ShareThisNew York and other big cities fought their garbage wars. These days the battle over trash is in the rural outlands.
In Northern California, a company called Recology wants to haul all of San Francisco's garbage 130 miles by train to rural Yuba County, near the town of Wheatland. It wants to transport other urban Bay Area trash 400 miles by rail to a proposed landfill near Winnemucca, in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.
Residents of towns in California and elsewhere are battling the plans, warning of environmental hazards and telling the cities to keep their trash.
But many experts say the days of the local dump are gone - and that may be a good thing for the environment. It's increasingly common to send trash away:
-- Sacramento's trash is trucked 140 miles over the Sierra Nevada each night to a remote landfill east of Reno.
-- Hawaii is pushing a plan to ship garbage 2,500 miles to Washington state.
-- New York City hauls its refuse to rural landfills in Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina.
"It's like any other commodity," said Thomas Kinnaman, a Bucknell University economist who specializes in waste management. "If you think about where food comes from, (or) manufactured goods ... , they move around the globe. Garbage is the same nowadays."
City dumps were once the norm. The model began to change in 1976 when Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Regulations implemented under the law in the 1980s and 1990s required landfills to be lined with clay and flexible geo-membranes, and to have systems to monitor and collect gases such as methane and the liquids that leach from garbage.
Thousands of city landfills closed because they couldn't afford the requirements. Private waste companies stepped in, building regional landfills where multiple cities and counties could truck their trash.
In California, a significant portion of localities still have landfills, including Yolo County. But Robert Holmes, a state regulator, said urban areas and smaller counties are turning to distant landfills.
The new landfills generally go in rural areas where land is a bargain. Transportation costs, particularly rail, are relatively cheap. The companies charge a tipping fee, and the garbage keeps coming.
"They're making money hand over fist," said Lawrence Swanson, of the Waste Reduction and Management Institute at Stony Brook University in New York.
San Francisco, for instance, pays a tipping fee of about $23 a ton at Altamont Landfill near Livermore, Calif. owned by Waste Management, the world's largest garbage company. San Francisco will ship an estimated 475,000 tons of trash there this year, paying about $11 million, said Mark Westlund, with San Francisco's Department of the Environment.
Recology, formerly Norcal Waste Systems, is the city's primary waste collector, but it takes non-recyclable refuse to the Altamont landfill, owned by competitor Waste Management. Recology has reached a tentative agreement with the city to haul garbage to its Ostrom Road landfill near Wheatland for less than what the city currently pays.
Waste Management has challenged the process and is seeking to renew its contract. Negotiations between the city and the companies are being kept under wraps.
Some residents in Yuba County are trying to head off Recology's bid to build a rail spur to the landfill. They insist that nearly tripling the amount of garbage arriving daily -- from 800 tons to 2,300 tons if San Francisco's trash is added -- would pose risks to groundwater and farmland.
Recology officials say they're not just offering San Franciscans a better deal; they're also making garbage greener by shipping it by rail. Trains are more fuel-efficient and easier on the environment than trucks, they say.
(E-mail reporter Hudson Sangree at hsangree(at)sacbee.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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