Des Plaines Composting Facility Patriot Acres Plans to Triple Operations with its First Fully Operational Year
Transcript: Walking along the unpaved trails beside Beck Lake in Des Plaines, you might see excavators to the west tossing around 100-year-old tree trunks. This is Patriot Acres, an organics and landscape material recycling facility that opened last year and is rapidly expanding. The mulch from those trunks could be in your yard soon or even in the topsoil of the Illinois farms that you buy produce from.
Patriot Acres is nestled within the Des Plaines River Trail System and bordered by the Des Plaines River on the west and Oakton College to the south. After years of opposition from some community members and local governments, the facility is ready to give food scraps, tree trunks and yard waste new lives, thanks in part to technology they designed in-house.
For many Illinois residents who compost, their food scraps leave their minds as soon as they enter the compost bin. But when you compost, what happens next? How and where do the vegetables you let die at the bottom of your fridge (again) find new life?
Your food scraps could soon find their final home at Patriot Acres, an organics and landscape material recycling facility that opened last year in Des Plaines and is rapidly expanding. After years of opposition from some community members and local governments, the facility is ready to give food scraps, tree trunks and yard waste new lives as topsoil, compost, mulch and much more.
In phase 2 of their expansion, expected to be completed around the beginning of 2026, Patriot Acres will grow further to accommodate three to four times the volume of the organic material the facility can currently process, said Todd Daniels, owner and director of operations. This expansion also includes a new 1.5 million gallon rainwater basin, a eighty-seven percent increase from the current 800,000 gallon one.
This is the first full year of operations for Patriot Acres, yet the company already has over 400 customers from the South Side of Chicago to the Wisconsin border. Daniels emphasized that much of the operation’s success results from the visions and diligence of his coworkers; some of them have worked with each other in landscaping businesses for 25 years.
“Team effort is important,” Daniels said. “People work hard, then see the ultimate cycle take place.”
Patriot Acres is funded in part by a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Fertilizer Product Expansion Program (FPEP).
FPEP promotes innovation and competition in the U.S. fertilizer industry. The program funds operations that manufacture, produce and distribute nutrient alternatives to commonly used chemical fertilizers, which are frequently produced with natural gas, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Patriot Acres received the grant because compost is considered a suitable alternative. Nearby farms in McHenry County will be one key beneficiary of Patriot Acres’ products, such as their topsoil.
“Composting is a fundamentally local process,” the EPA explained. “By composting our food scraps and yard trimmings instead and using the compost produced, we can return those nutrients and carbon to the soil to improve soil quality, support plant growth and build resilience in our local ecosystems and communities.”
Patriot Acres is bordered on two sides by forest preserves that are home to lots of wildlife. Some of staff members’ favorites: a resident pack of coyotes, deer, a pair of bald eagles, hawks, butterflies and more. Patriot Acres doesn't accept any meat or bone scraps, which helps to keep these relationships pleasant. “It’s fun; every day is a bit different,” Daniels said. Photo taken and edited by Rhiannon O’Berry, 03/06/2025
Initial Opposition from Surrounding Communities
Through the past several years of attempting to attain all necessary zoning permits from groups like the Cook County Board of Commissioners, Patriot Acres weathered strong opposition from some local residents and governments.
It didn't start that way, according to John Lardner, an engineer and co-owner of Patriot Acres who worked on the zoning nine years ago. Lardner relayed via email that initial meetings with the planning and development departments of the Village of Glenview, the Village of Mt. Prospect, and the City of Des Plaines went well, and each seemed supportive of the project.
Lardner explained that after he applied for the special use permit in late 2016 and a public notice went out, a flyer arguing that Patriot Acres would cause severe odors for surrounding townships was mailed out to 5,000 addresses in their zip code, and from there, resistance to the facility amplified.
Archival research on their respective websites found that in 2017 alone, Maine Township, Wheeling Township, the Des Plaines City Council and the Glenview Village Board each passed resolutions opposing Patriot Acres’ development. An ad hoc coalition of local residents called Citizens vs. Patriot Acres emerged with a website, events and memos opposing the site’s construction.
The primary concerns among these opposing parties included increased truck traffic, fire risks, vermin, odor and further contamination on the site of the unlined Sexton landfill.
In a memo presented to the Glenview Community Development Department in May 2017, the coalition called Patriot Acres “an environmental disaster waiting to happen and a public nuisance in the making, one that promises to impact thousands of people for miles around.”
According to Daniels, Patriot Acres partners reached out to the community; they hosted open houses to explain how their composting process works (which Lardner said attracted hundreds of residents), spoke to city councils and sought feedback, welcoming questions.
While some community opposition remained, Patriot Acres ultimately obtained the special use permits from the Cook County Board of Commissioners as well as permits from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and the Illinois EPA.
Karen J. Dimond, supervisor of Maine Township, has been in her role since 2021 and said Patriot Acres has not been a prominent issue during her time in office to her knowledge.
“I haven’t received any complaints about it,” said Dimond.
Representatives from Wheeling Township and Glenview did not respond to a request for comment.
Daniels said that the most crucial aspect of preventing hazards like fire and odor from affecting surrounding communities is company proactivity surrounding safety.
