trash to treasure

It doesn’t stink.

t hat’s the first thing that strikes visitors to Dallas’ 996-acre Mc c ommas b luff Landfill, a former gravel pit lying just south of the t rinity r iver near the intersection of I-45 and I-20. It would seem that a place that takes in nearly 5,000 tons of garbage a day — almost 2 million tons a year — should emit an odor at least as sour and putrid as a commercial dumpster.

b ut somehow, it doesn’t.

“We don’t want you to know there’s a landfill here,” says r on Smith, the city’s assistant director of sanitation services.

At the end of each and every day, his crew spreads a six- inch layer of clean dirt atop the mounds of trash brought in. t he dirt helps mask the stench, keeping the stray dogs and rats at bay, and also makes the landfill look more like a construction site than a giant pile of garbage. t oday Smith is giving a tour of Mc c ommas b luff, a regular part of his job and a task he clearly relishes. From the look of pride on his face, you’d think he was showing off one of the Smithsonian museums. t here’s a reason folks around the sanitation services department call it “ r on’s landfill” — Smith can ramble off all the ins, outs and little-known facts about Dallas’ dump site as he navigates his SUV around the perimeter.

And as he does, you start to get the idea that all the trash here is really just “a side note,” Smith says.

“ t his road isn’t made of gravel — it’s ground-up, recycled concrete.

“See that pecan grove to the left? In the fall, people can come here and gather the pecans that drop.

“ t hat’s a compactor. It rolls over the garbage five times and flattens it so that it takes up the least room possible. At a landfill, space is money.” t rash is Smith’s business. And in Dallas, it’s big business. Most of us don’t give another thought to our trash after garbage trucks collect it from its front driveways

2 million tons of waste taken in annually at the landfill

800,000 annual tons of waste from single-family residents

6,000 tons of waste left at the landfill each day on average or alley each week. And even if we do think about it, we likely assume it’s taken to a remote location, then left to sit and rot for the next few decades or centuries.

7 pounds of waste thrown away daily by the average person in Texas (The national average is 5.4 pounds. Texans don’t necessarily toss that much more than other Americans; the national average takes only household waste into account, whereas the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality factors in other forms of waste.)

“From the person on the street’s perspective, garbage collection looks exactly like it did 50 years ago,” says sanitation services director Mary Nix. “ b ut technology has changed dramatically.”

t he ranking of Dallas’ Mc c ommas b luff Landfill among the

For one, we’re recycling more than we ever have. t his means less garbage being dumped into the landfill, something that will add years to the landfill’s life. And, Nix says, our recycling numbers are growing as more and more Dallasites warm to the idea. Plus, all those milk cartons and soda cans create revenue for the city just not enough to pay for the city’s recycling program.

t he real money-maker is all of that precious space at the landfill, along with the fact that Dallas lets anyone use it who is willing to pay up. Mc c ommas b luff is so big — the biggest landfill in the state and the 15th largest in the nation — that the city has room to spare, at least for a few more decades.

Trash to treasure

And perhaps even longer, if landfill technology continues to improve. Dallas recently began implementing the latest landfill science, called “bioreactor technology”, which quickly breaks down trash into methane gas that is then sold into natural gas pipelines. Not only does this process create another source of city revenue; it also chips away at the landfill’s giant piles of garbage, leaving room for even more trash.

And with more innovation, Smith says, Mccommas bluff could feasibly last forever.

“the landfill is still finite,” he says, “but I am convinced that something will come along that will allow us to keep this thing going indefinitely. Some technology will probably evolve over the next few decades that will probably make it infinite. I don’t know what it is — it has to be cost effective, so it has to cost less than trash. but when somebody works that out, we’ll be able to mothball the landfill.” the numbers might astound you, in terms of how much we throw away on a daily and yearly basis. read on to find out more about our wastefulness, steps we can take to curb the amount of garbage funneling into our landfill, and how the city has taken our efforts to recycle as well as our apathy about trash and turned a landfill into a gold mine.

For now, Dallas residents live with the reality that garbage heads to one of two places — a recycling plant that cleans and packages anything reusable to ship it overseas, or a landfill within our city limits.

The cu TT ing edge: ‘Bioreac Tor T echnology’

Anyone who takes the time to hear ron Smith talk about this technological process might start to see the city dump as an opportunity to harvest renewable energy, rather than a nasty necessity. t rash, to him, means energy and revenue.

“When I look around this landfill, I don’t even see trash,” Smith says, “I just see food for the microbes and feedstock for a renewable source.”

The technology quickly converts the landfill’s garbage into methane gas, which is sold to Atmos Energy and pumped into pipelines. That’s especially noteworthy when you consider our landfill was the first in the state to use the technology, and only one of about 20 in the nation — the largest, in fact — using it today.

Think of it as “composting on a larger basis,” says sanitation services director Mary Nix. In that sense, the idea is “easily 100 years old or older.” But in terms of applying bioreactor technology to landfills, she says, that began in the early ’80s.

Converting garbage into methane gas isn’t a new idea trash will eventually break down and create methane, and some landfills burn it off while others trap and use it.

Smith has opted to take this one step further, implementing technology to help the Dallas landfill’s trash create methane even faster than it would if left alone.

Because the technology creates methane more quickly, it translates into more revenue for the city. The landfill produces 5.5 million cubic feet of gas daily. Nix says the city expects to net a little more than $800,000 in methane sales during 2009. (The city did not make any money on methane last year because until 2008, any profits went to the methane processing plant’s investor —T.Boone Pickens’ company, Dallas Clean Energy — which assumed all risk, costs and profits for constructing and operating the plan for the first 15 years.)

The biotechnology has been underway for about a year at McCommas Bluff, but it could be another year before we begin to see measurable results, Smith says. The landfill has 30-acre chunks of land called cells, and right now, bioreactor technology is being used only in one cell at a time. The hope is that it be used for every cell in the future.

Here’s how it works, in a nutshell.

Start with 996 acres of land dedicated to dealing with the city’s waste (accepting about 2 million tons of trash per year, the McCommas Bluff isTexas’ biggest dump).

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8940 Garland Rd. Suite 200 Dallas, TX 75218 214.321.6441

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