Landfill on hold until spring

PALMER -- The opening date for the new cell at the Mat-Su Borough Central Landfill has been moved back to next summer, with the onset of winter in the Valley, but Solid Waste Engineer Greg Goodale said the existing cell should provide ample space for refuse until then.

Due to a few unexpected problems along the way, the project, which was scheduled to be complete by October, was put on hold. Goodale said the problems were related to gravel work necessary for the project. The construction guidelines for developing a new landfill cell are pretty stringent, he said, and the gravel for one portion of the project had to be within a narrow size range that was difficult to achieve. Taking the delay into account, the contractor continued working on the project until recently.

"We just gave them a winter shut-down," Goodale said. "It's not in our best interest to have someone try and continue working under these conditions."

He said it's best to open a new landfill cell in the winter, giving the refuse a chance to build up and act as a sponge, slowing the amount of leachate running into the storage tank when things thaw in the spring. Although starting use of the cell during warm weather will likely lead to more leachate and increased trips to Anchorage's wastewater treatment facility to dump tankloads of leachate, Goodale said they'll be anxious to start using the new cell as soon as it's available.

The existing cell still has a few lifts, or eight-foot-high blocks of space available. He estimated the refuse generated in the Valley takes up about one lift per year -- about 54,000 tons of refuse. There's more than enough space left, he said, but regulations allow the cell to remain open, or not capped off, as long as space is available. Closing a cell leads to a chain of regulatory requirements, engineering and other things that make it a costly process, Goodale said. Closing a single cell may result in costs of $1 million or more.

"Our hope was to be able to postpone the closure of this cell for many years -- up to 10 years," Goodale said. "We're disappointed [the new cell] didn't go online in December."

If the existing cell could remain in use for another 10 years, the borough could fill the existing cell to the same level the still-open Cell A is currently at, then use the entire surface area as one large open cell.

"The longer we have to stay in this cell, the more it takes away from that," Goodale said.

The project was funded with a $3.2 million federal grant. Steppers Construction was the successful bidder, with a $1.55 million bid, but slightly more of that has been used through change orders with the project and a project expansion, bringing the total amount committed to the project at this time to about $3 million. One change order, Goodale said, will allow a lift station to be installed with the storage facility to allow the borough to use larger tankers to haul the leachate away, saving transportation costs. The project itself is about 80 percent complete, Goodale added, and the liner system incorporated into the design to funnel runoff into a tank where it can be removed is about 90 percent complete. Once it's on line, Goodale said, the fact that it is lined will allow them to accept material currently not acceptable at the landfill.

"You have the ability, once you're in a liner system, to accept types of things like petroleum-contaminated materials," Goodale said. "But really, it gets us into compliance with existing regulations."