Changes to waste disposal in the Duluth area
Many of us discard trash without considering its fate, but where it ends up can have a significant impact on not only the environment but also the cost of waste disposal. A landfill agreement between St. Louis County and Resource Renew will result in a slight increase in cost, but there will also be an environmental benefit.
Formerly known as Western Lake Superior Sanitary District, Resource Renew provides solid waste services for around 150,000 people. The 530-mile service area includes Duluth, Hermantown, Cloquet, Rice Lake, and several townships.
Current Waste Disposal and Reduction Efforts
Resource Renew tries to reduce the amount of waste that ends up in a landfill in a variety of ways, from educating the public to offering services that reuse specific products.
“We manage a regional household hazardous waste facility that you can bring all your household paints, cleaners, and we do offer that for businesses as well,” said Director of Planning and Technical Services Brandon Kohlts. “As a part of that, we also have a reuse center where people can come and get free paint, cleaning products, stains, and those types of things for their projects that otherwise would have been discarded. Those are now available to residents at no cost. We’ll continue to offer those and expand those programs to serve the residents.”
Despite the efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle, most of our waste still ends up in a landfill. According to Kohlts, Resource Renew has had an agreement with the City of Superior for the past 20 years. Around 16 large trucks a day bring waste to Superior’s Moccasin Mike landfill.
“One of the most common questions I get is, ‘Why did we take Duluth’s trash at all’? And the answer is it’s extremely expensive to run a landfill and it’s not free to dump our own garbage here,” explained Superior Mayor Jim Paine. “The DNR actually charges us for every ton of trash we put here. So if we didn’t take outside trash, which pays us a very high rate to dump their trash here, we would have had much, much more expensive trash bills for years.”
The landfill is reaching capacity soon, and the City of Superior does not own the surrounding land.
“Besides, our knowledge of how to protect the environment has meaningfully advanced since we first opened this,” said Paine. “It’s just not a good idea to have trash right next to Lake Superior, Wisconsin Point, so it’s time to close it up and time to look for a new solution.”
Landfill Agreement
Needing to find another place for their service area’s waste, Resource Renew reached a ten-year agreement with St. Louis County. Once Moccassin Mike landfill closes next July, the waste from Duluth and nearby areas will go to the St. Louis County Landfill in Virginia for several years.
“We went through a selection process where we solicited proposals from interested disposal locations,” said Kohlts. “We had a process where we reviewed those and looked at the environmental benefits, the economic benefits, and put them through a scoring, and really the St. Louis County landfill stood out as the best option for this area.”
St. Louis County Director of Environmental Services David Fink is excited about this agreement.
“I always say it’s long overdue. We have the capacity to do that,” said Fink. “We’ve worked with them hand in hand for years and years. We’ve had different committees that we work on with Resource Renew. This is just the next step up that we can offer this type of service as a region to work in partnership for a long, for a long, long time.”
In its current footprint, the Virginia landfill has about 20 years left before it reaches capacity. Adding on this additional waste from Resource Renew brings that timeline down to only seven or eight years, as the waste input will be tripled. St. Louis County is prepared to adjust accordingly, with plans to expand the landfill operation in Virginia and build a new landfill in Canyon.
“We’re trying to set this up not just for today or for 10 years from now, but realistically, this should be an operation 100 years from now,” said St. Louis County District 6 Commissioner Keith Nelson.
Changing where waste goes will have an effect on the cost of waste disposal services for Resource Renew customers.
“For your average homeowner, you’re probably going to see a $10-$20 increase per year in your garbage bill just because we have had the benefit of only having to transport at 12 miles over the last 20 years, and now we’re going to have to haul it about 60 plus miles,” explained Kohlts.
There will, however, be a positive environmental impact.
Environmental Benefits of the Agreement
“It’s going to be a really advanced environmental campus to manage our waste. That was one of the big benefits of going to that facility,” said Kohlts.
St. Louis County has been working on improving the technology around cleaning wastewater.
“Our treatment train that we put together is going to take PFAS out of the wastewater, and right now we don’t have a way to destroy that PFAS. We’re collecting it on membranes and activated carbon, and different things throughout the treatment train, and then that’s going to go back into the line landfill, so we know that it can’t be, you know, basically out in the environment. So we’re containing it in a closed loop,” explained Fink.
Containing PFAS in a closed loop means that it will not enter our groundwater.
RELATED: Addressing PFAS levels in local lakes
“The water coming out of that facility will be cleaner than the rainwater that’s falling on top of this landfill,” said Nelson. “That’s really what we should be talking about, to be environmentally conscious, to make sure that we’re managing our waste stream, which is ever-growing. But we’re managing it in the most environmentally conscious fashion we can.”
This level of engineering and environmental concern has not always existed, but St. Louis County is looking to clean up what Nelson calls “ills of the past”. One example is the old Eveleth dump, located near Rock Ridge.
“Nobody really knows that it’s a dump, but there’s contamination. They’ve shown contamination at all of these. They’re unlined facilities that they’ve exported contamination for years,” explained Fink. “That is our intention – to clean up the contamination of the old dumps that didn’t have the liner and make sure that we’re doing the right thing moving forward in cleaning up the contaminated wastewater in this case.”
As for the Moccassin Mike landfill?
“We’ve actually closed this landfill multiple times because it’s not one thing, it’s many cells. And each time a cell has filled up, we have closed it and capped it. So now what we’re gonna do is close and cap the final cell. So that means it’ll get covered up by multiple layers of fill, some organic and inorganic material, and then ultimately organic topsoil that will allow grass to grow,” explained Paine. “It’ll be a reasonably pleasant space after that. Then, we have to monitor it for at least 40 years to make sure that it’s safe.”
When their landfill closes, the City of Superior will also have to send its waste elsewhere. With a year to go, the city is working on a plan for when that happens.
“We should have our preliminary final plan by the end of the summer or the early fall. But that plan will be finalized more and more until the end,” said Paine. “We’ll never know the last day of the landfill. We may do a kind of interim last day where we close it off to everybody but us, and then we’ll operate on our own for a few months or weeks. It’s just a matter of how much people throw away on any given day, and that’ll determine when we fill up.”
No matter what they decide, the city will go from being paid to take trash to paying for their trash to be taken. Mayor Paine says the financial impact should be minimal.
“We have the whole cost of maintaining this landfill, most of which will go away. So we’ll save a bunch of money while also incurring new expenses. It’s going to be a very complicated transition, but we’re feeling pretty ready for it,” said Paine.