“The priority for Patriot Acres is to be a good neighbor,” Daniels said.
This is part of why Patriot Acres closely monitors temperature of on-site piles and regularly tests to ensure piles are sufficiently moisturized with rainwater from the on-site reservoir, Daniels said. Biocovers also help to minimize odors and deter scavengers; they are part of the aerated static piles composting technique Patriot Acres uses.
The “How:” Aerated Static Piles
Transcript: So, how does Patriot Acres’ method, aerated static piles, work?
First, yard waste, food scraps and more are collected in large piles, then ground down and mixed together in different ways based on the products they will become.
Within a pile, that ground product, also called the “unders,” is laid over pipes, then covered with a layer of yard waste like mulch and leaves called “overs,” or biocovers.
Next, a temperature probe designed in-house is left in the pile and sends temperature information to a digital database every five minutes. Each pile is part of this digital database that is monitored centrally, and controlled to optimize decomposition while making sure the piles don’t overheat.
Then pumps attached to the pipes blast air through them as needed into the bottom of the pile through holes and oxygenate the unders, giving the aerobic bacteria the air that they need to consume material faster.
Biocovers also help piles retain the heat generated by aerobic bacteria as they digest the waste, which Daniels said helps deter pests.
“The biocovers act like insulation on a house,” Daniels explained.
The piles must peak at internal temperatures over at least 130 degrees Fahrenheit, even in winter, and they can reach up to 175 degrees Fahrenheit. This conversion of matter to heat is why 100 pounds of food and yard waste can easily become only twenty pounds of compost, Daniels said.
Patriot Acres is the largest facility in Illinois that uses this method, Daniels said. Finished topsoil and compost is produced in three to six months. The EPA explains that aerated static piles require less labor and land than the turned windrows method other companies utilize, in which piles are turned over with machinery to aerate them.
Organics Recycling atop a Retired Landfill
Patriot Acres is built atop the retired 165-acre Sexton Landfill, also known as the Des Plaines landfill, which was operated for twenty years by the John Sexton Sand & Gravel Corporation before it became inactive in 1983. It is now in certified post-closure care, meaning the landfill is closed, covered and has completed the required post-closure procedures to stabilize the compressed waste buried under the thick cover of soil.
Village of Glenview trustees as well as Citizens vs. Patriot Acres have raised concerns about potential leakage considering there is no liner on this landfill and industrial wastes were disposed of there. Daniels said the soil cover has been well-maintained and is in great condition.
The landfill still produces methane, which is collected and burned to ultimately become carbon dioxide emissions. In 2021, about 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide was released, or the warming equivalent of over 2,000 gasoline-powered cars driving for a year, per the EPA.
That is precisely the sort of long-term emissions that facilities like Patriot Acres mitigate by diverting food scraps from landfills.
Over 25 years, greenhouse gas emissions from 2019’s landfilled food waste alone will produce about two million metric tons of methane, per the EPA. Graphic by Rhiannon O’Berry, calculated using the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator.
The Ultimate Impact of Local Organics Recycling
As of 2019, about two-thirds of the 66 million tons of food waste produced in the U.S. went to landfills, while only 5% was composted. In 2018, food was 21% of landfilled waste in Cook County. While food waste comprises about one fourth of landfill waste nationally, it is responsible for about three-fifths of landfill methane emissions, per the EPA. Composting methods like Patriot Acres’ that provide ample oxygen substantially reduce food waste methane emissions.
While the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) establishes that the best food waste solution is to prevent it in the first place, industrial composting is a preferable solution to putting food scraps in landfills. (Graphic by EPA, 2023)
One of Patriot Acres’ customers is the Collective Resource Compost Cooperative, Evanston’s official compost hauler. According to Collective Resource Board Vice President Mary Beth Schaye, Collective Resource “prefer[s] leaving composting to experts with decades of experience” so that the co-op can focus on educating and building relationships with community members.
Collective Resource serves more than 3,000 residential and 300 commercial customers, transporting 50 tons of food scraps every week to their recipient composting facilities: Whole Earth Compost, Green Era and, as of last year, Patriot Acres.
“We were looking forward to working with them for years, before it finally became a reality in December of last year,” Collective Resource General Manager Jeremy Barrows said via email.
Collective Resource picks up one ton a week of food scraps from the kitchen at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel and transports it to Patriot Acres.
“We do hope to send more there in the future,” Barrows said.
Patriot Acres sold its first batch of compost on March 10. In April, the full line of products ─ compost, mulches, topsoils and more ─ will launch into full-scale distribution to Illinois landscapers, farmers, municipalities and more, many of whom contributed the compostable material in the first place. Daniels anticipates all the products will sell. Barrows said via email that Collective Resource will purchase Patriot Acres compost to give away to Collective Resource customers at its annual “Gift Back” events in April and May.
Another benefit of the local organic ecosystem formed by organizations like Collective Resource and Patriot Acres is job growth, the EPA states; by the end of their next phase of development, Patriot Acres will double their staff from six to twelve employees, said Daniels, while Collective Resource employs thirty people with benefits like access to a retirement vehicle and health insurance, said Schaye.
“We feel we’ve done something good at the end of the day with tangible, real impact we can see and touch,” Daniels said.