A new report from Union of Concerned Scientists pushes for wetland protections in a new Farm Bill. (Photo courtesy of USDA)
A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found wetlands in the Upper Midwest region are “in peril” due to recent legal challenges and a lack of state-level regulation. The report looks to a new farm bill as a vessel to protect wetlands.
The report, authored by Stacy Woods, the research director for the Food & Environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said industrial agriculture has inflicted “devastating damage” on wetlands across the country and that Iowa has more than 640,000 acres of wetland.
These wetlands, along with those in states across the Upper Midwest region, act as “natural barriers” to flooding. The report found this flood protection equates to nearly $23 billion in annual residential flood protection. Iowa’s wetlands alone could mitigate $477 million worth of flood damage to residential areas.
These estimates in the report are extrapolated from a 2022 study that found one acre of wetland was the equivalent to $745 in benefits from prevented flood damage.
The Union of Concerned Scientists is a non-profit advocating for “science and evidence-based decision making” for climate, energy, transportation, food and equality issues.
The report alleges the Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “stripped” Clean Water Act protections from wetlands that are not connected to federally recognized bodies of water.
The new interpretation of the law, combined with the “absence of state-level wetland protections” in Iowa and other Upper Midwestern states makes wetlands “particularly vulnerable” to pollution or drainage, the report found.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2020, the Conservation Reserve Program had restored more than 3 million wetland acres across the country since the program started in 1985. The same program has restored over 118,000 acres of wetland in Iowa and enrolled 66,000 acres as “buffer” in farmable wetlands, according to data collected by Environmental Working Group.
A hope for Farm Bill protections
The report looks at the Farm Bill as a place to implement wetland regulations to stop “large-scale commodity growers and corporate agribusiness interests” that “exploit wetlands for agricultural expansion.”
Farm bills in the past have established protections for wetlands, including the Conservation Reserve Program and the “swampbuster” provision that linked a landowner’s eligibility for USDA incentive programs to their preservation of wetlands.
An Iowa landowner recently sued the USDA over the provision and several groups including Iowa Environmental Council, Iowa Farmers Union, Dakota Rural Action and Food & Water Watch, sought to intervene in the lawsuit, which a federal judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa approved Tuesday.
The lawsuit alleges swampbusters created an unconstitutional condition for a farmer to receive USDA benefits, while the now-approved intervenors say without the law, there would be little to no protections for wetlands from farmers seeking to expand their croplands.
In addition to swampbuster, the report details other Farm Bill provisions that have protected wetlands, including conservation and wetland easement programs and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, which “enhance(s) wetlands” by promoting soil and water conservation.
The report calls for the next Farm Bill, which Congress has been unable to agree on and pass for more than two sessions now, to “enhance” existing conservation programs and implement new incentives that “foster soil and water health.”
These suggestions include: increasing the Conservation Reserve Program acres to 45 million acres; increasing funding for the Conservation Stewardship Program from $1 billion to $4 billion annually; expanding funding to historically underserved, disadvantaged and new farmers, and to link the Federal Crop Insurance Program to a farmer’s participation in conservation practices.
According to the report, investments from these recommendations constitute “only a fraction of the significant annual value wetlands deliver.”
“Integrating these initiatives into the next food and Farm Bill will fortify USDA programs that safeguard wetlands from industrial agriculture, ensuring these vital ecosystems thrive and continue to mitigate flooding, purify water, and support our communities and our climate,” the report said.
Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and X.
BOONE – Engineers at Critical Materials Recycling break apart circuit boards, old transmissions and decommissioned wind turbines to extract and recycle rare earth materials.
Most recycling facilities extract things like copper and aluminum from the same scraps, but few know how to break down the batteries, meaning those rare earth material components are often lost.
Rare earth materials are a series of elements with properties like conduction or magnetism that make them essential to electronics. They’re also part of the 10%-15% of wind turbine materials that are not currently recycled.
Iowa-based Critical Materials Recycling was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy as one of six companies to receive a $500,000 cash prize and $100,000 in assistance from national laboratories. Twenty projects were selected in the initial phase of the DOE prize and awarded smaller sums, $75,000, to further develop their concepts.
The $5.1 million Wind Turbine Materials Recycling prize was funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as part of its efforts to achieve a carbon-pollution-free power sector by 2035.
Dan Bina, Critical Materials Recycling president and CEO, said his company was already interested in wind turbine recycling but the DOE funding expedited and prioritized the project.
“The prize will give us the funding to be able to do that initial leg work, and we’ll build a team to make it happen much sooner and probably much better,” Bina said.
The need for better wind turbine recycling
Tyler Christoffel, a technology manager for materials manufacturing and design innovation at the DOE wind energy technologies office, said a big goal of the office is to create a circular economy.
“Basically looking at the ways that we can make our materials more sustainable, be able to reuse them, make them go further,” Christoffel said.
