John Roosa, Administrator, Boone County Landfill and Recycling, March 18, 2026

Joining us today on our program we have the legendary John Rosa from your Boone County landfill. It's good to have you back, sir. How are you? Good. Thanks for letting me come back. Hang it out. Just spring break and all that stuff going on.

So yeah, you just do what you got to do. Unfortunately, we had Mother Nature say, oh by the way, winter's not quite done. That's coming up on Friday. Yeah, you know, it happens this time of the year too. So we struggle with what we've got. We'll make it work. We'll make it work.

We'll get there. Big issue. And I know the last time you were in, you talked a little bit about all the traffic and again, additional material that was coming in. AIMS resource recovery down there hasn't really been operating very much lately.

And we do know that I know you talked to the supervisors about it the other day when you were in giving a presentation about that. That's been one of the big challenges. You get a lot of tonnage. Yeah, it's been a rough one.

Had a lot of, most of the days they were diverting to us in January, pretty much the entire month. February was pretty busy too. And now we're going into March. They're still having some issues and doing some plans shut down as the current one.

So yeah, we knew it was coming, but it's still never good. But we're taking it all in and doing the best we can with it.

So, and again, this is part of the reason for folks, we go back, we go way back to a couple of years ago, really, when the supervisors kind of all of a sudden realized that we've got limited life. Yeah. At the landfill.

And so since then it's been, and a lot of that had to do with they were having issues with resource recovery. You were getting a lot of material, a lot of tons. Now upside, you were getting a lot of money. Yeah.

You're making money for it, which allowed you to keep your local rates down. But as we've started to make this transition, some of those local rates have had to come up. And again, it's all part of the balancing act you have to try to do and extend as much life as you can. Yeah.

And yeah, we've got the, we've got some money fronted to us. Essentially, we sold off a lot of airspace and we're not getting it back. That's the inevitable, I guess, the truth of the matter is what's going to happen. It's a finite airspace. We've used up a bunch.

We used it up really fast. We've made some money off of it. But, you know, now the money can only, can only do so much for us. So we need airspace. And so we're trying to slow it down. Step one, simple, you need more space in the landfill. Let's take in less garbage.

One thing that we looked at was the Ames and Story County waste and said, you know what, maybe we don't, is there something else that could be done with that stuff? And they did find another option. So that's good. That's going to work out July 1 of 2027.

Start seeing that impact of less stuff coming into the Boone County landfill and the story and Ames waste going elsewhere. So looking forward to that. Slow down, I guess, if you will, just to see the slower filling of the landfill.

Yeah, you mentioned a couple of years ago how that kind of came about. Yeah. And it was at that timeline too of we always kind of hope, be able to expand our, invite some property around us.

But there's limitations on three of the four sides and then the fourth one kind of became not available also. So kind of like, uh-oh, now if we can't expand. The thought several years ago was, yes, acquire more property and continue to expand in the same vicinity.

So not get that, now your land block pretty much. Yep. Unless it gets really creative, I guess, and how we would ever go a different direction. And there's two roads in the way in two of those directions. So could we ever, could we ever do that?

Could we ever move a road or something? There's that discussion. There's the DNR considering maybe they would allow us to go higher with the garbage. So right now it's a four to one slope. So we go steeper, get more garbage inside.

And it does add significant years to the life if you do that calculation on how it, what capacity there is available. But there's operational issues with that. And the winds of the springs, actually almost any time of year anymore, it seems like the winds are going.

And the higher we go, then the farther the garbage will blow too if it comes off of the hill being like another hundred feet taller. Imagine what it would look like with bags launching off the top of those. Well if it hits the metro, well that's it.

You know, and a lot of people say, well why did we have to take, again, Story County, close theirs down, oh gosh, 20 years ago? Yeah, something like that. It was quite a while ago. And at the time, DNR said, go to boot.

Basically they are the, we do have someone that is in charge while people wonder sometimes. But it is the Department of Natural Resources. This is their responsibility and you have to work under their guidelines.

Yeah, and that was, it was logistically look at where Ames, you know, that's where the landfill was. Where's the nearest one? You start looking at locations that would be up to the north is in Adronabu.

Going south to metro and Marshalltown to the east and certainly farther away than what would be just to come to Boone. So the easier one was, yeah, Boone's closer, let's just do that. So, and I get it, you know, and I wish we could continue, honestly.

I mean, I wish we had much more space and we could continue working with Ames and Story County because, I mean, just environmentally speaking, to send all those trucks from middle of Ames all the way to Carroll is where they're going.

Think of the environmental impact with emissions and travel the roads. I mean, a lot of things can be problematic and a lot of stuff being transported, more opportunity for stuff to not make it there and be blown off their vehicles. As we've seen around here.

