A study completed by Cornerstone Engineering and Geology (CEG) last month indicated that two sites in Wawarsing — 247 acres adjacent to Milk Road and 191 acres adjacent to Brown Road — had been identified as the most promising for a future county landfill, Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency executive director Marc Rider said last week.
After reviewing the most recent landfill siting feasibility study conducted by Hydroquest in 2021, CEG was charged with identifying land areas suitable for landfill development, It sifted sifting through the county’s 45 existing inoperative landfills to assess reclamation potential.
“When I came on board in March,” said Rider, “I asked them to review any and all potential sites in Ulster County where a grouping of parcels could give us over 100 acres of usable landfill land.” Any landfill in Ulster County would be mandated to be at least 1000 yards from a residence.
Rider described the work as mainly a combination of a geographic information system and a hydrogeological study. He said CEG came up with nine sites in the county with potential for consideration as a future landfill. He winnowed out the rest until only the Warwarsing sites remained.
Even with the two sites in Warwarsing identified as the most promising, Rider expressed his desire to retain the services of a consulting firm to perform a deeper dive.
“A traffic study, impact-versus-benefit analysis, a deeper soil analysis, a look at the groundwater and where it runs,” said Rider, “Those studies should be first, and we’ll stage the contract that way if I’m given the authority to go forward. That will tell us right off the bat whether we’re eliminating any of these future sites or not.”
UCRRA’s board has voted to authorize the issuance of a Request for Proposals for the further landfill site analysis.
Assuming these studies don’t turn up anything which would disqualify the siting of a landfill — a possibility which Rider acknowledges — even then he forsees a decade-long process performing New York State DEC-mandated studies as well as anything required by federal Environmental Protection Agency laws which specify how solid-waste management facilities should operate.
“We’ll hold public meetings with the communities that will be affected,” promised Rider. “And if suitable, if there is a site that’s identified as meeting all those [criteria], then we will move forward and apply for a permit with the agency and the town and begin the SEQR process.”
It will be a long uphill climb. Landfills are so unpopular that none have been permitted to be opened anywhere in New York State for the last 20 years.
The UCRRA itself, created almost 40 years ago in part to site a countywide landfill, has so far been unable to complete its charge.
Rider said his eyes were open to the challenges, but suggested that public sentiment was becoming more realistic as the deadline for landfill permits draws nearer.
“There’s currently 26 active landfills in New York State,” Rider pointed out. “The total permitted annual capacity [for landfills] is just under eleven million tons, and currently New Yorkers send just under nine million tons to those landfills annually. As of 2020, there were 202 million tons of capacity left. If no new landfills are permitted in the next 22 years, then we have nowhere to take our waste in New York State.”
Rider estimated that 140,000 tons of county construction-and-demolition debris is shipped off to Seneca Meadows in the Finger Lakes region each year. It’s the largest landfill in New York State, an enterprise which adds 4000 tons of carbon-dioxide emissions per year from shipping and bleeds an estimated $10 million in the exchange.
“The way that landfills are built today with membranes, and all of the collection of methane and leachate and ensuring that none of the contaminants are getting in the groundwater,” the UCRRA executive director said. “It can be an environmentally responsible way to dispose of our waste.”
While Rider agrees that local municipalities should be responsible for their locally generated waste, he also recognizes the problem is much larger. Solutions will have to be creative. Landfill’s need not be the end-all, be-all.
He points to other, more technologically advanced waste solutions like the operation of anaerobic digesters currently utilized in other New York municipalities like Auburn, Buffalo and New York City. Micro-organisms break down food-waste materials inside sealed tanks, creating a biogas harnessed to produce e heat and electricity.
“So maybe it’s not just place a landfill in one community and take all of our MSW from three or four counties and place it there,” theorizes Rider. “Maybe one solution is dealing with organic waste in an innovative way alongside the other.”
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