John Roosa, Administrator, Boone County Landfill and Recycling, October 21, 2026

Today, visiting with John Rosa, the legendary John Rosa from the Boat County landfill who's not treading mud for a change. Still kind of gooey in spots though, even up high. Even up high. That's because you have all that clay and stuff down there. Yep. Which is good and a bad thing, depending on where it is, but yeah, it's still nice not to have the stuff, the wetness falling from the sky on us and making it infinitely worse. It's nice to have the dry weather and we're starting to make some more progress on our projects out there. So I gotta ask, okay, millions of gallons of leachate have gone through that place, which that's one of the notations I'm guessing that when DNR gave you some things that you know, your leachate is out of control. Well, yeah, we're in the midst of construction too. But so has that slowed down at all? No. The hauling continues. We are, last I looked, we were at 3.4 million gallons that we've hauled. The highest we've been in a full calendar year is 1.2, so we're tripled already. It's not slowing down. We'll probably end up easily over 4, probably pushing 5 million gallons and contracting it out is what we had to do and, you know, that's additional cost, but it's really no choice. You couldn't do construction without it. Yeah, and we can't haul that much and we got three different locations that our haulers are taking it for us, so we're still running them to Boone like we have been. We've added on Ames and a lot of it goes to Des Moines. So it goes by Semi and price expense, but one of them, it's gotta be done right now. We can probably manage it better going forward, even with that extreme amounts, you know, with our forced main project that's going on and getting closer to being done. Even that has regulations on how many gallons we can pump to Boone wastewater treatment plant. So, you know, at 20,000 gallons a day, you know, yeah, we can manage it. It can run, you know, every day of the week type of a thing and be consistent and provided pumps don't fail and, you know, all those things. But it was kind of a perfect storm, not a good way either with all the leachate, with all the rain, I mean, storms from literally storms, but also all the rain that we've had, you know, certainly a problem, not just for our construction, but for the leachate volume. And then, you know, we got some things flowing a little bit better and that was good, but it was also a problem down the road. This would happen back in May and then just the flow, the constant flow coming in and then the lagoon kept rising and we kept pumping it out, it kept rising and it was, and then the rain falling and then the feeding in more of it and it's, there's frustration in my voice. So, you know, I can tell. Maybe you can sense it a little. I apologize for that, but it's a headache. To me, this is then why we're doing this forest main project. Yeah, it is. Because there is, that material is out there and basically the DNR, no matter how long the landfill is going to be there, they're going to make you take care of that or they're going to make the county take care of it. Yeah. Users. Someone will have to. Yes. And it'll be in place. We can utilize that forest main project. We can utilize the forest main once it's, the project is completed and then beyond our life, which, you know, is looking with Ames and Story County leaving our service area and going elsewhere with that waste prolong our life to 35 years and we could probably get, you know, a little more depending on if we can look at this other kind of a westerly expansion on our property, get a little more creative. It's be expensive to do, but it's also probably worth it to extend the life for the landfill. So, you know, you're pushing 40, 45 years and then. This is well after our tenure. Yeah. Right. Someone else's problem. Someone else's, someone else will get to enjoy the use of that forest main to pump leachate into town, but, you know, that's still another 30 years after closure of the landfill. So, you know, this would be something that we use for 75 years and maybe beyond, you know, it's, that's just when it's regulated. And then beyond that, it would, you know, be someone else's, the DNR had taken over and still have it in place. It would just be, I don't know, I wish we would have done this decades ago. I know other landfills have had that in place. You talk to them, they're like, you'll like that you'll be good for you to put that project in and get that going now. And it's like, yeah, I wish we could have, but, you know, it was expensive, but it's a good investment. And look at the money that we're spending now on hauling, especially, and we would recoup a lot of this money going forward. Yeah. Well, I remember visiting with your predecessors, both. Yes. Again, Lois, Scott, before that, it was something that they would love to have moved forward with. Right. And just being able to get the okay to go ahead and spend the money for it. Yeah. That's a challenge. So we're having that conversation during a pufferbillie. You and I, we happened upon Scott and we had a little conversation and he's like, good for you to finally get that one or to get that done. I tried back then, you know, and, uh, yeah, you could tell he was, you know, like thankful that we're getting it done. Well, it's one of those things in a lot normal people, we don't see it. We don't know it. Yeah. It is part of the requirements and it's one of the things that they give you restrictions on and to take care of it. Yep. Yeah. Well, anyway, that's 3 million gallons. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot. 3.4. Don't forget the other 400,000 on top of that. Well, we're not done yet either. Yeah. Yeah. That's a bunch. We'll keep doing that. Let's talk a little bit about the sell expansion because you did mention a little bit about that and getting creative. Thank you for engineers and their imagination, I guess. Yeah. You know, anything can be engineered, it's just how much you want to spend. Right. Yeah. Basically. So right now, basically, we're looking at the expansion Leroy and Sons, so I dried out some for them. I'm guessing they're starting to make some progress. Yeah. They sure are. Yeah. They've been at it and they can get a lot of stuff done, a lot of dirt hauled in a short period of time. There's the, they call it a blackout with all the liner that goes up, the heavy mill liner that goes down for the bottom of the cell and we have the east side, the west side and part of the bottom done. And now that's the issue that we're, you know, we're so frantically trying to lower the water level in the lagoon, the leachate lagoon, trying to get that below the pipe coming in so that it won't backfeed into that area so they can finish their work. So now we're trying to figure out what else we can do because getting that lowered, you know, we needed to get it lowered about three more feet and we need it done, you know, two weeks ago. So you can't just, you know, get rid of that that quickly. It's still like, you know, 200, 300,000 gallons. So hauling out 75,000 in a day is fine, but still some is going in. Especially when it was raining. So you're looking, you know, a couple solid weeks, but they're chomping at the bit to get this going and they waited all this time and, you know, it's, they fought the leachate. We did, you know, we're fighting it now so that they can get their work done as well. So now we're looking at how we can get creative and still accommodate this and make it happen so they can keep moving forward and not have to wait a week or something because we still got to get the liner installers to come back and they're running out of time too. You know, temperatures aren't going to be all that wonderful going forward. You start it in early November and they're looking at mid-November Thanksgiving time being unavailable. So we're, we're in a tight crunch right now. And I mean, it's not the end of the world, but it's also problematic in getting the project done timely. You'd have to just push this back to spring. What a spring typically bring is more rain and more delays and then. So yeah, there's just some challenges. Yeah, it's still fingers crossed. We're still trying to get everything we can done and it's going to be a tight month or two push here at the end. So our, our project initially and folks, it's not inexpensive to do this last sell. Definitely we know that. We're talking a $2 million. Yeah. A little over two. It's probably with some change orders or, you know, 2.1 ish, but yeah, 2 million. And this was even before they had all their diesel price increases and all the delays with the weather and everything else. So good luck, sir. Thank you. I'll take it. The other part is again, working with engineers and you talked about this in, and I know they're doing long range kind of, I'm guessing just tossing out some different ideas because down the road, this would be things that whoever's going to be there. Yes. In 15, 20, 25 years, they're going to say, we can do this, yeah, new technology, new, whatever. They'll come up and so they'll be able to do maybe spread more, go up, raise it up more. I mean, there's different things that they can do that can be engineered. Yeah. There's special considerations and they talked about changing the closure slope so you could go taller, steeper on the sides and there's problems with that because of erosion and elevate, if you go too high and then are you going to have any terraces involved, you can actually maintain the property and, you know, there's issues with it. But ideally, like, wow, if you could do the maximum, you know, two to one closure and go really steep, it adds like 75 years on top of it. I mean, it's very appealing when you look at just that, but you're not going to get that and it's realistically because you'd have to taper it down and build the tariffs in and, you know, modify some things. But still, it's something to consider and DNR is talking about that because it's an alternative cap that would go on the top of it to deflect erosion, I guess, or to prevent erosion from happening, run the water off instead of cutting into it some more. So, you know, there's challenges with that, you know, but could you maybe go three to one instead of four to one and, you know, even though you're allowed to go two to one slope kind