So there's just a lot of things about it that I'm, you know, I wish we had a lot more space and that's, I think everyone, not everyone, landfills around the state are experiencing that. I wish we had more space.

Yes, like we touched on it before, we're not the only one in this predicament. And again, the, at least the thoughts and the things that were done many years ago, like when they started resource recovery and Ames. Good idea.

Logistically, we found out that for a variety of reasons did not work out as well as they had hoped. I think they've had a lot of use out of it, but still that product does have to make its way eventually to a landfill. Yeah, that's right.

You know, the stuff that you can burn, that's great. But there's a lot of stuff in the garbage containers and it gets dumped that can't get burnt. That has to go somewhere and it goes to a landfill.

The stuff that can get burnt, that's wonderful, but it's going to be creating ash from that process. Where does that that's going to a landfill? So inevitably, everything ends up at a landfill.

Eventually, even recycling, you talk about, you know, recycling plastic, cardboard, all sorts of things. Eventually, that stuff, the material breaks down, it's been recycled, it's been transformed and other things so many times that it just can't, it breaks down anymore.

Now, aluminum and glass are kind of the exceptions. Those are supposed to be inevitable. But you talk about plastic and cardboard, you know, thick, heavy cardboard, that's great.

Then next time it gets a little bit thinner, it comes back as a different material, eventually thinner, thinner down to the paper towel rolls, toilet paper rolls, the inside of that little cardboard thing. That's pretty much the last cardboard life.

Maybe then it can come back as paper, but that's the last of the cardboard. That's really thin and not very useful. So it always, it breaks down over time and then eventually it goes to a landfill. So I mean, at least it's a spot. That's the good thing.

But do you have people come in or every once in a while come across somebody who would just say, so, but why, how did we get in this predicament? And it's basically, people throw a lot of stuff away. Yeah, that's true. Yep.

And you know, you look at, go back, I don't know how many years the magic number would be, but wouldn't it really start coming, you know, becoming a problem. And I would say the development of plastic certainly is an impactful one.

Plastic can be recycled, some of it, most of it, not all of it, you start mixing. But the bad part is you start mixing materials together. And one example is like a solar panel.

You have that, I've had that discussion with solar companies and they're like, it's a hundred percent recyclable materials. Well, it's made from wood and wire and glass and plastic, and they rattle off all the different components of that.

But unless it is separated into those different materials, it's not recyclable. So fact is that's not recyclable as is. If it gets dismantled, then yes, it could be.

But you start mixing those things together and it becomes then, well, if we're not going to spend the time to dismantle that, then you know what's going to happen to it? It's going to get buried.

And I think that's what we've done over the years in, you know, in the society just changing. We're getting to be good chemists. There's so many more hazardous materials out there too.

You look at the, we went to that training recently, the landfill, so we could learn how to handle the household hazardous waste collection. And there's more mixtures, it seems like, of where does this go? How does this get classified?

Well, it's a flammable liquid, but it's also a, you know, a base material, a corrosive, and it has these different characteristics. And okay, well, we'll put it in this one.

So my point being, you start mixing those things together and then they are not able to be reused in any way or recycled in that capacity. So then it's garbage. Yeah.

So one of the challenges, of course, recycling, and I did recently see Ames starting their curbside recycling, which again, that's something that with the moves that they are making, because they are going to build this big transfer station and we'll see their trucks driving by on their way to Carroll pretty regularly.

And that, so I mean, that's what's going to, that's the theory on when this is going to happen, probably what, another year or so? Yeah. A year and a half, maybe. Yeah.

I think they're talking about the recycling stuff, but yeah, they're still in the production of the, or the development of their RC, R3C, their new transfer station, their new campus for handling the waste and recycling materials. Yeah.

Then they're, you know, the garbage added to Carroll and then I think the curbside stuff. And I think they're working with one of the Metro companies, Metro Waste, kind of like you. Yeah. We do that. We keep working at it. We have had them come by and pick up our paper.

I mean, I get that we get the white paper from us here, but I know the cardboard, that's been one of the missions to try to divert that and at least have some cost avoidance. Right. Yep. Got that part. Still working on that. Well, it's a challenge.

We do have on the recycling side, want people to remember that now that we're getting close to the beginning of April, we will start doing the household hazardous drop-off opportunity.

I'm not going to say the whole thing because we're just going to have the one coming up first of April. You're going to be back on the Saturday, first Saturday. Yeah. We begin that every Saturday morning, couple hours.

So if you've been cleaning up something and you got a box of things that you're going, I have no idea what this chemical is, but I think I need to get it to somebody else.

Saturday mornings, you can swing out to the landfill, go into the second entrance way and someone can help you out. Yeah. And you can bring out other materials too, but you'd have to go through the scale to get rid of those.

