Over thousands of years, glaciers and relentless winds swept through what is now southwestern Iowa, depositing glacial till and carving the land into steep ridges and rolling hills. The result is one of only two places on earth where loess soil reaches depths of 200 feet or more, a landscape that locals simply call the Loess Hills.
Tucked into the folds of those hills in Malvern, Iowa, you’ll find a community of freshly built houses, a soybean farm, and right next door to both, a landfill that takes its name from the land itself: Loess Hills Regional Sanitary Landfill.
The geography that makes this part of Iowa remarkable also makes running a landfill here unusually demanding.
“I think a lot of folks misunderstand landfills as a place where you dig a hole, put trash in it, and that's it. But it's much more than that, especially here."- Bret Stephens
Site Manager, Waste Connections
Nearby Omaha residents affectionately dub it the “Oma-dome,” a phenomenon where the city's dense concrete, asphalt, and buildings trap heat and push a warm-air dome skyward, deflecting storms around the metro area and, oftentimes, funneling them eastward toward Malvern.
Colliding with weather systems pushing in from the Rockies, when these storms finally break, they break hard and fast, dumping rain and high winds on some of the most unusual soil in the country. Wind-deposited over thousands of years, it gives the hills their sculpted silhouette and makes the surrounding farmland some of the most productive in the Midwest. But put to work as a landfill cover, and its limitations show quickly. It doesn’t insulate well, which means the decomposing waste beneath it sits exposed to every atmospheric mood swing passing overhead.
Buried beneath that loess cover, years of organic waste are slowly decomposing and generating landfill gas, a mix of methane and carbon dioxide. Captured and processed correctly, the landfill gas becomes renewable natural gas, or RNG, that can be injected directly into a pipeline and used to heat homes, fuel vehicles, or generate electricity. “It’s an exciting thing to tell people, that our trash can power homes,” Stephens celebrates.
However, it’s capturing those specific gases, with little to no nitrogen or oxygen intrusions, that proves to be difficult. When high pressure systems roll and push through, they force atmospheric gases (primarily nitrogen and oxygen) into the landfill. That outside air dilutes the methane, throws off the gas composition, and sends the numbers in the wrong direction. Pipeline operators have strict specifications for what they’ll accept. Too much nitrogen or oxygen and too little methane, and the gas isn’t pipeline quality anymore. The landfill gets pulled from the system until it can clean things up.
At Loess Hills Regional Sanitary Landfill, the natural gas pipeline is just one mile away and getting pulled off that pipeline means lost revenue and a renewable energy project that isn’t living up to its promise. It’s that kind of pressure, atmospheric and otherwise, that keeps landfill and Site Managers like Bret up at night.
Before LoCI Controls: Storm Comes In, Staff Comes In
With over 13 years in the field, Bret Stephens has seen just about everything. He knows that in landfill operations, no two days are the same and work-life balance can feel like a concept for other industries, but not a reality for the one he’s in. When a pressure spike would hit, someone, oftentimes him, had to come in, midnight, on a holiday, or otherwise.
Before LoCI Controls, managing barometric events meant tracking weather forecasts obsessively, watching for incoming fronts, then heading out into the wellfield and guessing which wells might respond to a pressure change. Tune them down. Wait for the storm to pass. Turn around and tune them back up. Repeat.
“Before real-time data and automation with LoCI Controls, we would be like dogs chasing our tails. It was a whole lot of guesswork, which means a whole lot of lost RNG revenue," says Stephens.
With LoCI Controls
Now, when the team notices a drop in flow at the inlet or sees surging in the system, they know where to look, and they can look from anywhere. LoCI’s Sentry units feed real-time data into the WellWatcher® platform, giving Bret’s team visibility across the entire wellfield without setting foot on site.
"Being able to monitor the Sentry units through WellWatcher shows us exactly where we've lost our vacuum. Troubleshooting is easy when you can narrow the problem wells down from 100% of your wellfield to 10%."
Stand at the summit of Loess Hills Regional Sanitary Landfill and you'll want your tall boots. The loose loess soil shifts underfoot with every step, soft, swallowing, and as unpredictable as the weather systems that shape it. From the overlook, meadows alternate with grain fields, and scattered across the hilltop, LoCI devices quietly do their work.
But getting here didn’t happen overnight. Handing over your wellfield is a deeply personal thing. Most RNG operators know their system the way they know the back of their hand; every well, every quirk, every seasonal pattern. Bret was no different.
The deployment was structured as a performance-based agreement, with LoCI Controls providing hardware and platform access in exchange for a share of the carbon credit revenues generated at the site. By eliminating upfront cost barriers and directly tying LoCI’s success to measurable environmental outcomes, the arrangement aligned incentives from day one.
Even so, trust had to be earned. What started as daily check-ins with LoCI analysts gradually settled into weekly reviews as the data proved itself and confidence in the system grew over time.
"I’m proud to say that we're planning on growing and reaching the full potential of our RNG plant and we’ll be taking LoCI with us every step of the way,” Stephens stated.
Now, after a morning watching another storm front roll through, Bret can head to coach his son’s afternoon baseball game without a second thought. No anxious glances at his phone, or calculating whether he'll need to turn around. The WellWatcher system is watching, and he knows it.
And when his kids ask what he does for work, he has a pretty good answer. He tells them that what happens on these hills —capturing gas from the earth, turning waste into energy, managing something invisible and essential— is just the latest chapter in a very long story. People have been shaping and shaped by the Loess Hills for generations, and for now, he's just doing his part.