El Paso City Council, Waste Management and Environmental Justice

Last Tuesday, the El Paso City Council voted to turn down a contract with Waste Connections, Inc. which owns the Sunland Park, NM landfill and direct City attorneys to rewrite the ordinance to direct commercial garbage to city landfills. Tomorrow that amendment will be introduced to Council and Council will consider spending $18.5 million to re-open the McCombs landfill.

Recently I read an op-ed piece in the Albuquerque Journal by Nat Stone. Nat is an "unaffiliated" researcher who documents water contamination and control issues throughout the Rio Grande Basin. He lives in Zuni, New Mexico which is just outside of Gallup along I-40. That piece Does Waste Come Before Water in State's Priorities? discusses the possible pollution of the water table from the Sunland Park landfill. He mentions the grave concerns of the Sunland Park Grassroots Environmental Group, the disposal of toxic Phelps Dodge wastes at the landfill, and the realities of life near the landfill that result in illnesses and suffering.

Stone reports that amazingly NMED (New Mexico Environmental Department) has said that the landfill does not sit above the Mesilla Bolson, one of the two major aquifers supplying El Pasoans, when it does. He asks, "Should we bury our waste with our water?"

Stone sent me this op-ed piece to be published on the day before City Council meets to hear the introduction of a complete revision of the solid waste ordinance:

Flow Control

Obliged to affordably remove the collective waste of its 700,000 residents, the City of El Paso has rejected a private landfill’s discounted contract offer and moved toward burial of all city waste in city-owned landfills.

Formal adoption of this “flow control” ordinance would conclude a two-decade chapter of Sunland Park history, whose 14,000 residents have repeatedly protested a New Mexico permit for a California corporation to dump nonhazardous waste – 90% from El Paso – in their community. Forced by a succession of permits to “host” El Paso’s refuse, Sunland Park residents have warned that the site, where hazardous waste was illegally dumped, lies above the Mesilla Bolson, a key water source for the 2,000,000 residents of the greater El Paso region.

Opponents object not only to the location of the landfill, but also to a pattern of contamination in Sunland Park that magnifies health risks, stunts economic potential, and bruises pride. Over nearly a century, emissions from a nearby copper smelter rendered Sunland Park the most lead-contaminated community in New Mexico. The smelter then illegally incinerated hazardous waste from military weapons manufacturers.

Also burned were human body parts and other medical waste sent to the landfill’s medical waste incinerator, later closed in the wake of community protests.

Support for flow control gained traction in El Paso in 2008 after the landfill, anticipating a ten-year permit renewal from New Mexico Environment Department, was instead issued a 1-year permit that implied the possibility of subsequent closure. Reopened by a series of legal volleys, the case remains undecided by NMED.

Meanwhile, ever less certain of the Sunland Park option, and increasingly intrigued by the potential environmental and economic benefits of a strengthened recycling market, El Paso City Council now seeks to manage the liability of its own waste.

Having paid millions of dollars annually for an out-of-state corporation effectively to bury El Paso’s waste over the City’s own water supply, the City Council tomorrow will vote on an antidote to that failing plan. Flow control would keep those millions in El Paso, direct waste to City-owned landfills that do not threaten groundwater, and promote recycling and its offsetting revenues to fill those sites as slowly as possible.

Here also is Stone's video about the landfill: