While garbage-hauling trucks rumble and hilly rows of compost smoke with an inner heat of 150 degrees Fahrenheit, Ulster County Resource Recovery (UCRRA) executives and workers gathered to commemorate 579 cubic yards of new concrete floor at the transfer station Garbage Building D.
One of the celebrants was Marc Rider, who on March 5 began a three-year tenure as executive director of the UCRRA. Rider will oversee a staff of 35 workers in the office and in the field.
The agency mandate is to manage all municipal; solid waste: biosolids, source-separated organics, clean wood, demolition debris, and recyclables produced in the county. It collects waste from 16 municipally owned and operated facilities plus two regional facilities it owns and operates.
Add to that workload two capped-off landfills, one in New Paltz, the other in the Town of Ulster,
The concrete, reinforced with rebar and mixed with pieces of metal that resemble nails, is 18 to 21 inches thick. The floor will be able to withstand pressures of 6500 pounds per square inch.
“You need the support of every section of the floor,” explained Charlie Whittaker, UCRRA director of operations, “in order not to crack or breach it.”
Knowing full well the abuse and rough use in store for the new floor, the agency anticipates a life expectancy for the concrete of nine years.
Dump trailers, box trucks and pickup trucks haul garbage in day in and day out over the floor through five outsized doorways. The massive building resembles an airplane hangar.
The garbage never stops
“The waste comes in, it’s tipped, we have three to four spotters on the floor that will separate the clean wood, take out the cardboard, take out the metal, the rubble — anything that can be reused,” said Whittaker, “and also take out the e-waste, air conditioners, propane tanks, anything unauthorized, that’s not allowed to go to a landfill.”
When necessary, a 57,000-pound loader pushes garbage across the floor into evergrowing piles. An excavator waits alongside to dig into the pile with a giant claw and move the sorted garbage out, dropping it into open-roofed trailers waiting a story below.
“This is where the excavator digs,” said Whittaker. “We wanted to get a little bit more concrete there. Sometimes when the pile is depleted, you end up hitting the concrete.”
Ten to fifteen trucks a day each carry away 35 to 39 tons of what the excavator claw drops down.
“Our permit says at the end of the day this floor has to be cleaned, swept, and all waste has to be removed. Every single day. We are permitted for 640 tons six days a week.”
As Whittaker noted, the garbage never stops. To ensure disposal could continue uninterruptedly, the floor was poured with concrete and cured in four sections. Making sure that the concrete cured properly and that its water content did not freeze and crack was a months-long process. Blankets and blowers were used to keep the floor warm while the concrete set in the winter months.
That all construction was done in-house rather than through solicited bids was a particular point of pride for the agency.
A generic floor plan
Director of finance Tim McGraff said material and supplies to build the floor cost the agency $190,000. He estimated $400,000 was saved. “At least,” said McGraff. “At a very conservative level, because if we compare that to square footage costs from back in 2005, vendor costs, I’d probably say closer to a million.”
As a facility permitted by the state Department of Environmental Conservation, a DEC-approved floor plan expedited the process from the get-go, said Whittaker. “We can actually just have our engineers come in and say what needs to be repaired submit a letter, and then the DEC approves it, says, ‘Go ahead.’ Then we got to give them the opportunity to come inspect it. They didn’t come in inspect it because they knew we were following a generic floor plan.”
The UCRRA is a public benefit corporation, paying its way by generating its own revenues. More than 80 percent of its revenues, now around $17 million a year, has been coming from tipping fees, payments by customers to solid-waste companies, the MSWs which are the UCRRA’s main customers.
Allowing 28 days for the final section to cure, Whittaker figured the agency had arrived at the stage where it was ready to open. The only thing left to do was to cut a ceremonial ribbon strung across an entrance doorway and let the garbage come rolling in.
There’s a lot happening
Previous agency executive director Greg Ollivier was fired last August amidst disagreements with the UCRRA board after less than a year on the job. He left describing the board as dysfunctional, and in return was criticized as mismanaging the recycling and operational aspects of the agency.
