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   All photos by Erin L. McCoy.

When you think about progressive composting and recycling programs, big cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles might come to mind-yet one of the most efficient composting facilities in the world is in Appalachian Tennessee.

Sevier County, Tennessee, is home to the twin tourist destinations of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, and attracts more than 11 million visitors per year. Gatlinburg is a quaint mountain town packed with quirky stores, restaurants, moonshine shops, and an aquarium. Pigeon Forge is home to the Dollywood amusement park. These towns are poised at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which covers roughly a third of the county.

Perhaps it’s this proximity to the natural world that helped inspire Sevier County’s unique approach to waste disposal. When it opened in 1991, the Sevier Solid Waste Composting Facility was one of the first in the world to use rotating drums, or “digesters,” for breaking down compost. Because of this plant, the majority of the county’s waste is composted or recycled. Today, it’s still a rare breed.

“There’s about 12 or so [composting facilities] in the world like this,” explains Tom Leonard, general manager of Sevier Solid Waste. “Every one of them has gotten some design feature from here, because we’re one of the oldest.”

As we walk around the facility, Leonard points to a grassy rise in the distance. “That back there is our old Class 1 landfill, but we don’t use it anymore.”

Measures of success

About 100,000 tons of solid waste and treated sewage pass through this facility every year-and an astounding 70 percent is diverted from landfills by being composted or recycled. That’s compared to 34.5 percent of all U.S. waste that was diverted in 2012, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. San Francisco, declared the greenest city in America by the Siemens Green City Index, recycled 77 percent of its waste in 2010, but was the only North American city of the 27 listed in the index to recycle more than Sevier County.

The county’s waste diversion rate becomes even more impressive when Leonard explains that 99 percent of the county’s waste is diverted from its Class 1 landfill-the most environmentally harmful type, requiring heavy lining to prevent runoff, careful regulatory oversight, and decades of maintenance. Garbage in these landfills is eventually covered up, but it never really goes away, Leonard says.

“I just don’t like the word ‘forever,’ because that’s a long time. So what we’re doing is, we’re stabilizing the material back down to its form, and our ultimate goal is not to put anything from this plant into a landfill.”