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Written by Brad Mitzelfelt, First District Supervisor
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 Economic development and environmental stewardship can exist side-by-side.
Perhaps the most obvious example is the push for renewable energy. San Bernardino County is the epicenter of this emerging and important industry because the sun shines bright and long here, especially in the Mojave Desert.
We also have the wide expanses of open land necessary for utility scale solar power plants, the kind that can power medium-sizes cities.
Those assets — sun and land — also make the desert appropriate for another use that benefits the overall environment, namely, composting solid material that remains after wastewater is treated. However, as with large solar plants, great care must be taken in where the projects are located in order to protect the desert environment.
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 Currently, an estimated 35 million tons of waste are disposed in California’s landfills annually, of which 32 percent is organic materials.
Waste materials that are organic in nature, such as plant material, food scraps, and paper products, can be recycled using biological composting and digestion processes to decompose the organic matter.
The resulting organic material is then recycled as mulch or compost for agricultural or landscaping purposes. The intention of biological processing in waste management is to control and accelerate the natural process of decomposition of organic matter. There are a large variety of composting and digestion methods and technologies that vary in complexity.
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 Compost is a combination of organic materials that are being decomposed largely through aerobic decomposition into a rich black soil. The process of composting is simple and practiced by individuals in their homes, farmers on their land, and industrially by industries and cities.
Compost is high in nutrients and used for many purposes. A few of the places that it is used are in gardens, landscaping, horticulture, and agriculture. The compost soil itself is beneficial for the land in many ways, including as a soil conditioner, a fertilizer to add vital humus or humic acids, and as a natural pesticide for soil. In ecosystems, compost soil is useful for erosion control, land and stream reclamation, wetland construction, and as landfill cover.
Composting organisms require four equally important things to work effectively:
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Written by Joe Nelson, Staff Writer
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 A proposed sludge composting plant in Hinkley that has been the subject of ongoing legal battle between citizens, environmentalists and the county for the last three years got the green light, again, Tuesday from the Board of Supervisors. On a 3-1 vote, with Supervisor Josie Gonzales dissenting and Chairman Gary Ovitt absent, the board denied an appeal to block the project from going forward and approved it instead. Nursery Products, LLC. plans to build the composting plant on 80 acres south of Highway 58, a mile west of Helendale and about eight miles west of the unincorporated area of Hinkley. Hinkley residents appealed the project when it was first approved by the Planning Commission in 2006. When the Board of Supervisors denied the appeal in February 2007, citizens teamed with the Center for Biological Diversity and sued the county. The trial court reversed the county's approval and ordered the county to further consider the feasibility of an enclosed facility and to conduct a more thorough assessment of the project's water supply. Nursery Products appealed the trial court's decision, and the Fourth District Court of Appeals upheld the low court's decision.
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