LANSING, MI -- Michigan is poised to bury its dependence on heaping garbage in landfills in favor of a rules that emphasize more recycling, composting and other re-uses for the gunk and junk that we all throw away.

This week, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is holding a public meeting in Lansing on a proposed overhaul of the state's solid waste regulations developed by a group of business, government and academic representatives.

The 13-member advisory panel, formed last April, has put forth a suite of recommendations that represent the first comprehensive look at updating Michigan's garbage disposal and recycling laws in nearly two decades.

The proposals are meant to guide the development of legislation to amend

Part 115 of Michigan's Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act; the guidebook for state public and private garbage disposal operations.

Over past year and a half, the panel and sub-workgroups have met monthly to duke out proposals to amend waste planning, financial assurance, handling yard waste, coal combustion residuals and radioactive fracking waste.

"What we've come to is a consensus about broad ideas on changes that need to be made, but there's a still a lot of work to be done on details," said Sean Hammond, deputy policy director for the Michigan Environmental Council.

The big garbage re-think is rooted in a wide-ranging regulatory reinvention process started by several years ago under the first term of Gov. Rick Snyder, who wants to double Michigan recycling rate from 15 to 30 percent.

Even the nomenclature is undergoing revision. What's for years been called "solid waste management" would be referred to as "materials management" to reflect the notion that much of what we're all throwing away could be recycled, composted or converted to another form that's usable and marketable.

The open cell of the McGill Road Landfill near Jackson is surrounded by seagulls on November 5, 2013.

Today, Michigan's solid waste laws are geared toward ensuring there's enough capacity in the 80-some landfills scattered around the state. Last year, nearly 4.5 million cubic yards of trash entered Michigan landfills; a 1.5 percent uptick over 2014. Across the state, there's about 27 years of landfill capacity left, assuming no major changes to disposal rates or other factors.

That emphasis on landfill siting and capacity -- developed in the late 1990s when disposal capacity was seen as a problem -- has made garbage disposal relatively cheap, reducing the incentive to recycle and reuse trash, said Hammond. Current law requires any landfill that falls below five years of capacity to expand, making it "hard to let that capacity dial down to a more reasonable level."

In each landfill, there's treasure getting buried. A new DEQ-funded university and business study found that Michigan garbage contains an estimated $368 million worth of recyclable material. The largest chunk, 13.6 percent, is food waste that could be converted to energy through composting or anaerobic digestion.

Michigan waste experts say as much as 40 percent of landfilled garbage is organic material that can't necessarily be composted, but could be digested.

The study concluded 42 percent of thrown-away materials have market value, including all standard recyclable commodities except glass, plus textiles.

About five percent of the 10 tons of garbage sifted through at multiple sites during the study was yard waste, which is technically not allowed in a landfill or waste incinerator unless the clippings are diseased or infected. Such waste could and should be composted, the DEQ panel says, but the issue is complicated.

Today, there's about 120 registered composting facilities in Michigan, but there's a lack of oversight because the DEQ is understaffed in that area. The DEQ says minimal oversight has caused "bad actors" in Macomb County to run afoul of local nuisance laws regulating odor and noise. The DEQ only gets $40,000 annually from registered composters, which agency managers say isn't enough to fund proper inspections.

"There's really no money for any kind of oversight," said Duane Roskoskey, specialist in the DEQ's Office of Waste Management. "It's a tough issue in that part of the state."

Don Butynski, a manager at the Ann Arbor compost center, pulls a branch from a Doppstadt slow-speed grinder used in the compost-making process.

Among other changes, the DEQ panel wants to prohibit waste haulers from dumping yard clipping at unregulated compost facilities, require closure bonding and certain quality standards for the end product.

Composting issues in the metro Detroit area highlight the lack of robust solid waste planning at the county level across Michigan.

At one time, county solid waste boards actively monitored landfills. But, as state money for local municipalities dwindled over the past 15 years, many of those boards have dissolved and the state hasn't bothered to require counties update their solid waste plans on the regular five-year cycle.

The result is that Michigan has maintained a landfill-first status quo as other countries and states have outpaced us in recycling and reuse rates.

"At the county level, we've lost some of our expertise because the solid waste planning process hadn't been update in so long and everything has just been out there tooling along, for better or worse," said Darwin Baas, Kent County's public works director, representing the Michigan Association of Counties on the panel.

The group wants to resurrect those boards at either a county or regional level.

"We think every five years, every county or group of counties should sit down and say, what has changed?" he said. "Where are we going with sustainable materials management? Do we have enough single stream processing or composing?"

"Let's not just bury it because that happens to be the cheapest thing to do."

Kent County wants reduce garbage entering its landfill by 90 percent by 2030. The South Kent Landfill has acres marked for expansion, but Baas hope that diverting waste could open that land to industrial development. At Kent's recycling facility in Grand Rapids, recyclables from as far away as Battle Creek are sorted and separated for transport to a buyer.

After the materials leave the processing facility, the downstream supply chain -- "folks like Padnos and others can broker the materials to mills, smelters or whatever," said Baas. But right now, there's not enough processing capacity to divert enough recyclables from the landfill to double Michigan's recycling rate.

"The ability to take it in co-mingled form and separate it, that's lacking."

Hammond said there's a lot of work yet to do. With elections this fall, freshmen lawmakers filling open seats are going to require some solid waste education.

Funding estimates for the proposals aren't yet developed, but "we do anticipate a need for increased funding if all the principles are implemented that have been recommended," said Tom Frazier of the Michigan Townships Association.

On Wednesday, July 20, the Solid Waste and Sustainability Advisory Panel (SWSAP) is holding a public meeting from noon to 3 p.m. at Lansing Community College West Campus, 5708 Cornerstone Drive.

The DEQ is accepting public comment until Aug 1. The panel will formally present its recommendations to the DEQ this fall after digesting public input.

"Solid waste is really a type of infrastructure," Hammond said. "People want to put their discard materials at the curb and have it disappear."

"It's not a pipe in the ground, but it's an infrastructure need."

Garret Ellison covers government, environment & the Great Lakes for MLive Media Group. Email him at gellison@mlive.com or follow on Twitter & Instagram