Trash Talk

[December 19th, 2007]

A ticked-off tribe and a delicate union negotiation could stop Metro from picking the most fuel-efficient option on a massive upcoming garbage-hauling contract.

Metro is responsible for managing the region’s solid waste stream, and under a $9.8 million annual contract—in effect since 1989—it sends more than a half-million tons of trash a year 150 miles up the Columbia River Gorge to a landfill in Arlington, Ore.

The trash currently travels by truck. Every week, according to Metro, more than 350 tractor-trailer loads, each carrying about 31 tons of trash, roll up I-84 to the Arlington dump. After a Jan. 10 Metro Council hearing, the agency expects to invite interested parties to bid on a new 10-year contract starting in January 2010. That contract could be worth up to $150 million, or as much as $15 million a year, according to Mike Hoglund, Metro’s solid waste director.

There are three possible modes of transportation for the trash: truck, train and barge. As oil approaches $100 a barrel, the question of fuel consumption looms large. Metro’s use of trucks—by far the least fuel efficient of the three modes, according to an engineering study done for Metro earlier this year—already makes it unusual in the Gorge garbage game. Seattle sends its trash to the Gorge by train. And Vancouver, Wash., barges its waste up the Columbia.

“Whatever option we choose will be significantly more expensive than our last contract because of higher fuel costs,” Hoglund says, “although cost is only one of the criteria we’ll use.” (By comparison, four barges linked together carry 280 truckloads of trash in one voyage.)

At least two government agencies are interested in barging.

At the receiving end, the Port of Arlington spent nearly $2 million building a dock to receive garbage and was just days away from completing construction in March. Then, a long-simmering battle erupted between the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which issued permits for the dock.

Last month, the tribe made clear it opposes the dock, which lies at the mouth of Willow Creek on the Columbia.

“The impacts on reserved treaty fishing and cultural resources from such a facility and its operations would be so extreme and extensive to preclude any options for effective mitigation,” tribal chairman Antone Minthorn wrote local officials Nov. 2.

On the sending end, the Port of Portland wants its Terminal 2, located northwest of the Fremont Bridge in Portland, to be used as a load port for garbage headed upstream. The Port is eager to use the under-utilized dock. But the Port’s labor agreement at Terminal 2 with the International Longshore Workers Union also poses a potential obstacle to barging.

Gene Leverton, a consultant hired by the Port of Arlington to develop the Willow Creek dock and to coordinate the possibility of barging the trash, hopes the ILWU will agree to different contract terms for domestic shipment than it follows for international shipments along the West Coast (see “Cargo Kings,” WW , Oct. 9, 2002).

Shippers often dislike those terms. “The ILWU has quite a reputation for creating uncertainty in transportation, because they have a lot of rules around staffing and work hours that are not cost-effective,” Leverton says.

ILWU Local 8 secretary-treasurer Karl Lunde says his union has a separate contract for movement of domestic freight and is willing to consider working under its terms. “We’re open to any and all opportunities,” Lunde says.

Barges and trucks cost about the same. But barges produce less carbon dioxide because they use about half the fuel per ton as trucks. That’s key in global warming. However, barges do use dirtier fuels, which produce particulates that impede Gorge views.

As if the obstacles to barging were not enough, Metro recently reassigned the values of criteria it will weigh to award the contract, de-emphasizing cost and reliability from 60 percent to 45 percent. The agency increased the weight given to environmental impacts and social concerns, such as river congestion and the possible loss of trucking jobs in Gilliam County.