of a thing, could you get that happy medium and make it work and still add and get the, you know, extend to life? Yeah, I wish there was other things, you know, there was talk about shredding and we had a shredder who tried it out, you know, with we weren't getting the compaction levels that we were before. We wanted, yeah. So, the idea was to let's shred it and then it would increase by 25%, which was certainly appealing. But then we're actually getting that level now with how we're operating. And also, my concern is going forward is the use of batteries and the common situation we have with fires because of those batteries, and if you ran them through a shredder every time you're going to expose all those batteries to present more fire opportunities, which I do not want. I mean, fire is good for getting rid of garbage, I guess, but it's a scary situation when you have it in the landfill. You haven't been able to do that since the 70s. Right. Theoretically. Yeah. So, that's all in jest. We're not looking for fires. Fires are bad. If you burn out in the country, which that's how I grew up on the dead end gravel road back in the day was burn everything, whatever you can in your burn barrel, and then when that's burn barrels full, then you take that to the landfill and get rid of it to the dump back then. So, we don't have that either. But and I still know that that goes on, but discourage folks from burning garbage and waste because of air contamination and problems with that. So, you know, we got to do the right way, still do the right thing and manage it the right way of all the waste coming in and most cost-effective manner is to smash it and bury it. So, one thing I wanted to ask, because you're part of ISASWA, which is the Solid Waste Society here in Iowa, but we're not the only landfill that's facing the limitations. We know there are several others. Some are further ahead than you, some are further behind you, but I'm guessing others are also looking at some of this, the slopes and the things like that. You might not have to reinvent the wheel. That's right. I mean, others might be out there testing it and saying, this seemed to work best for us, but each situation is going to be a little different. Right. Yeah. And what might work at their site may not work at ours, but it's still, yeah, still something to consider. It is one of those things of maybe you don't want to be first to try to figure out how to do that because you can learn from others' mistakes and draw from that and make a better choice, but yeah, there is certainly going to be issues in the near future with other landfills as well. You know, we talk about ours at, you know, 35, 40 years, you know, max kind of a thing, and then what else do we do, but there's some other landfills that are going to be having in the next decade, in the next 10 years. There's other landfills that are going, they have enough space for centuries of life and that's very envious. I dream about that. I wish that would be the situation here. Not that, you know, we want more garbage necessarily, but we certainly want to be able to have the opportunity to provide that service to the community. Well, we do know all of that's going in the meantime. I know that Ames had some challenges with their systems, and so they've been hauling a lot of material over here. We are getting within, well, I'm going to say half a year or so theoretically that they are going to have their facility up and they'll start transporting long range or longer to Carroll, but again, they were in, they closed down their landfill. God, I think that was back in the 90s, early 90s, something around there. And that's when they got added into boom counting by the DNR, which folks, yeah, it wasn't just half as DNR did that. Well, and it's good to have it designated. You know, it's, at the time, it made a lot of sense. You know, we had some more, we had space, you know, it wasn't really a concern, but there certainly is a lot more growth over names and the amount of garbage coming our way now because of it, you know, is eating up a lot of our airspace. So it's- And they discovered that the recycling of the garbage or the way they reused it with their resource recovery. The idea was good, it seemed good at the time, but the practicality was, in reality, it was difficult to do. Yeah. Well, it started back in 75 and you're like in 50 years and, you know, not much has changed in that process. Well, I think something needed to change. I know they looked at a feasibility study a few years ago to say, maybe we can, we need to do something. You know, this was like three or four years ago and it was, let's do something more elaborate. You know, let's really take more in and let's burn more, which is great, but they're still residual from it, but still they would be able to do that, but then they looked at the price and went, oh, wow, that's a lot of money. We can't do that, so we're going to find something else. So at least the transfer station will be able to, they'll be able to manage it and have some controls over where it goes, and that's a good thing to know where it's going. They've also enhanced their recycling. Yeah. Curbside service. Yeah. We do