Solid Waste Flow Control Should Flow On Time

First of all, read the Cindy Ramirez story in today's El Paso Times: El Paso City Council to mull solid waste flow control, landfill issues. As someone who favors more recycling and less waste, moving to the use of our own landfills just makes sense. Putting it simplistically, if I'm burying my garbage in someone else's backyard, I don't care how much I throw away or what I throw away. If I have to use my own backyard, then I start caring. Moreover, I prefer local contractors who care about our home over a huge mega-corporation such as Waste Connections. Actually I do care about what and how much gets dumped no matter whose backyard we use. It's our earth and fellow humans not to mention the health of the water we all use, the critters and the rest of the environment involved. There may be major problems with the Sunland Park landfill and we should care.

There are two main challenges that we face when it comes to dumping less, recycling more and using our own landfills to incentivize these goals. There is that $18.5 Million to re-open the McCombs landfill, of course, but that is not insurmountable. A preliminary decision by the TCEQ to expand the McCombs landfill was issued just one month ago. All that is now required is a public hearing. What the City applied for was to increase the vertical of landfill from 4,125 to 4,305 feet above sea level over a boundary of 19.4 acres. That's 180 feet. Imagine an 18 story building sitting on 19.4 acres. There's your $18.5 Million. However, El Paso creates about a million tons of garbage (commercial and residential) per year. The cost to dispose of one ton is $26. Even if the City collects half or a bit more of the garbage, the cost of the landfill expansion is easily recouped in just over a year. What this means is that there is no reason why El Paso shouldn't stick to the current September 2014 date for flow control.

So why the push back? First we are dealing with a huge corporation which makes huge profits. Whatever the politics at play, the City Manager must have been swayed to stick with the Big Boys over the local contractors - a huge economic error for so many reasons that I can't get into them right now except to say that it hurts the tax base and puts the burden on property owners as have all the colonial exploits in this City. (Want to know why your home and/or small business is overtaxed? Look at the salary and wage base versus the profit margin of the few and elite Big Boys.) There is also, of course, the fact that Waste Connections has given huge amounts as reported by the Times to our friend, Dr. No. I have also heard that Rep. Robinson does not want a dump in his part of the City in spite of the fact that the McCombs Landfill is on the border with New Mexico and near an expanding Jobe Quarry. It's industrial land no matter how you look at it or want it or whatever. See the map.

The final challenge to waste and recycling is the remoteness of El Paso. An engineer with extensive knowledge of solid waste work told me that, since we are so far from the centers of demand for recyclables, the transportation costs put us out of the market. Furthermore, we don't produce enough combustible waste to make waste to energy plants economical. (Perhaps it could be if Ft. Bliss were to join us; but then we still may be market-hungry.) 

The solution? According to the engineer: "The real key in our area is to reduce waste at the source.  Compost at home; don’t buy stuff with a lot of packaging; don’t use plastic grocery bags; reduce overall consumption of the items that create the most bulk waste." Flow control is a great incentive for us to do just that - waste less, compost more, reduce unnecessary packaging including the ubiquitous El Paso City flag - the plastic grocery bag. We've got to act not just talk. I still shake my head with disgust when I think of our City's Sustainability Manager's half-hearted presentation to a City Council Legislative Review Committee two or so years ago on banning plastic bags. We need some real will power not just nice looking plans and cutely stated goals.

Let's hope that the Davids win tomorrow and the Goliath, Waste Connections, goes down and the Philistines on the Council are fewer than the Israelites. 

Flow Control Passes City Council

It was Representative Beto O'Rourke who asked the decisive question. After well articulating the pros and cons to go with Flow Control or maintain the status quo with Waste Connections and the Camino Real Landfill, he asked Environmental Services Department Director, Ellen Smyth, "Can El Paso do flow control?" "Are we ready, do we have the resources, the expertise, the wherewithal?" Ms. Smyth answered: "Can do." She said that we have the resources, the expertise, the wherewithal.

And so, by a 6-2 vote (Robinson and Lilly dissented), City Council embarked the City on course that some believe to be an $18 million crap shoot. Others, though, feel that by taking responsibility for its own waste, El Paso will set course to a more sustainable future of reducing, recycling, reusing and composting.

El Paso is also taking responsibility for its own waste rather than dumping the problem (sorry to say the pun is intended) on its poorer neighbors in Sunland Park who have for years protested against the Camino Real Landfill saying that it is the cause of illnesses (including a greater cancer incidence among the population) and toxic water pollution.

Retired attorney Taylor Moore, a Sunland Park resident and member of the Sunland Park Grassroots Environmental Group, articulated the dangers of putting on top of the water table a landfill where industrial wastes are still buried and deadlier toxic wastes in the past were once taken in the dark of night. He spoke about the water table flowing to the Rio Grande was being compromised and that water from the Rio Grande is pumped from the Canal Street station to Sunset Heights to Brown and beyond to the entire city.

EPWU official, John Balliew, refuted Mr. Moore's claims when he said that particulates found in water tested upstream at Borderland, Canutillo and Vinton were consistent with what was present in the water tested at the Canal station. However, the question for Mr. Balliew is "Who does the testing? An independent?"

After a summary of Waste Connections proposals by Lee Wilson and a convoluted speech by Representative Robinson, the Council voted in favor of Representative Byrd's motion (and Quintana's second) to commit to flow control as outlined in the enabling ordinance without a deal with Waste Connections.

As Robert Ardovino said: "Responsibility is promoting sustainability." El Paso has decided to become sustainable - at least with waste if not with water and sprawl and building ugly freeways on a beautiful mountain corridor.

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: