at less than $1.65 a gallon. This use of MSW is believed to offer significant advantages over other waste-to-energy (WTE) methods, as low temperature and closed-loop systems exploit the MSW for a higher value while avoiding the emissions created by other methods.

...