The Backhus A75 compost turner is used to turn the compost windrows. (Courtesy photos)
A curbside collection vehicle delivers a load of curbside green waste to Wasatch Integrated Waste Management District.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has selected Wasatch Integrated Waste Management District in Layton as one of two local governments from Region 8 to receive the Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling (SWIFR) grants totaling more than $8.3 million.
Wasatch Integrated Waste Management District is expected to receive more than $3.4 million to help improve post-consumer materials management and infrastructure. According to the EPA, this initiative supports economic development in communities across the nation.
“We submitted an application for the SWIFR grant,” said Preston Lee, executive director of Wasatch Integrated Waste Management District. “We submitted back in 2024. It took a little while to actually receive the award but we were pretty excited that we got it. We requested $3.4 million but I haven’t seen an official letter from the EPA that tells us exactly the details.”
The project is to advance the Wasatch Compost Facility and Program Expansion, he said. “The project will expand the capacity of the compost facility by enlarging the footprint of its aerated static pile on the posting pad.”
When the building was completed, it came online in 2013, said Lee. “It was only two-thirds the size of the original construction plan. Budgeting constraints required us to reduce that footprint. So now what we’re hoping is to expand that to the full extent.”
There are other components to this project, he said. “We are expanding the curbside collection of our organics to some cities — the member cities inside of our district. We hope that we’ll be able to do that with four cities, either expanding the current programs that they have or actually introducing them to cities that don’t currently have a program.”
Those cities have yet to be determined, Lee said. “In the actual application, we were to introduce the service into Clearfield and Farmington and then to expand the service in Sunset and Syracuse. The reason I say it’s yet to be determined is because since we put this application together, Clearfield rolled out a program in 2025 earlier this spring and Farmington is supposed to roll out their program in 2026.”
Lee said they have to look through the project and make sure that they’re complying with all of the aspects that they asked for. “So I don’t know if we’re going to continue to work with those cities or if we’re going to try and expand into some of the other cities that don’t currently have programs. But the application did include those four cities.”
Wasatch Integrated will also be expanding its education and outreach to all member cities this fall within the district as far as curbside organics collection, he said. “That’s the curbside green waste program. We currently have nine participating cities and we’re going to be increasing our education and outreach to those cities.
“There’s another aspect that’s part of this project that is kind of exciting,” said Lee. “It asks us to launch a pilot program for contamination detection in collection vehicles. So we’d have to partner with one of the city’s haulers.”
Each city contracts with an independent waste hauler, he said. “We’d be partnering with one of those haulers to install an AI camera system on their trucks. After the cameras are installed, the AI technology on the collection trucks is to detect contamination and curbside organics — the parts as they’re picking them up. Then they can report that contamination and track it. We can also identify who is contaminating those and notify them.”
It’s going to be targeting outreach content distributed to the households that frequently contaminate the green waste system, Lee said. “Some contaminants would be actual garbage in garbage bags. Imagine someone mowing their lawn and they’re drinking a Coke and they just take the Coke can and throw it inside the grass collector. Also they might be cleaning up their garden and raking up all the rocks and putting the rocks in there.”
Most of the contamination is full garbage bags or bagged green waste, he said. “It’s tough for us to process anything that’s bagged. We don’t have bag breakers.”
This is a three-year project, Lee said. “The majority of the work is done within the first two years, with the third year being more of a reporting — just monitoring how effective the education and outreach has been.”
The purpose of the grant is to reduce the amount of air emissions from the landfill, he said. “A lot of the emissions that come from landfills are associated with the organics that are placed inside. Removing the organics out and upcycling them to products that individuals want — like soil composting — that’s what we’re hoping to do.”