He said about 90% of the turbines, mostly the parts made of steel and concrete, have an established recycling process.
“The work in the program was really focusing on those materials that have been hard to recycle so far, developing technologies so that you can more cost effectively recycle them and then get them into secondary markets,” Christoffel said.
Those materials include the fiber reinforced composites that make up the blades, housing components and the rare earth materials found in the turbine generators.
Christoffel said increasing recycling infrastructure and technology will help reduce waste at all stages of the turbines, from the production process, to the end of life and updating stages that occur less frequently.
Critical materials recycling is a big focus for the department across various industries, not just wind technology. Most of that research is going on at the Critical Materials Innovation Hub led by Ames National Laboratory, here in Iowa.
Ikenna Nlebedim, a scientist at the hub who worked with Critical Materials Recycling, said rare earth recycling is “a key strategy” for U.S. sustainability, security and technological advancement.
“Recycling rare earth elements is crucial for the United States, particularly in the context of wind generators, electronic waste (e-waste), and electric vehicles,” Nlebedim said. “It helps reduce the environmental damage caused by mining and processing, conserves finite resources, and supports a circular economy by reusing materials.”
Most of these minerals are mined overseas, with a majority coming from China, which spurred of the U.S. to develop better recycling capacity.
The gray rectangles around the core of this old wind turbine are magnets made of rare earth materials. Critical Materials Recycling used this smaller turbine as part of its research to recycle the turbines. (Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
How it works
Critical Materials Recycling worked with the Ames National Laboratory to use an acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) process that has little to no waste, saves more of the metal components and doesn’t expose technicians to dangerous acids.
Nlebedim, who led the research, said the hub invented the process in 2015 and has worked with TdVib, Bina’s other company that produces a very specific type of material used in sonar-like technologies. Bina’s team commercialized the process with its Critical Materials Recycling company.
“ADR is both environmentally friendly and efficient, eliminating the need for pre-heating and reducing pollution, making it a greener alternative to traditional methods,” Nlebedim said in a statement.
The DOE prize went to Critical Materials Recycling to apply the acid-free dissolution process to wind turbines.
The first step in the process is to break apart the various “feedstocks,” — a wind turbine, car part or other electronics brought to the company — into their components.
Computer hard drives, already shredded by the technology companies for security purposes, get tossed in a rock-tumbler like machine with a copper salt that Bina said selectively dissolves the rare earth materials and pulls them out into a solution.
The rest of the hard drive, which has copper, gold and aluminum, can go to a more traditional recycler after CMR has extracted the approximately 2% rare earth materials from the hard drives.
“We insert ourselves into the process, and actually add value, because now there’s more copper,” Bina said.
The copper salt used to pull out rare earth materials leaves a copper residue on the shredded hard drives, which adds value to the recyclers who traditionally strip the hard drives for gold, copper and aluminum. Rare earth materials are rarely extracted from hard drives because they make up a relatively small percentage of the materials and were difficult to separate with other processes.
The process is more or less the same moving up the line to larger, discarded magnets and the “swarf,” which is like magnet sawdust, accumulated from cutting them to size.
Bigger items, like a transmission from a sedan or the generator of a wind turbine, have to be taken apart before they undergo the same process. Some of these magnets can also be recut and used again in various components.
Dan Bina of Critical Materials Recycling shows the various components broken apart from a transmission to harvest the rare earth from inside. (Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
Each type of magnet has a slightly different process, but Bina said they go through a selective leaching process, like the hard drives in the copper salt tumbler, and come out as a rare earth solution.
The solution then goes through a series of tanks where it is precipitated into a solid form and cleaned to a rare earth material that Bina said is “exactly” like what a buyer would find on the open market.
Bina said the water used in the process goes through treatment and filtration and can be used again.
“We’re not using any strong acids throughout the entire process, we don’t produce any hazardous waste, and we almost have no waste whatsoever,” Bina said.
An acid process would break down everything but rare earth materials, which are typically such a small portion of the electronic that it rarely makes financial sense to do. Critical Materials Recycling pulls the copper and aluminum to sell to smelters, to make up for the cost of gathering the rare earth materials.
“In order to get the rare earth from something like this, you have to valorize everything,” Bina said.
Dan Bina of Critical Material Recycling said even these small, pilot-project sized tanks can process rare earth materials from over 2 million hard drives a year. (Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
Moving forward
Soon, as part of the second phase of the DOE prize, Bina said his team will process several of the big, 4-megawatt or larger, turbines.
“Not just looking to see if we can do it, but actually doing it,” Bina said.
He said part of the challenge is building a team and the partnerships to operate. He doesn’t have a contract in place but has been in conversation with big energy and wind companies in Iowa to work into their decommissioning plans.
Dan Bina, president and CEO of Critical Materials Recycling in Boone. (Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
A spokesperson with MidAmerican Energy said the company was aware of Critical Materials Recycling and wrote a letter of support for its project with DOE.
