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 sixinch 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.”

30 acres in a landfill cell

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 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 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.”

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

2.5 years it takes to fill one of Dallas’ landfill cells

1,000 the number of acres devoted to the landfill, plus another 1,000 acres of buffer land around it

47 the minimum amount of years left in the landfill’s life expectancy, based on current projections (Most landfills are designed to last for up to 20 years, but “our predecessors wanted to design a site to be here for the long term,” says ron Smith, assistant director of Dallas sanitation services) recycling program.

The 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. McCommas Bluff 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.

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.”

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 numbers might astound you, in terms of how much we throw away on a daily

September 19 - November 1

Featuring

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.

THE CUTTING EDGE: ‘BIOREACTOR TECHNOLOGY’

The

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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. Trash, 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

30,000 Tons of recyclables the city collected from single-family and community recycling bins in 2008

$45

Price per ton Dallas is paid for its recyclables (down from $60 a ton in 2007 and $90 in January 2008)

$2.2 million Total dollars, in gross, the city earned from selling recyclables in 2008

$5.5 million

Amount Dallas sanitation services spent to pick up recyclables in 2008

$20.98

Current monthly fee assessed by Dallas sanitation services to Dallas residents ($22.71 with sales tax)

$1.50

Portion of the monthly assessment spent on recycling pick-up

$2

Amount recycling would cost residents each month if not for the offsetting costs of recyclable materials sold

35

Pounds of trash a single-family residence recycles each month when recyclables are picked up once every two weeks

61

Pounds of trash a single-family residence recycles each month when recyclables are picked up once every week

30

Days per year of landfill space “saved” by recyclable materials