But if you have those materials from a clean out, you know, the popular ones or the ones that people are kind of desperate when they call it, they say, we just bought this house and they left all this stuff behind.

Or we're cleaning out mom and dad's house, the grandparents house, whatever it might be. And there's all this stuff and we don't know what it is and can you help? And you know, we just went to that household hazardous waste training.

Like I said, they kind of reiterated, you know, like do your best to not give an answer of, I don't know what that is, keep it or do something else with it. When people bring out those materials, do all you can to take everything you can. No, we can't take it all.

I mean, there's, there's always those things that we don't take ammunition or nuclear material.

Radioactive one is, you know, in the household hazardous, here's a fun one, you know, you get the household hazardous waste, smoke alarms, fire detectors, those have radioactive material in there.

There, which is kind of hazardous and it's kind of a bad one, but we don't take that in the household hazardous waste collection. So it's radioactive material, it classifies as hazardous, but we don't take it in the hazardous waste collection facility. It actually gets buried.

So yeah, of all things. It's just one of them head scratchers. Well, let's make a forever chemical. And then you're not supposed to collect, you know, like a hundred of those or like an apartment building and clean out a whole bunch and take a hundred of them.

No, they don't want you to bury many of them at a time. You're supposed to spread it out so there's less concentrations. And it's like, but it's inevitably it's all in there, but these are some of the head scratches. You know, I got it.

I have to get a job coming up with these plans, do some of this stuff too. Yeah. Wow. You know, you kind of go, okay, well, all right. Well, just do it your way. Those are the rules. Let's just play by them, I guess. But you mentioned those Saturdays and those are great.

Those have been popular the last couple of years doing those. Well received, I believe, an opportunity to not have to schedule something.

You can just grab those things and head out to the landfill, go to the second entrance, like you said, find the hazardous waste area, wait for an employee to help you get those things out and get them sorted and contained appropriately.

And again, if that Saturday doesn't work, you don't want to wait till the next Saturday. We are open for the household hazardous waste collection by appointment, 8 to 3 Monday through Friday also.

Just call ahead, make sure there's someone available that can help you out with the proper handling and storage of the stuff. Communication essential here. All you got to do is call and ask and say, you know, can I do this? Do I have it?

And yes, if you're moving into a house or something, you go, you know, I got like 30 gallons of latex paint here. Well, start drying that stuff out, you know. Open the lid now and be really patient. And or put in kitty litter or whatever. There's a number of things you can do.

But do just latex paint, just dry it out. Yep. Yeah. Now, if it's enamel or, you know, if you got oil based paint. Oil based. Yep. That's the one. And, you know, there's a lot of people will assume, well, it says enamel or it says acrylic or it says whatever.

It really comes down to whether it says oil based or latex or water or some of those catch words. I often look at containers and if it doesn't say latex, it doesn't say oil, look at the cleanup options and it'll tell you to clean your brushes and containers with warm soapy water.

That's going to be water based. And that's latex and it's not a hazardous place, but it's garbage. And then the other side is mineral spirits or thinner or something like that. All of that. Then it's oil based. Yep. And then it's a hazardous material, hazardous waste.

So then you can use our free drop off on those Saturdays. Yeah. And there it is. Oh, yeah. Hey, see how easy that is, people? It's hard. I do want to get back to batteries because that is what we touched on this the last time we had a visit with you.

And I asked about your concrete bunker and I know supervisors also asked you about that. And that's been one of the big things that you guys made that commitment. We'll take all batteries, but just put some tape over the positive end, something like that. Get them to us.

And especially if you have rechargeable batteries that are failing. Yeah. Please get them to us quickly. Yeah. Those don't want those sitting around your house. Yeah.

I mean, typical nine volts and, you know, the alkaline old batteries that are probably not much harmful to them, honestly. But, you know, let's still get them out of your house. And then just start getting that mentality of all the batteries, try to get them removed.

We have that service at the landfill, so you can drop them off anytime we're open.

And in particular, the ones that you're hitting on is those, the bad ones, the dangerous ones, the ones that are bulging, those battery packs, rechargeable ones, especially that look compromised, or even if they're feeling hot, that's an issue. Don't leave them in your house.

Don't leave them inside anywhere. Don't just set them out in your yard either. But, you know, I would encourage to have a bucket of sand. It's always a good thing to set that in and away from everything and then get it to us.

We have this concrete building that we acquired and trying to modify it and make it into a temporary battery storage. We don't want all the batteries for Boone County sitting out there forever. But we got to get them to somebody else.

And in the meantime, we need to store them safely. So this concrete building would serve as that. And I mean, it's not fireproof, but it's going to be more resistant anyway, should there be an issue.

