“I don’t know anybody who says, ‘You know, I definitely want to be involved in waste management,’” said Kathy Morris, chuckling. Not a glamorous career, it’s often overlooked — until the garbage isn’t picked up. Yet in 1989, when industries were closing and jobs were scarce in Iowa, waste management provided a steady paycheck for Norris and her family and eventually became a lifelong career.

Morris serves as the executive director of waste commission for Scott County, Iowa, where she has spent the better part of 33 years. She recently won the Robert L. Lawrence Distinguished Service Award, the highest honor in the field of solid waste management given by the Solid Waste Association of North America. The organization’s website lists many of her service activities, such as mentoring others and her hours spent volunteering in the community, along with her dedication to the waste commission. By the time she reads this, it will be at the beginning of her retirement years, though she admits that if it wasn’t for her five grandchildren, she would not have considered retiring from a job she so enjoys.

She remains humble about winning the SWANA award, mentioning that it was “really nice” that her coworkers nominated her for it. They are the reason she loves her job, a fact that has kept her in her position for so many years. “I have great coworkers. We work hard to provide a service that the community needs.”

Originally, she had not planned to go into the field of waste management. As a military spouse, she followed her husband Gary to Army bases in Germany, Louisiana and Kentucky. But as both were natives of Davenport, they realized that their home state of Iowa was “such a wonderful place to raise kids” and moved back to Scott County in the late 1980s. At the time, their children were two and nine months old. Though Morris had a degree from the University of Iowa in business management, opportunities were in short supply, so when she spotted a listing for an administrative-type job with the waste management commission, she applied. Within six months of taking the position, her administrator left, and she found herself promoted.

In the early years of the 1990s, Morris reported that many new laws transformed the waste management system. They took greater consideration of the use of land and different ways to reuse materials.

“When I started, literally, we were just landfilling, and there were eight employees, and now we have an integrated system that includes household hazardous material management, recycling, electronics recovery and reuse and a variety of other different things for the ‘Keep America Beautiful’ affiliate for the community,” she commented.

Her voice grows animated as she speaks about the many areas in which waste management commissions have made progress, a clear indicator of her dedication to the career she seemingly fell into. She stated, “We had to basically look at how we managed waste in the past, how we were currently managing it and how we were going to manage it in the future to be able to meet the diversion goals that were established … but it helped us to plan and develop programs; we worked with so many wonderful staff members, administrators, elected officials — pulling everyone together toward a united goal.”

Some changes that Morris has seen and helped to implement in eastern Iowa included automated waste collection, automated recycling collection, a single-stream recycling, shingle recycling and working with the Habitat for Humanity ReStore to repurpose building materials and keep them out of landfills. The planning area that she supervises consists of five counties in Iowa and two in Illinois, and she has worked to build partnerships to educate and beautify the area.

“Just building those partnerships, sometimes with nonprofits, sometimes with private companies, sometimes with other government partners, we were able to — just add so many suggestions to better the environment here in Scott County. … I think that’s probably the secret to the successes, the partnerships, and for us to work together toward a common goal. That just brings a lot of pleasure and a lot of rewards for the community.”

Even with all the improvements made to the waste management commission over the years, Morris considers her greatest accomplishment something more personal — her coworkers. When she began working for Scott County, there were only eight employees in waste management. Today there are 70.

“One of the things that I was told by supervisors early on is that part of our job as local government was to provide jobs that paid well, that had good benefits so that our workers could live and thrive in the community,” she stated. For Morris, it’s about “all the great people that I’ve worked with and how fun it is to hire somebody right out of college and to see them get married and have kids and enjoy their jobs, and we’re always trying to promote from within — that’s probably the thing that I’m the most proud of.”

She praised the quality of the workers at the local level. “I’ve worked with so many great people, so many great elected officials, so many great people at the Iowa Dept of Natural Resources.”

Work is rarely done, however, and she will be watching from the sidelines as the commission builds a new landfill next year and the state of Iowa works on “sustainable material management and working with a lot of stakeholders,” evaluating how the state can best dispose of and reuse waste materials, similar to what other states have already implemented. Though few understand the work that Morris has done — her own mother included — her work behind the scenes has helped keep Scott County beautiful and running efficiently.

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