Solid Waste 2002 report - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

Federal and state regulations on landfills were enacted after discoveries of groundwater contami- nation from landfill leachate. A number of closed landfills have also become Superfund cleanup sites. Once landfills are closed they must be monitored basically forever to make sure that the material does not contaminate the soil or groundwater outside the landfill. Minnesota charges a sales tax on your garbage collection bill that pays for this monitoring and any ensuing cleanup (Minnesota pays between $30 and $40 million a year to monitor and clean up all the currently closed landfills in the state). Also federal regulations require landfill operators to sign a financial assurance statement in which they post a letter of credit for money that could be used for cleanup. (How- ever if that operator goes out of business there is no guarantee private money would be available for cleanup.) Minnesota requires additional post closure care. Instead of a letter of credit, an operator has to have a contingency action cleanup fund of money set aside to pay for cleanup. Tipping fees at landfills run between $35 and $40 a ton although some garbage companies that run their own landfills give themselves a lower, preferred rate. Tipping fees at landfills have gone up in part due to these potential long-term obligations to pay for cleanup. However since government assumes a number of the costs of monitoring and cleanup, garbage rates charged to consumers do not fully reflect the cost of landfill disposal. Large garbage haulers have begun to capitalize on their scale by building landfills in other states such as Iowa and Wisconsin that have ]ower tipping fee taXes and lesser environmental and financial requirements. This trend has become especially pronounced since a 1994 U.S. Supreme Court decision opening the door for haulers to take their trash out of state. Haulers such as Waste Management and Superior Services are able to truck their trash and dump in out of state landfills they own for less than what it costs to use disposal facilities in Minnesota. In 2000, Minnesota was the tenth largest eXporter of trash among the 50 states. Following years of complaints from residents about the truck traffic and other undesirable ele- ments of living near a landfill, Wisconsin lawmakers increased the tipping fee tax at Wisconsin landfills $3 a ton in 2001. The money will go for grants to Wisconsin recycling programs, but the bill's sponsors freely admit they were trying to discourage dumping of out of state waste. Despite the increase tipping fee taxes are six to seven dollars a ton less in Wisconsin than in Minnesota. And Craig Seim, General Manager of BFI's Minnesota division told the Committee garbage haulers will continue to make disposal decisions based primarily on cost. Waste Management is experimenting with a new type of landfill called a bioreactor where the wastewater is poured back over the capped cells of the landfill in order to speed decomposition and if successful allow the cell to be reused. Don Kyser a Public Engineer with the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance told the Committee he believes this eXperiment will not work as well as hoped. He says the amount of leachate collected and treated is only enough to appro- priately saturate one cell to speed decomposition. And in this test the leachate is being spread over all the cells. Also glass and plastic will not decompose in these bioreactor landfills. :