“We look forward to seeing how the company develops and we embrace the potential for additional recycling and disposal options,” the statement read. “The more options, the better.”
Some of the other recipients of the DOE prize are developing processes for recycling wind turbine blades, which had proven to be rather difficult, as more than one company has run into problems processing the blades quickly enough.
MidAmerican has partnered, in the past, with a company that was later sued by the state for leaving piles of wind turbine blades, destined for recycling, around the state. MidAmerican has since partnered with another facility in Fairfax for recycling the blades.
Bina hopes wind turbines become a large part of his business, which he has plans to expand into a larger space soon. But, since wind turbines are typically decommissioned en masse at intervals of 10 or 20 years, the other items, like hard drives and swarf will be constant inputs for the plant.
“We have seen numerous pieces of these feedstocks just getting thrown away, in our eyes, the rare earth anyways, because there just isn’t that technology, that industry in place to capture them,” Bina said. “
The team in Boone is at the beginning of the growing industry.
“Rare earth recycling, five years or so ago, was unheard of,” Bina said.
Christoffel said the development of a circular economy of these expensive materials will help the U.S. to more sustainably build out expanded wind and solar infrastructure.
“It’ll provide some insulation to our supply and help us to ensure a more sustainable build out of clean energy domestically,” Christoffel said.
Corn and soybean associations commissioned a new study on the effects a potential trade war would have on agriculture producers. (Jared Strong | Iowa Capital Dispatch)
The National Corn Growers Association and the American Soybean Association found a tariff-induced trade war with China would “hurt” U.S. farmers, based on a jointly released study that pulled from 2018 tariffs data and GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s economic plans.
Worse-case scenario figures in the study show that soybean exports to China would have an average decline of nearly 52% below baseline expected levels, and corn exports would have an average decline of 84% below baseline.
Agricultural representatives, including folks from Farmers Unions in Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Minnesota Soybean Growers Association and Iowa former Secretary of Agriculture and former Lt. Gov. Patty Judge among others, met Wednesday for a webinar in response to the study.
Many in the webinar urged farmers and rural voters not to vote for former President Trump because of his proposed tariffs.
“We know that elections have consequences, and unfortunately, this one could leave us in a very precarious position [for] those of us here in the heartland that try to make a living on the great soil,” Judge, a Democrat, said.
The study, released Oct. 15, was conducted by the World Agricultural Economic and Environmental Services and projected a new trade war would cause “immediate” drops in corn and soybean exports, which would quickly be filled by exports from Argentina and Brazil.
According to the trade study, many of the tariffs from the 2018 U.S.-China trade war are still in place, but China has granted annual waivers to the U.S. to reduce the tariff costs. This has worked to quell the trade war in recent years, but the study says the existing tariffs from China could “easily be reinstated.”
The study pulls from two scenarios, one where China fully reinstates the 2018 tariffs, and another where China applies a 60% tariff on U.S. goods, based on Trump’s proposal to place a 60% tariff on Chinese goods.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
This, according to the study, could lead to an average loss for U.S. soybean farmers of $3.6 billion to $5.9 billion and $0.9 billion to $1.4 billion for corn farmers in annual production value.
‘Still rebuilding’
The agricultural representatives on the Wednesday webinar spoke frequently of the 2018 trade war and the “devastating effects” it had on farmers and rural economies.
The effect was acknowledged by the former administration, which issued $23 million in relief to farmers who suffered a loss of trade because of the high tariffs.
Denny Wolff, the former Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture, said on the call that farmers were hit with a “double whammy” in 2018 when their imports went up because of the tariffs and the value of exports went down.
Gary Wertish, Minnesota Farmers Union president, said in the call that the agriculture economy is “still rebuilding” from the “devastating effects” of the 2018 trade war.
Judge said the tariffs could be “catastrophic” to Iowa because of its large agricultural production compared to its relatively small land mass and population.
“We saw what happened in 2018 and we simply cannot do it again,” Judge said.
According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Iowa is the second largest agricultural export state, and shipped $16.5 billion of domestic agricultural exports in 2022.
Brent Swart, the president of Iowa Soybean association, noted the importance of trade to Iowa soybean farmers in an emailed statement to Iowa Capital Dispatch.
“Many farmers could share a similar story of depressed commodity prices and sustained financial squeeze following the start of the U.S.-China trade dispute,” Swart said. “Trade remains a top priority for U.S. soybean farmers, and this study only underscores its importance.”
Most of the representatives on the call voiced support for Vice President Kamala Harris, or more aptly, for her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“Governor Walz clearly understands agriculture,” Judge said. “He is with us. He is our neighbor, and I have full confidence in a Harris-Walz administration to make solid decisions about agriculture.”
Iowa Capital Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on Facebook and X.
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