it all voluntarily. Yep. They're working on it, but it might give us, you get a little higher volume with some of these things. There might, we might get some markets somewhere. Maybe. Yeah. That'd be nice. We'll, but yeah. I mean, once you start to get to said volume, people start to take a look at it and can we do something else with this? And then some stability with that. Yeah. I know the markets fluctuate on recycling and sometimes cardboard's up and down, even metal scrap, you know, can be a little bit volatile and, but if there was some consistency, that would certainly be something beneficial for planning and budgeting purposes too. So. Well, as the citywide cleanup, wrapped up, and I think most of them for the year are pretty much done. Aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. And this one, yeah, was a reschedule from June for city of Boone anyway, but yeah. You kind of just had them set a lot of mattresses that look like a lot of mattresses out there. I know that's the mattresses and tires, not your, not your high priority. I know. No, no, no. You can't really compact them. No. Tires get recycled mattresses could. And I know there's other landfills that are doing that some more now it seems like there's other things I think in Cedar Rapids is a facility that's able to recycle mattresses. So maybe there's some more opportunities coming. But last I knew before that it was up in Minnesota was a company up there that was able to recycle mattresses, but it's quite a process. You know, you can't really haul a lot of mattresses that they don't compact really well into a trailer. So how many, how many can you get and make it worth your, worth your drive? But yeah, citywide's done. I don't have the final figures or anything on it, but I know they're still working through them too. Yeah. I think they hit their free waste, the 65 ton that we give them every year. That was done early Thursday of the first week. So you know, three little over three plus days and they were done with the freeloads anyway coming in, but it still kept coming all week long into Friday. So yeah, I guess it was, it sounds like it was a lot of business for them from what I've, what I saw. That's the initial reaction I've gotten. Yeah. So we'll see what happens again. I was one of those things, the council wanted to continue, the mayor wanted to continue. So public works, they thought a lot of what was out there could have just been taken by the haulers. So as you said before, when in doubt, throw it out. Let's talk some recycling here before we got a few minutes, but recycling efforts. So first of all, yard waste, again, we're in the midst of that. It's a Thursday, Friday, Saturday opportunity. So doing that, but recycling efforts. He's still moving along. Yeah. We're holding pretty steady. We're getting ready for the, you know, holiday push will be coming along pretty soon next month. It seems like November, especially Thanksgiving time and then after on volumes that come in. But everything's going along all right. We still did the electronics recycling and the TVs and those things. There's still a lot of the other materials and that was a question that came up a lot during the citywide cleanup. This would call us and ask about if the city was going to take it and we, we didn't have the answer. I said, we, we will take them, but you know, if you're looking for a service to get them here or get them, you know, taken care of, then that's that was the city thing. But now if you missed, you know, find these other things you want to get rid of and got some electronics, you got TVs, screens, computers, if you're looking at appliances, tires, those things are, you know, regulated and not buried. So they'll bring them on out. We can still handle them and you pay a fee to dispose of those correctly and we'll get them recycled instead. So that's how those are handled going forward. But yeah, the, actually the curbside, the, you know, residential recycling stuff is going along well. You know, the drop off site still, still rocking and rolling and still looking for opportunities to discuss that further with the city to be, if we can have a facility, we can get a property in town and put up a facility. I dream of something that's big enough that we could put in three containers, maybe have room for four so we can rotate them, but also have an area where we could do other things, other things like battery drop off, you know, if we could have a facility right there. And again, that would have to be something that's, you know, fireproof, essentially, because we don't want hot batteries in there and then causing big fires. But where could that be? Could we provide that service with this at that same area, get back to pallets maybe, you know, and I wish there was a way for people to drop off good things and someone else could use them because I really love the reuse of things instead of just throwing it away. Even recycling has a cost and an expense to the service, but, you know, if we're able to reuse things at first instead of just recycling them, that's always going to be better and just to be able to provide more, expand it more and be able to do more for the community. Thank