Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Volume Increases At Regional Landfill

Things are looking better financially for the Upper Southwest Regional Solid Waste District.

During its regular monthly meeting, Friday, May 10, Joe Ball, director of the Nashville landfill, told the members of the financial improvement.

In recent months, the district had been losing money on its operation. Ball said changing the rates on class I and class IV refuse has helped, but the biggest help has been an increase in volume.

He said the volume from Hempstead County alone nearly tripled for the month, with the majority of the garbage coming from Temple Inland in the form of sawdust from its particleboard manufacturing process. The Hempstead County waste, he said, does not include the City of Hope, which has its own landfill.

Howard County, Ball continued, has two industries generating a lot of solid waste as well.

The district is having one problem which has plagued all involved. Ball said the landfill can't schedule times for the different counties to come in and drop off their trash. This has led to several trucks arriving at the landfill at the same time, which leads to delays.

The door-to-door collection method, he said, has led to part of this problem, but it existed before the counties began route pick up of garbage.

"We never know what's coming in until it gets here," he said. "It's hard to predict. But we're scheduling where we can. We're getting more waste from collection trucks than in the past."

The slow time for the landfill crews is early morning, between 7 and 9 a.m., he told the board. Ball said he may try and get Howard County to go to morning delivery of its refuse.

"The push," Ball said, on a federal level, "is to get rid of landfills; to make it cost more to bury than recycle."

Because of this, he said the price of recyclable materials should go up considerably, especially paper products.

In addition, the district is continuing to look into pelletizing its waste into fuel pellets for Georgia Pacific.

Ball told the panel GP has ran tests using a similar fuel pellet and learned it will provide an adequate BTU for its process. GP, he continued, will pay the going price, about $20 or $21 per ton.

"This will be good for us," he said. If the district can work out a deal with GP and finance the necessary equipment, 55 percent of the trash going into the landfill will be "recycled" into fuel pellets. However, some separating would be required to take the materials which can't be used to make pellets out.

In addition, Ball said he visited Firestone's class III landfill. Class III landfills are primarily for industrial use only.

Apparently, Firestone is looking at possibly building another landfill as the current one is filling up. However, the company is examining the cost to see which would be less expensive: building another landfill or having the materials hauled to Nashville's.

Ball said Firestone would generate 1,400 or 1,500 tons per year from the two products the company manufactures. He said it would cost the company about $100,000 per year to haul it to Nashville, but this would be cheaper than building and maintaining its own landfill.