Garbarge in, garbage out?

By David Steinkraus

Friday, January 14, 2005 11:04 PM CST

RACINE COUNTY - By March, if all goes as intended, the state Natural Resources Board will be voting on a set of rules allowing larger landfills than we have now.

But if you live near Racine, and spend time gazing at the 125-foot mound of Kestrel Hawk Park Landfill, don't worry. Getting bigger is not an option, according to a company official. Beyond that is a provision of the new rules that could speed decomposition of waste, if the odoriferous details can be worked out.

On the other side, one environmental consultant says the proposed rules don't do enough to safeguard people in the future, and that the decomposition idea is just a recipe for trouble.

The changes The basic change in the regulations would allow landfills that are two-thirds wider and 100 feet higher, according to a summary prepared by the state Department of Natural Resources. This would approximately double the volume of a landfill, the summary says.

"These new rules would not affect the existing site," said Michael Ettner, general manager for the Wisconsin landfills owned by Republic Services. One of those is Kestrel Hawk, which serves the Racine area. The other is Mallard Ridge in Walworth County.

Changing the size of Kestrel Hawk would require going through the extensive state permit process, and only a proposal to expand the landfill would trigger a request for a new permit. That's not going to happen at Kestrel Hawk, Ettner said. "We are literally boxed in on all sides."

Subdivisions and a shopping center take up three sides, and on the fourth is SC Johnson's Waxdale plant.

Liquid fix A proposed rule change that may affect Kestrel Hawk has to do with the system of pipes that collect leachate, the water which seeps out of the mounds of waste, like the liquid you find in your trash can. The state's proposed rules call for allowing landfills to recirculate this leachate, in other words to spray it on the garbage after it's dripped through once.

What happens then is that the garbage decomposes faster, so the mounds settle faster, and that makes the whole landfill more stable, Ettner said. More than 70 percent of the waste in Kestrel Hawk is municipal solid waste, and that's only about 14 or 15 percent moisture, he said. "It's very dry, so it's highly absorbent."

If the landfill could recirculate its leachate, much would be absorbed by the garbage, he said, which means less would be sent through sewer pipes to the Racine Wastewater Treatment Plant, which means the city would spend less energy treating that water. It all makes good environmental sense, he said.

"However," Ettner said, "there are drawbacks to recycling leachate, and one of them is the possibility of producing more odor from your landfill."

That wouldn't make Kestrel Hawk a good neighbor, he said, so there are no plans to recirculate leachate until the company can find a way to reduce the smell.

Space questions The solid waste industry likes the proposed regulations, Ettner said, because they will promote better use of existing landfills. "The existing landfills ... if they are not able to utilize their on-site land holdings better through changes of regulations like what's proposed - then you're going to see more greenfield sites proposed. It's inevitable."

Kestrel Hawk's permit allows it to hold 7 million cubic yards of waste, Ettner said, and Wisconsin generates about 10 million cubic yards each year. "We would be able to fill Kestrel Hawk in less than a year," Ettner said.

"We don't have a problem with landfill capacity in Wisconsin," said Dennis Mack, section chief in the DNR's Bureau of Waste Management. There are many parcels of acceptable land, and no one anticipates a shortage of landfill space in the near future, he said.

In the DNR's southeastern region, a rough triangle running from Manitowoc south to the Illinois border and west to the western edge of Walworth County, one landfill finished the state siting process in 2004, Mack said. That was a landfill near Germantown which had applied for an expansion of 10.9 million cubic yards. Three others are in the process of expanding: A landfill in Franklin which has requested permission to expand by 11.7 million cubic yards, the Mallard Ridge landfill near Delavan which is seeking another 8.4 million cubic yards, and another landfill in Kenosha County which is seeking a 900,000-cubic-yard expansion.

The opposing side Landfills may be designed to contain waste now, but they won't always be that way, and that's where the problems will start - when 40 years have passed and the plastic liners encapsulating waste begin to break down, said Peter Anderson. He is president of RecyclingWorlds Consulting of Madison. When those liners degrade, water will seep into the waste causing a second wave of decomposition and leachate seepage that could leak into groundwater, he said.

The mass of waste will settle, meaning part of these mountains of garbage could collapse onto whatever is nearby, probably homes, he said. To stop that, "You're going to have to basically stabilize millions of tons of garbage." And building larger and larger urban landfills - such as the 1,087-foot-tall landfill in Los Angeles - means more waste around to collapse, he said.

State law requires waste companies to be responsible for landfills for 40 years, he said. "Now whether they will be around 40 years after the landfill closes is a very interesting question."

What may happen is that the state, in the absence of a company to charge, will seek the deepest pockets to pay for fixing those slumping mounds of waste, he said. Federal law currently allows states to seek compensation from large companies, such as SC Johnson, even if their fraction of the total volume of waste is small, Anderson said. So legislators will have a choice. "If it's a choice between raising taxes and finding some industry to stick it to, guess what they're going to do?" Recirculating leachate looks good, but there are problems here, too, Anderson said. The rate of decomposition doesn't change that much. "What it does is reduce the cost to the landfill operator of sending the leachate to the treatment plant."

In reality, he said, the idea is to take a pile of waste with about the same moisture content of a piece of lumber, and add enough liquid so that it has the moisture content of a swamp. "You're talking about liquefying a manmade mountain." It's a mount covered by 2 feet of dirt and a plastic sheet about as thick as a credit card, plastic which will degrade, he said.

"We're not saying no landfills," Anderson said. What we should do is look at costs realistically, including those that may be incurred by the next generation or two, he said.

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