Most of us don’t think about our garbage except to put it out by the curb once a week, but if we do consider where it goes we generally imagine mountains of rotting debris spilling out of plastic bags being picked over by seagulls and other scavengers before being pushed into a trench to be buried where many of the materials take hundreds of years to decompose. As a species humans don’t handle their waste very well and landfills reach capacity long before the contents degrade and according to the EPA Methane (CH4), a byproduct of decomposition, is a major contributor to greenhouse gases.
Landfills are the third–largest human–related source of methane in the U.S., accounting for 17 percent of all methane emissions in 2009. Methane is generated in landfills and open dumps as waste decomposes under anaerobic (without oxygen) conditions.
Thankfully, Coos County is one of a very few waste disposal facilities that incinerates trash under stringent Title 5 environmental requirements regulating emission levels. The Beaver Hill Solid Waste facility uses a high temperature low oxygen process that burns the dangerous gases as fuel to convert trash into a fine ash. A permanent solid waste advisory committee comprised of DEQ professionals as well as local trash haulers was formed several years ago to help guide the facility but recently the temporary structure advisory committee has injected some misleading information derived from a very cursory review of the facility so I have asked Randy Sanne, an employee with Solid Waste to clarify a few issues.
Part I is posted above and Part II will be posted below.
Another concern raised by Al Pettit during a recent structure advisory committee meeting and mentioned in their draft report is that the Beaver Hill Disposal Site is “currently processing less than 20,000 tons per year down from nearly twice that amount a few years ago.” He indicates this is a statewide trend. The source of this last statement has not been made available to the public so it is impossible to analyze those conclusions but one of the reasons that Beaver Hill has seen a reduction is because a local hauler, Waste Connections, started taking its trash to a landfill out of the county when their offer to purchase the site was turned down in 2010.
Waste Connections chose and was given the opportunity to do business in Coos County and may haul our trash anywhere but the county actually has a right and a responsibility to assess a system benefit fee for every ton of waste transferred out of local control. Lane County assesses just such a fee.
Finally, a November 1, 2011 report prepared by Pickets Engineering, LLC estimates the costs of closing the Beaver Hill Disposal Site at $2.3 million which would probably trigger the closure of the Joe Ney construction landfill site at a cost of $7.9 million.
