|
An
Un-neighborly Practice
Chances are you wouldn’t pick up your trash can each
week and dump it into your neighbor’s yard—but
that’s exactly what we as Boulder County residents
do to our neighbors in Weld and Jefferson Counties. Since
1992 we have shipped them both our waste and its associated
long-term environmental and public health problems.
Each
day, a parade of trucks hauls more than 4,000 cubic yards*
of food waste, construction debris, electronics containing
hazardous materials, and other waste across county lines
to bury it in our neighbors’ “back yard.”
That’s a football field almost three feet deep in garbage
every day!
Why do this un-neighborly thing in the first place? Because
the misleading market signals of price and cost perpetuate
the falsehood that there are inexpensive “sanitary”
landfills nearby for Boulder County to use. The problem
is, no landfill is sanitary or cheap.
Can
a Landfill be “Sanitary?”
Landfills today are constructed under the Environmental
Protection Agency’s (EPA) 1991 Subtitle D regulations.
Subtitle D regulations define the technology that must be
used to prevent waste materials from migrating out of landfills—e.g.,
clay barriers, plastic liners, and methane collection systems.
These technologies often work well for a while, when the
landfill is young.
However,
even the EPA admits that it is a question of “when”
and not “if” landfill protective barriers will
fail: “Even the best liner and leachate collection
system will ultimately fail due to natural deterioration,
and recent improvements…suggest that releases may be
delayed by many decades at some landfills.”1 Furthermore,
says the EPA, “Once the unit is closed, the bottom
layer of the landfill will deteriorate over time and consequently
will not prevent leachate transport out of the unit.”2
This
last point is especially important, because Subtitle D regulations
only require landfill operators to deal with leachate (garbage
“juice”) and gas emissions for 30 years after
landfill closure. But based on the EPA’s assessment
and real-life experience, leachate from landfills continues
to threaten the environment long after 30 years have passed.
Some European countries recognize this and require monitoring
and treatment for 300 years post-closure! Yet here in the
US, the long-term responsibility for this toxic mess is
left to you, me, and our children’s children.
Is A Landfill Cheap?
Prior to 1992, trash from Boulder County
was buried in the Marshall landfill, just southeast of the
city of Boulder. While waste was still being dumped there,
the combination of wet wastes already in the landfill and
rainwater filtering down created toxic leachate. Because
the Marshall landfill was not engineered to contain this
ooze, it entered the groundwater. Now, each year the city
of Boulder pays $400,000 (BFI/Allied Waste, the landfill
operator, also pays $400,000/year) to fund ongoing monitoring
and clean-up efforts needed to protect the environment from
further contamination. The EPA has also declared the facility
a Superfund site, meaning some of our federal as well as
local tax dollars are involved in mitigating this threat
to the groundwater in southeast Boulder County. This could
easily continue for decades—with no end in sight. “Cheap”
landfills—like Marshall must have seemed during its
heyday—are only cheap on the front end, and only for
the short term. The real-life, long-term costs are very
large and very persistent.
A New Vision
What’s the answer when our own defunct landfill is
oozing toxic leachate and we can’t in good conscience
dump trash on our neighbors? Boulder County needs to adopt
a comprehensive Zero Waste plan that would significantly
decrease our dependence on landfill technology and replace
it with a mix of infrastructure and policy including:
1) A recovery center (or centers)
for a wide variety of hard-to-recycle materials such as
electronic equipment
2) Accessible community-based composting operations
3) Adequate recycling facilities and collection mechanisms
for all recyclable materials
4) Local legislation to increase producer responsibility
for waste and require recycling/recovery of products and
packaging, as well as phase-outs of non-recyclable and
hazardous materials used in manufacture
5) Container deposit and take-back laws
6) Elimination of the subsidies, policies, and incomplete
accounting that make wasting the “cheapest”
alternative for discards.
It’s time we begin sharing the
best of Boulder County—things like Zero Waste policies
and exemplary Zero Waste practices—with our neighbors
next door, not a legacy of waste and environmental problems!
*This is a conservative
estimate, since it does not include Boulder County trash
transported to the Foothills Landfill in Jefferson County.
Trash volume data from this landfill were not available.
1 U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency Federal Register, August 30, 1998, Vol.
53 #168.
2 Ibid.
|