Waste-management industry veteran Anna Roppolo was lured out of retirement to helm the agency during the search for a new director.
Roppolo winnowed the field down to three out of 60 candidates, “Forty of them were serious,” said UCRRA board chair Regis Obijiski. “Of course Marc won out.”
Rider, 45, served as an assistant county executive in a previous administration. He finished third behind Jen Metzger and March Gallagher in a three-way Democratic primary race for county executive. “With my experience running various departments in county government I felt I could help the agency in operations,” he said last Tuesday.
The amount of waste produced in the county has been climbing. So has the amount of materials diverted from the Seneca Meadows landfill, the terminus for Ulster County waste 250 miles away.
Ulster County produced a mind-boggling 263,027 tons of waste in 2022. Despite the best efforts of the agency, 176,581 tons of garbage was packed off at a cost of ten million dollars to Seneca Meadows. But the agency managed to spare 86,446 tons from that final journey.
It may be helpful to think in terms of the tonnage represented by a single Toyota Prius. The tonnage would be the same as if the residents of Ulster County had scrapped 151,297 Toyota Priuses and then needed to bury them somewhere. The operations at UCRRA managed to save the equivalent of 50,000 of the feisty little cars.
Options will be explored
Rider sees four options for the surplus waste.
“One, we can keep spending $10 million a year, sending out waste up to Seneca Meadows, out of our budget ’til 2040, which is when I believe Seneca Meadows will close. That’s the status-quo option. I can’t imagine that the solution long-term is to continue to do what we’re doing. That’s probably the least environmentally friendly option.
“Two, we can work with some neighboring counties. You know, there was talk of GUS a few years ago [A tri-county co-operative considered among Greene, Ulster and Sullivan]. We can look at doing regionalization. I think the county executive has said that she is interested in exploring that as well. It will take work by the legislature and work by the executive office, there will be a county partnership in this.
“Three, we have our in-county landfill.
“The fourth option is figuring out a waste-to-energy plant. Right now, incinerators are not as environmentally friendly as many would hope, but there’s a lot of gasification that happens with energy, so you can take all that organic waste, you can gasify it and turn it into electricity. You’d still have to haul the 20 to 30 percent that’s not made up of organic waste somewhere else.
“These are all options that we need to explore.”
Making compost
The most promising development in UCRRA operations over the last few years may be the way in which food waste has been diverted to the county’s composting program. Besides generating revenues for the agency, 4320 tons of source-separated organics (food waste, food scraps) were processed in 2022, making unnecessary 123 tractor-trailer trips carting 35 tons each to Seneca Meadows, saving diesel fuel and avoiding the pollution that would have come from burning it.
Mingled with yard waste and wood chips, the bulk composting operation sold 2708 tons of compost back to the community in 2022.
“There’s a lot of talk on diverting 80 percent of organic wastes,” says Rider. “Even 100 percent by 2030. I think that’s an admirable goal. And it’s one that as an agency we’re going to move towards.”
Waste not, want not
The UCRRA also has a public outreach arm. A campaign of community programming aims to introduce the public to a future of the possible while countering the damage done by decades of products produced with disposability in mind.
The message emanating from the agency is that If residents are mindful of their waste, if municipalities provide containers for waste separation, and if waste haulers maintain the separation of waste materials in transit, then the UCRRA can recover resources for re-use — resulting in a minimum of waste destined for a landfill
“I would say there’s one other group that should be responsible,” added Rider, “and that’s the producers of that waste.” If non-recyclable packaging and materials were never manufactured in the first place, consumers and everyone else downstream wouldn’t have to worry about disposing of them.
“What we have here is a public-health problem,” said Obijiski. “We’re choking on our own garbage. Not just here. The whole world.”
Consider the great garbage patch twice the size of Texas floating somewhere far off the coast in the Pacific Ocean.
In the middle of the ocean or 250 miles to Seneca Meadows, out of sight is out of mind. Rider wants to consider what Ulster County can do here.
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