King County’s 920-acre Cedar Hills Landfill in Maple Valley takes in about 800,000 tons of solid waste a year off the trucks hauling compacted residential and commercial solid waste from transfer stations, and buries it.
But as Pat McLaughlin, King County director of Solid Waste, told Auburn’s leaders recently, 78 percent of the stuff could be recycled, which means Cedar Hills is filling up much faster than need be.
By 2030, he said, barring drastic action, Cedar Hills will run out of room. When that happens the county, according to its 2001 Solid Waste Management Plan, will have to contract with an out-of-county landfill for long-term disposal, for $10-to-$15 million more than it costs today.
Higher costs it will pass on to customers.
“We are consuming the very, very valuable air space at the landfill unnecessarily, and our only other option is more expensive,” McLaughlin said. “And so, as we are endeavoring to keep our rates low and competitive and our services supported with value, we’re really challenged to find a way to work boldly and collaboratively on a plan that will ensure we don’t unnecessarily raise our costs.”
McLauglin came to town to talk about a plan for achieving higher recycling rates, as outlined in a program called the “Roadmap to 70 percent.” With him was Jeff Gaisford, King County’s manager of Recycling and Environmental Services.
King County built up the bones of the plan from successful practices already in use elsewhere in the country. That includes Northern California, which, McLaughlin noted, has achieved recycling rates 10 percentage points higher than King County has.
County officials have distilled their findings into five core actions, keyed to “diverting resources instead of burying them.”
Action one calls for the county to adopt the following:
1. Separation of resources. That is, beyond the existing curbside programs, high subscription rates and successful recycling practices, customers have to stop contaminating the recycling resource stream with garbage.
2. Mandatory separation of resources from waste. Customers already have the containers, and the county’s hauling partners have said they can manage this part of the waste stream.
3. Establishment of a robust enforcement program. This calls for customer education. At the same time, expecting residents and businesses to play by the rules should provide the incentives for business partners to support the effort, McLauglin said. If all the county gives its business partners is a contaminated waste stream, he said, the program won’t get far.
“We can’t simply divert resources and force them onto these private haulers and processing companies if there’s no market or plan for them. They won’t do that. They’re smart business people, and they need to know that there’s a system in place to process, sell and move these market goods. They’re not going to warehouse them for us,” he said.
And because 78 percent of what’s being brought into the system is resource rich, the solid waste division needs to be able to harvest resources instead of burying them.
“We’re a safety net. We’re a last resort. The best thing we could do is educate people not to create the waste in the first place,” McLaughlin said. “We need to partner with businesses through product stewardship programs to get smarter packaging and end-of-the line ownership.
“Obviously, we also need to work through our business partners to educate them on proper recycling at the curb,” he added. “But we’re doing that now, and we are still getting 78 percent resources brought into our facilities. We can’t turn our head from that. We need to be able to harvest those resources as well.”
Gaisford said the county could take incremental steps toward achieving its goals, such as mandating that businesses and schools separate their food from the waste stream and put it into the compost cart. If businesses and schools were required to do this, he said, the county would see an increase of 4½ percent in its recycling rates county wide.
Among other steps: recovering materials like paper, metal and food that can be recycled today and which already have markets; and taking maximum advantage of existing infrastructure such as carts, which haulers like Waste Management already provide to the cities.
“You’ll see that there are no silver bullets. We need to increase recycling for all four of our key waste generators: single-family, multi-family, non-residential and self-hauling. … As we’re able to rebuild our transfer stations into new facilities, we’re able to separate more of the materials and provide more recycling services to our self-haulers, which is a huge component of this — a need to increase their recycling rate as well,” Gaisford said.
“… We don’t need to do all of this tomorrow. There’s some of these that are more ripe for action, such as single-family. They already have high participation rates, we just have to maximize the food recycling because we know that not a lot of food recycling is going on. As for multi-family, there are some issues going on. We need to know they have the right containers and space,” Gaisford said.
