Do You Know Where Your Garbage Is?
By Portia Sinnott, November 2004
Surprise!
Central Landfill’s 2005 expansion is on hold and 30% of Sonoma County's
trash is now being
exported out of county.
Let’s make it clear to the County Board of Supervisors that increased
waste diversion and recycling must be the first priority.
Sonoma County’s main
landfill, Central Landfill, is scheduled to be full this coming July. Due to
potential groundwater contamination problems, the North Coast Regional Water
Quality Control Board has put the long planned expansion on hold. To help
mitigate the situation, 30% of our waste is now being exported to a privately
owned landfill in Solano County. Because of this costs have increased
substantially. On July 1,2004 tipping fees at the landfill increased 30%, from $54
per ton to $70 per ton. Household and commercial trash fees have gone up in
recent months and will probably go up again.
The County Board of
Supervisors will be making some hard decisions on this early next year. Brown,
Vence and Associates, a respected northern California based waste management
consulting firm, was hired in September to reassess the recently approved
Countywide Integrated Waste Management Plan (CoIWMP), analyze the
alternatives, hold stakeholder workshops, and perform integrated system
scenarios and economic analyses.
As presented at a special
Board of Supervisors Meeting on June 22, the options being considered included
expanding Central Landfill, siting a new landfill, exporting our waste,
privatizing part or all of the system, joining with other counties to create a
regional system, and/or developing an anaerobic digester that would convert
garbage to methane, which in turn could be burned to produce electricity or
used as vehicle fuel.
Increasing our landfill
diversion goal, currently the state mandated 50%, was not taken seriously in
these meetings though it is well addressed in the CoIWMP. This is unfortunate
because our waste reduction, recycling, reuse and composting programs have
great potential. For example,
nearly 46% of our residential waste stream being landfilled is food, plant
debris and possibly contaminated paper, all organics that could be composted.
Fortunately this is on
its way to being rectified but your attention is needed.
The Sonoma County Local Task Force on Solid Waste (LTF) is an advisory board
to the Sonoma County Waste Management Agency and the County Board of
Supervisors. This august group includes representatives from our 9 cities, 5
supervisoral districts, 2 hauler groups, a recycling group, the agricultural
industry, Sonoma County Manufacturing Group, Santa Rosa Chamber of Commerce,
Sierra Club, the Environmental Forum, Garbage Reincarnation, League of Women
Voters and county staff from Public Works and Public Health Departments plus
educational, marketing and scientific specialists. In other words, this is a
well-structured, occasionally contentious, group that over many years has
learned to work well together for the benefit of the County.
At its October 2004 meeting,
the LTF unanimously recommended that county staff and Brown, Vence and
Associates make maximum diversion a top priority and to consider a broad range
of alternatives including mandatory recycling, food organics, landfill bans,
product bans, product stewardship, R&D and last but certainly not least
public education.
Please speak up and let
the supervisors know your priorities. A
public workshop on our disposal challenge and the study results will
be held soon. For additional information, please read the pages above.
To find out when the workshop will be held, call the Integrated Waste
Division Recycling Hotline between 12 and 3 pm weekdays at 707 565-3375.
Portia Sinnott is a
waste management professional, the District 5 representative alternate to the
Local Task Force on Solid Waste, and serves as the LTF Vice Chair.
This piece is written as a citizen reporter, not as member of the Task
Force and does not intend to represent the opinions of the entire task force.
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