Dump Luck

[February 7th, 2007] Tossing glass bottles in a landfill doesn't constitute recycling for most people—but the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality isn't most people.

Last October, without any public notification, DEQ let Waste Management Inc. line a new Hillsboro landfill with 7,500 tons of glass picked up from curbside recycling bins in Washington County.

That's a good chunk of Waste Management's haul in Washington County and nearly 8 percent of all the glass recycled in Oregon in 2005. Put another way, environmental regulators allowed the equivalent of about 10 million empty beer bottles to be crushed and buried in the bottom of a landfill.

Larry Tuttle, of Portland's watchdog Center for Environmental Equity, says DEQ's decision is contrary to long-established public policy of sending recyclable material to its highest use (for glass, that's new bottles or fiberglass) rather than to a dump.

"At the same time Metro and the City of Portland are spending several hundred thousand dollars to promote glass recycling, DEQ is allowing Waste Management to negate that effort," Tuttle says.

"I don't think this was a wise decision by DEQ," adds Bruce Walker, Portland's solid waste and recycling manager. "They only talked to affected parties, and I think DEQ staff only heard one side of the story."

That side was Waste Management's, the publicly traded company that dominates Oregon's garbage.

Waste Management engineer Mark Reeves wrote in responses to DEQ questions last October that the reasons for using glass rather than gravel to line the Hillsboro landfill's expansion were primarily economic.

"If source-separated glass were not used, then gravel would need to be imported," Reeves wrote. "The direct cost of this quantity of gravel would be about $150,000. Indirect costs would include additional impacts to highways and construction delays."

Typically, metro-area municipalities set rates annually for the haulers who pick up curbside garbage and recyclables. Those rates are meant to cover costs and yield a reasonable profit for the hauler. Overall, the system is geared toward maximizing Oregon's rate of recycling. And hauling fees reflect the reality that recycling is often at least nominally more expensive than simply throwing material into a landfill.

Reeves wrote that it would be prohibitively expensive to transport the recovered glass and market it for a higher use because it was "mixed-color and highly contaminated with plastic bags and paper. The material would have to be cleaned of contaminants for use in recycling." Reeves added that transporting the glass to a Portland-area recycler would cost about $60,000.

Tuttle says Waste Management already gets compensated both for the cost of buying gravel for the landfill expansion and for sorting and shipping the glass. He says DEQ's decision creates a windfall for the landfill operator. Waste Management district manager Dan Wilson says his company's savings are small, "certainly not a windfall."

And DEQ's Rod Weick says glass is excellent for lining landfills because it doesn't react with substances that leach out of garbage. "And it reduces the need to mine gravel resources to go into the landfill," Weick adds.

Weick also says DEQ will count all the glass used in the landfill as recycled because it's being put to a "beneficial use" and saves the costs of mining gravel.

Weick acknowledges DEQ green-lighted a novel use of glass in the metro area without public notice, but he says none was necessary because "it's not a permit issue."

The October decision came when Waste Management had a glass stockpile at Hillsboro. Part of that stockpile accumulated when rail cars to move glass to the Bay Area recycling facility that melts most Portland glass were in short supply.

Weick denies that DEQ did Waste Management a favor by allowing the company to dump its stockpile rather than paying to ship it south. "We made a valid and reasonable decision," he says.

The freight bottleneck has long since cleared, says Paul Faherty of Strategic Materials Inc., which buys Portland-area glass for its San Leandro, Calif., plant. "The market for glass has never been better," Faherty adds.

Tuttle finds it ironic that in a strong market, glass is going into a landfill instead of recycling ovens. "Whenever there is an issue that pits a company DEQ regulates against the public interest, it always seems like the public interest comes in second," Tuttle says.