you. I think the, we do know again, they did do the new structure over in Ogden and things like that. Yeah. Seems to have gone well. I think they police, amongst them users, police it pretty well. They do. I've seen things on Facebook about, you know, tear down your boxes, people, you know, so there's people that get on there that are. That is not recyclable. That's not recyclable. Don't put the styrofoam in there. That's still not. It never has been. Probably never will be where we are, but yeah, they're, you know, having that voice coming from somebody else sometimes is better, you know, that, I know they get it from us, but then when people feel empowered, just, you know, because they know what's right and wrong and they want to make sure that that recycling facility stays available to them, they care. You know, there's a lot of passionate people out there in our communities that care about recycling. And it's a good thing whether or not you buy into it or not, a fact is, if we can recycle, we're preventing stuff from going to our landfill. And when we talk about the in life, the, the final capacity and how much more we can take, the more we can prevent filling it up faster. That's good for us. So keep recycling. Okay. And composting. You heard it. You heard him say that. Recycling and composting. Yeah. Again, with the leaves. And we've heard, I've had several different things where people were talking about just mulch those leaves and stuff like that. Some do, some don't. Yeah. Reconsider your process. You know, especially if you're bagging up grass clippings, you know, try not to, let's just mulch those up and put them right back into your lawn. That's a better service. It's good use, good nutrients going right back into your lawn. Leaves are falling. You know, do you have to bag them all up and bring them out? Maybe not. Maybe you can mulch them up instead and put them back into your lawn as well. It's good to have that good balance of nitrogens and carbon. So put it right back in there and see if you can not have to waste your time and fuel and all those things to bring it out to the landfill. So when you get into this fall, winter time of the year and do you look at doing some more programs or things like that out there? I know you work with naturals. You work with others. Work with the schools. If you can. Yeah. We still try to get out there. Still available. It's one of the things that we need to do more of, get back in on a regular basis. That was, you know, COVID kind of wiped it out and it's still never really recovered. I got probably got to do a better job of pushing out there and making sure schools know that we're available to come out and do that and, you know, the other side of free field trips to come out and, you know, you want to see something that goes on, you need to understand the landfill a little bit more, come out to a landfill. Go visit one, wherever you are, your nearest landfill, go ask if you could see it and understand the operation because a lot of people don't realize then put the garbage out on the curb. What happens after that? Yeah. They probably don't know. They think, well, it'll go somewhere. Okay. Well, come out. It goes away. And we call the landfill away. Welcome to away because this is where your garbage goes when it goes away and it stays there a long time. It will be there a long time. It doesn't really. No, it doesn't break down. Yeah. We've gone back and taken a look at some areas that you've had to open for one reason or another. Yeah. People got into small garbage and you can still see a newspaper and you can still read the print on it. It was from the 70s and this was 45 years after, you know, it was produced. I'm not sure when it got buried, but assuming it was in that same realm. When you're talking of newspaper didn't decompose after 40 years, I'm guessing plastic's not going anywhere. So you do separate out. That's one of the things at the drop off. I know you've got areas where you do newspapers and that was one of the big things we did along a long time ago. It seemed like we did and they shredded them up and they were using them. But is there still, is that something still viable or is it whatever business was doing it is now no longer feasible? Yeah. Yeah. Separation for on our end is not, I don't, I don't know if there's a market separately for that. But you do separate. You want to separate it out. You can. Yes. I think that's actually someone else put up a container and it's like, fine, if you want to take that, I mean, honestly, if it's going to be reused, that's going to be the main purpose. So maybe it's not recycled, but if it's going to be used for bedding or whatever purpose it may be, that's great because it's still being used. So let's get another used before it's thrown away. Okay. Yeah. Just curious. Sure. Got all these things we have to keep track about there. Yeah. I wish there was more. We try to keep our eyes open for other opportunities to see what we can do to take more materials in different ways and continue to do that. All right. John Rosa, landfill administrator, recycling coordinator, a guest on our program today. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.