Mat-Su junk cleanup: Getting creative

Mat-Su Borough officials are working on new ways to get accumulated junk out of the borough.

A recent program that moved 250 junk cars off peoples’ properties and moves to central collection points, with the borough chipping in to help pay costs, proved very popular.

So did a “free week” for dropping off trash and debris at the borough’s landfill. About 4,800 tons of debris was hauled to the landfill over 15 days, from Sept. 15 to Sept. 30.

“After this you’d think there’s no more trash left in the borough, but we know there’s more,” Mat-Su borough manager Mike Brown told the assembly Nov. 14.

The junked cars are collected but they are still in the borough, Brown said. The next step is to get them out of the borough to be recycled. Preliminary discussions have been held with a major metal recycling company as to how this could be done, he said.

The company was not identified but Brown said ideas were offered up that included use of borough land as a collection point and the borough-owned Port MacKenzie for shipping to the Lower 47 for recycling of the metal.

“We’re asking the company what we can do to help make this viable,” Brown said.

The company will work to further develop ideas and get back to the borough in a couple of months, Brown told the assembly. The hope is that this will be a comprehensive program that will involve all scrap haulers and storage operators in the Mat-Su region, he said.

Meanwhile, the free trash drop-off proved almost too popular. It was a challenge for staff at the landfill to handle the demand, landfill manager Jeff Smith told the assembly in the Nov. 14 briefing.

“The response was overwhelming,” he said. It wound up costing the borough about $50,000 in employee overtime.

Borough manager Brown said he talked to one resident who made 37 trips hauling trash. “I’m sure he was able to clean out his property,” Brown said.

The borough would like to offer the program again but in a way that spreads out the impact, perhaps by offering it at several times through the year or by sending out coupons, Brown said.

“Our challenge is that we don’t want to have to pay to do this (such as through overtime) in addition to the lost revenue,” he said.

The totals and types of trash collected were impressive. There were 1,500 tons of construction debris; 2,300 tons of metal; 600 tons of tires; 415 tons of conventional municipal waste and 8,000 cubic yards of other materials.

“There were also 985 old refrigerators,” Brown said.

Meanwhile, the new wood waste composting project planned at the landfill is good news for gardeners in the borough.

A $3.54 million U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant has been awarded to the borough to help develop waste recycling facilities.

“The award will be used to build a composting facility at the Central Landfill location, providing recycling options for organic wastes and to reduce disposal costs for Borough residents,” the EPA said in a statement.

EPA’s Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling program is the source of the grant.

Initially, the goal is to gather wood waste and debris from the borough’s solid waste collection sites in Talkeetna, Big Lake and Wasilla and transport the material to the Palmer landfill where wood waste it also gathered, according to Smith, the landfill manager. Currently wood waste is periodically burned after dropped off, he said.

Converted to compost, wood waste becomes a usable product ideal gardening, it will be made available for free at the borough solid waste facility, although people will have to bag it themselves. Valley Recycling, a nonprofit, will also be bagging and selling the compost at reasonable prices.

Smith said the plan is to eventually expand the recycling of wood to food waste, although Including food waste makes the process more complicated. It will take time to establish collection sites and educate the public on the program.

A three-acre site at the landfill has been designated for the wood waste composting. The compost process typically takes six to 14 weeks.

The borough has been gradually expanding its recycling capabilities at the landfill after purchasing a shredder last year with another federal grant, and the new EPA grant will be used to buy equipment needed for composting.

This will include trucks to move waste material from the outlying collection sites to the landfill, which is near Palmer, as well as other equipment.

Compost is good material for gardening, but there are other benefits. Recycling of wood debris means it won’t have to be burned, which eliminates smoke and the release of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

it will also reduce the amount of land needed for landfill expansions, a big monetary savings for the borough in the long run.

The borough has set aside 620 acres for its landfill but only about 20 percent of this is used now for solid waste storage in cells, or waste storage sites, Smith said. Three cells are now in use for ordinary trash and a fourth is used as a “C and D” cell for construction and demolishment materials.

Reducing the amount of land needed for landfill expansion, through recycling, offers real savings. Smith said it costs $6 million to $8 million to open a new cell and then close it when full.

It's a separate project from composting, but the C and D site is planned for an expansion so the public will be able to inspect and retrieve usable construction material.

Although this material is discarded by contractors some of it is quite usable, such as 2x4 and 2x6 boards along with dry wall material, Smith said.

New facilities will include a drive-through loop that will facilitate the dropping off of solid waste.

Meanwhile, the composting operation will be operating by spring, 2025, and Smith hopes to expand into food waste collection and composting a year later, or spring 2026.

The solid waste landfill is one of the borough’s “enterprise” operations, meaning it is self-sustaining based on fees and has no taxpayer support.