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Environmental advisers request study of county’s waste stream
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(Chris Ammann/Examiner)
With garbage piling up at the Northern Landfill in Westminster, workers continue to build another cell of land at the landfill to accommodate the need for space on Monday. Carroll County’s environmental advisers voted Tuesday to request that commissioners hire a firm to study the county’s waste stream to determine how recycling rates can be improved. If commissioners take the Environmental Advisory Council’s advice, the study would cost $15,000 and take two months to complete, said Sher Horosko, an advisory council member. Carroll trucks 90 percent of its garbage to Virginia. But rising gas prices, a recent Supreme Court decision about interstate commerce and New York City’s willingness to pay more than Carroll to truck its trash to Virginia are forcing county officials to examine alternatives for managing garbage, including building a waste-to-energy plant, which burns trash to produce electricity. If another waste program isn’t enacted, the Northern Landfill in Westminster won’t last a decade, said Michael Evans, the county’s public works director. Experts told EAC on Tuesday that Carroll should step up its recycling efforts before spending millions of dollars on building an incinerator to deal with its looming waste management crisis. “Three to five times the amount of energy is saved through recycling” compared with waste-to-energy plants or incinerators, said Kim Stenley, a Sierra Club member. “There’s a lot of potential for materials reclamation around here — schools, churches, businesses, carnivals,” Stenley said. “Recycling behaviors are noticeably absent in Carroll County.” Delaware recently adopted a two-pronged approach for dealing with garbage, vowing first to make recycling its top priority before considering anaerobic digestion and waste-to-energy facilities, said Jim Short, Delaware’s environmental program manager of solid and hazardous waste management. Sewage and other organic waste are processed to produce electricity and soil additives in the anaerobic digestion process. Some EAC members said they came away with more questions after visiting an incinerator in Lancaster, Pa., last week. EAC Chairwoman Karen Merkle said she thinks Carroll should implement an aggressive recycling campaign to buy time before the county decides on building a waste-to-energy plant of its own. By the numbers » In Carroll County, 15 percent of residential waste is recycled and 17 percent of commercial waste is recycled, for a total rate of 32 percent. » A jurisdiction in New Jersey, by comparison, has a recycling rate of 74 percent. kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com |
