Department of Public Works Commissioner Jack Cunningham has said repeatedly that the Colonie landfill is an important asset and the town now must do what it can to keep it open.
The idea of a private partnership has been put on the table by the Landfill Exploratory Committee, a panel formed by Town Supervisor Paula Mahan to bring about efficiencies in the landfill.
The landfill is made up of several components, including a composting facility, recycling facility and a gas-to-electricity project.
Recently, the Spotlight toured those facilities, located on Route 9 in Latham, with Cunningham and Landfill Acting Director Matt McGarry as they described how the operation is run, how the landfill has progressed over the years, and how they keep the trash compacted.
A frequent term used to describe the landfill’s components is asset, and that word comes up when discussing the composting facility.
`This is one of the assets the town has is the ability to take yard waste, re-circulate it, make it compost and put it back out into the community,` said Cunningham.
The mulch from the compost facility is also used to cover the compacted trash when it is final grade. The mulch is meant to even out the slopes of the landfill and prevent any sort of erosion.
Many of the houses near the landfill are due east of the facility, so when heavy winds pick up, they carry the scent given off by the compost area. McGarry said landfill officials have a system to combat the smell, and with fall ` and its influx of leaves ` fast approaching, that system is crucial to keeping down the stench from the rows of compost.
`We have an odor prevention system,` said McGarry, pointing toward several metal poles surrounding the rows of compost. `Those have spray nozzles that spray an odor suppressor for the composting operation. You can’t control it 100 percent.`
McGarry added that if the day were too windy, the landfill wouldn’t even begin operations that day to minimize the impact on nearby homes.
Cunningham said he remembers in the mid-’90s driving from Cohoes to the landfill and the odor was so bad he couldn’t even roll down his windows.
This odor is now being controlled by an active landfill gas collection system, which, since 2006, takes the methane gas that leaked from the landfill and converts it into energy.
Cunningham posed the question to McGarry about whether or not the methane gas that leaks from the landfill could potentially become explosive. McGarry said that is not the case.
`That’s not going to happen here for a couple of reasons,` he said. `The double containment liner system and the soils around here are extremely tight glacial tills and clays so there’s no opportunity to really migrate.`
There are pipes that run throughout the entire facility collecting the methane gas produced from the landfill. With the first 40 to 60 feet of trash that is put into the landfill, they begin to place horizontal collectors, which are 6-inch perforated pipes that are connected every 40 feet at hundred foot centers, according to McGarry.
`When we get to the end of the [landfill] cell, we’ll drill verticals down,` he said pointing toward the leachate, or rainwater that percolates through garbage. `We will connect to it on the high side so the water goes down, the gas goes up, and we draw the gas from it.`
Once there is enough trash collected in the new cell, they can open the valves to the gas collection system and begin creating a vacuum to draw in the gas.
Driving up to the top of the mound of trash, which reaches over 400 feet high, there are a few attractions along the way, such as the site analytical worker’s shaved dog ` a Husky ` standing on top of his pickup truck while he tests the groundwater for methane, a mannequin in an abandoned boat, and two large trash compactors. The 100,000-pound compactors will go over the just-dumped trash with 8-inch spikes attached to the tracks. They then spray out cement to compact the trash even more and control the odor.
The amount of trash the landfill is allowed to hold is 170,500 tons, a regulation set by the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Currently there is a 12-acre cell that contains a mound of trash, with a new 12-acre cell directly next to it ready to be filled once the proper permits are in place.
There is more space where there are several buildings adjacent to the facility that house landfill equipment where, in the future, Cunningham said a new permit could be sought to expand into those areas.
McGarry said the interesting part about the business of the landfill is that even though they sell trash by the volume, they charge by weight.
`So, the more waste you can get into a unit, volume, the more profitable your operation is, the longer the life of your facility is,` McGarry said, adding that if they entered into a private partnership they would be able to take in waste that is lower in volume and higher in density.
`The value of the landfill is not the tonnage, it is the space,` said McGarry. `So we’ll have an available volume of space left and where it comes down to someone being competitive in a bid, everyone has the same amount of space to work with, but if one competitor says, ‘We can get more waste or more value out of that same space,’ that’s where the competitive advantage hits.`
Cunningham soon notes that he experiences vertigo when driving around the top of the mound, jokingly attributing it to McGarry’s driving abilities.
At the top, the Corning Tower, the Northway Bridge and the entire facility is in plain sight, a strange view to experience on top of a large pile of trash.
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