So main thing is safety in your home, get those batteries out of there so there's not a fire. You know, you have those batteries around the tube. What if there was a fire in your home too? That's just going to accelerate that and be even more frightening, I guess.

If you take a firefighter going into those, into your house and additional fires blowing up and batteries and stuff. So, you know, there is a concern with them. They're good, you know, good environmentally. There's a lot of positives to it. However, there are those issues.

How are you going to handle it on the tail end of the. I was going to say, because you know, and I can remember back with, you know, everybody with alkaline, just throw it in the garbage. And that's what you guys used to do.

But so have we seen sort of a, because one of the problems is, is that they do have a tendency to start fires. Have we seen kind of a reduction in some of the fires since you guys have started doing this? I know people just still automatically will just throw them, but. Yeah.

We haven't done a great job of logging fires. You know, it's one of those things actually statewide where landfills are starting to do now. And we need to get a program developed for it.

But, you know, I know like just a year ago or so, or even a couple, you know, guys used to say, the guys at the landfill, the operators would show me here, here's some video of, you know, of a fire that was starting at the landfill.

They see the smoke coming, they remove it, find the battery ultimately is, is pretty much the norm. Find that battery that's buried in there that has started to smolder and smoke and starting to light up. Did they have to get out and start digging through that to find it?

Usually the equipment they drag it back and separate it. And if they need to, they'll hit it with a fire extinguisher that they're carrying. Okay.

But generally speaking, if you just remove it from the other stuff and then there's usually water puddles nearby or, you know, some standing water or worst case, just drive over and smash it down.

If they can, but really we need to remove it, you know, because that'll sit and smolder for quite some time. So if we can remove it, isolate it, you know, let it finish its chemical reaction, if you will.

And then, but at least it's controlled is, it's going to be the biggest thing. So we'll try to pack it down and sand if we're able to, I mean, if it's actually still active, but yeah.

Now, do we have companies that with the, like the alkaline batteries and stuff like that, the triple A's, double A's and things that are not rechargeable, but do we have some people coming up with a way to process those and try, there can't be much to recover out of there.

I can't imagine. Yeah. Out of those alkaline batteries, there's not much. It's like 0.1% of it or something, really minute amount that can be recycled. But there is a company that takes them. We work with EAS, Electronic Asset Security out of Urbandale.

And they said they would take all the batteries and we're like, cool, that sounds wonderful. Because that's what we wanted to do. Sure. The idea that what kind of battery is it? Well, if it's this battery, it goes here. And this battery goes here. This one is no, it's garbage.

I mean, it gets confusing. And there's, like I mentioned before about we're good chemists. We're creating new things. There's different forms of batteries now. I mean, there's all those rechargeables. There's lithium lithium ion.

There's NiCAD, alkaline, drawing a blank on all the different ones. There's a lot. So it gets confusing. And I tell you what, it gets harder to read them every, as your arms can't get long enough, as you get a little bit older. Right, Jim? I know exactly. Yes, I do.

No matter how good I am at it. Trying to see that. It's like, what does that say? What kind is it? It's like, who cares? Just collect it, separate it, bring it out to us. We'll do that. We'll pull out the microscopes and see if we can read the fine print on what it is.

But we'll get it stored temporarily and then get it to a recycler for its useful life anyway. So for people that are wondering, really, you guys are just really getting into it, especially now that you've got a place to put them in.

And again, if they ever have any questions, they can always call and ask. You bet. Easy way to do. We really want to develop something more out in the community to have containers that people can drop them off because I know we're not the most convenient.

I mean, we're not far from town, but also, you know, our hours, we can't be open 24 hours.

But if there's a 24-hour drop-off containers that you could put those batteries in, then I think we need something like that just to be more convenient based and then we can collect those and haul them and put them in our building, etc.

So again, you know, I'd hate to see like someone has a battery, but oh, we've already closed for the day, but it's already hot. What am I going to do with it?

And then we have an issue, but certainly don't leave it in your home, but you know, try to get it out, but pack it in sand away from everything. And but again, if we would have something as a collection points in town to be more convenient that could be used, then let's do that.

But you know, how do we make that? Because what if someone throws in a hot battery and then that thing explodes and what kind of a container we put in that, where's it going to be located? There's a lot of things to address with that. The fire department will not be your friend.

No, that would be a hot one. So yeah, it's easy answers. You know, we would have had this solved a long time ago. That's right. Keep working at it too. But we'll keep working at it and see what we can come up with. So well, got plenty more things to talk about as we get up.

We're going to have yard waste days coming up here in April. We're going to have Earth Day again. People get out, pick up some litter again, just throwing in that quick reminder.

If you want to adopt a ditch, something like that, keep Bunkani Beautiful the way to go and check with the landfill for that. Yeah, we can help you out. Absolutely. Thanks for joining us. Thank you.