Building for a million people

Northwest Arkansas is one of the most dynamic growth stories in America. About 40 new residents arrive here every day. The cranes are up, the subdivisions are expanding, and the restaurants, retailers and institutions needed to serve a booming population are multiplying alongside them.

The Growing Home NWA regional growth strategy — a serious, ambitious document — projects our region reaching 1 million residents by 2050, roughly doubling what we have today.

It’s an exciting vision. And there’s a gap in it large enough to drive a garbage truck through.

The Growing Home strategy addresses housing, mobility, economic opportunity, and Ozark preservation with care and sophistication. What it does not meaningfully address is what 1 million people will do with their waste — the food scraps, construction debris, biosolids and organic material that every resident, every building and every business generates every single day. Planning for where people live and work without planning for what they discard is like designing a kitchen without a drain.

This isn’t a distant problem. It’s already here.

The regional landfill has an estimated max 10 years of remaining capacity. Ten years. Meanwhile, Northwest Arkansas is adding population at a pace that would challenge infrastructure systems that were already mature and well-funded, which ours are not.

Annually, an estimated 40,000 tons of food waste are disposed of at the landfill in our region, accounting for about 20% of the total landfill volume. That food waste produces methane as it decomposes — a greenhouse gas roughly 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, along with other noxious gases. And when organics are buried, they’re gone from the economy entirely, despite being a feedstock for high-value products like premium compost and biochar derived from construction/demolition debris that local farmers and gardeners can’t get enough of.

Here’s the opportunity hiding inside that problem: Waste streams, managed correctly, are not liabilities. They’re commodities. Organic material becomes soil amendments and carbon-sequestering biochar. Construction and demolition debris are reclaimed as aggregates and other recovered materials. What we’re landfilling today at significant cost could generate real economic returns for the region, while extending landfill life and shrinking our environmental footprint.

That kind of circular economy doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be planned.

Carbon Chicken Project is Arkansas’ only commercial biochar-enhanced poultry litter fertilizer producer, converting agricultural organic waste into a soil amendment that sequesters carbon, improves water retention and reduces the need for synthetic inputs. Our sister company, Food Recycling Solutions, is NWA’s only commercial food waste diversion operation, collecting from 125 accounts and diverting 2.5 million pounds of food scraps annually from the landfill — material that becomes compost in such demand we sell out completely each year, currently unable to meet even a fraction of local appetite.

Developers, corporate campuses, institutions and commercial operators generate the waste streams that will define whether this region scales sustainably or stumbles into a capacity crisis mid-growth. Residents also have the voice to demand that regional planning bodies treat waste stream infrastructure with the same seriousness they give to roads and housing.

The time to build the systems that handle a million people’s waste is before we have a million people. That window is open right now, but not indefinitely. We need solutions-focused and local businesses ready to work. Let’s get to the table.

Editor’s note: Richard Ims is chief operations officer and co-founder of Carbon Chicken Project, and founder of Food Recycling Solutions. The opinions expressed are those of the author.