Landfill owner wants to stay in York County — but how? - York Dispatch
Landfill owner wants to stay in York County - but how?
Landfill owner wants to stay in York County — but how?
Mark Walters
York County's Modern Landfill has taken in some 4,500 tons of garbage per day for the last five decades.
But that could all come to an end soon, as the landfill that straddles Windsor and Lower Windsor townships is on track to reach its capacity by 2025.
If the company cannot build another landfill on its 750-acre property — a proposal that was shot down by Lower Windsor officials — it will have to be capped.
Municipal and landfill officials are still grappling with what that could look like. First, York County would need to figure out an alternative for where to send its trash, including the possibility of sending it all to a landfill out of state. Capping Modern Landfill, meanwhile, would necessitate adaptive reuse of the massive property split by Kreutz Creek less than 2 miles south of Yorkana.
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Officials with Modern Landfill hope the company, which runs the site at 4400 Mount Pisgah Road and is a subsidiary of garbage-conglomerate Republic Services, can maintain operations and keep its 35 employees working there.
Amid what appears to be a dead issue with no strategic future in sight, Jay Enoch, general manager at Modern Landfill, believes there is still a chance to bring Lower Windsor officials to the table, even though there have been no talks between the company and the township for months and the township does not appear interested in resuming them.
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Creative reuse: And while landfill growth may seem to conflict with protecting the environment, as is the crux of the debate locally, a look around the world shows previously capped landfills living their next lives as potentially eco-friendly amenities that might be hard to fathom existing atop a pile of solid refuse.
An amphitheater built on a landfill in Mountain View, California, has hosted concerts of major headliners. Bird watchers and joggers would never know a former garbage dump sits beneath a pristine nature preserve along the southern shore of Long Island, in Merrick, New York. Transforming the former landfill into a public park helped save its local government millions of dollars in the process, according to local officials.
There are dozens of golf courses converted from abandoned landfills. Landfills have been repurposed into sports complexes, a waste-to-energy ski hill in Denmark and parks, breathing new and sustainable life into swaths of land that would otherwise be dormant — lands that are encased piles of broken-down waste.
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Local skepticism abounds, as some people have pointed to past capping deadlines at the site that have come and gone.
“It has been said to need capped and then they found more room,” said Ted Evgeniadis, Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper. “Is the lifespan really 2025?”
While Evgeniadis admittedly was speculating about the landfill's lifespan, it has expanded four times in the past 45 years. The current active landfill is 227 acres, according to a company spokesman. Another 122 acres of landfill has been said would get another 25 years of Modern Landfill's continued use.
While previous expansions were made within the active landfill, the latest proposal was not a horizontal or vertical addition to the landfill, but an entirely new landfill within another piece of the company’s property: the opposite side of Mount Pisgah Road from the current landfill.
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The latest proposal died in December 2020 after Lower Windsor Township’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to end discussions with because of significant public pushback over environmental and agricultural concerns.
“There’s a future for us in this community,” Enoch said. “There is still value we can provide.”
Officials unwavering: But Lower Windsor Township officials did not see that value then and they do not see it today, even though Modern Landfill pays the township $900,000 annually to do business there. The company shells out an additional $1.2 million to Windsor Township. Funding provided to the townships would end if the landfill were to close, Enoch said.
"This decision was made over two years ago, and there has been nothing that has changed in terms of the facts that were the basis of the conclusion which was discussed at that time," Lower Windsor Township manager Sande Cunningham wrote in an email. "Accordingly, there is no current thought that it would be revisited."
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Officials have acknowledged the potential for capping and said they would be ready to remain part of the community in whatever role that may be once their landfill is no longer active.
"All we can do is continue to operate responsibly and to invest in this community that we've been a part of for more than 50 years," Enoch said. "Our door remains open. We are always willing to return to the table and discuss the framework of a new host agreement. Modern prides itself on being a good neighbor, and we want to meet the needs of the township and its residents well into the future."
Capping procedure: The landfill operators have already begun laying out plans for what will happen should that agreement not materialize.
That would include a capping system consisting of a liner, designed to keep material from the landfill from seeping into the surrounding soil, and several layers of soil and vegetation to help prevent runoff from the site.
After the closure, landfill officials said some number of staff would remain on-site for "post-closure care," including groundwater monitoring and management of leachate, the water that can seep from a landfill.
The site would be well-positioned to do this, in theory. It already has 78 wells, each one individually designed to monitor groundwater safety. There are 251 gas-monitoring wells around the landfill.
If and when the landfill gets capped, there would be a decommissioning period – something akin to what's going on at Three Mile Island – in which the landfill would need to adhere to a laundry list of environmental regulations.
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Potential for greenspace? As for creative reuse, Evgeniadis said he'd favor seeing the landfill turned into a greenspace, where trees and shrubs would be planted to provide habitat and allow animals to thrive.
Before piling clay and synthetic material on top of the landfill, it would have to be prepared to passively exist, and safely.
The landfill is already heavily lined inside with synthetic material — layers of webbing, membranes and filtration systems protecting it from natural elements and collecting the unwanted output that garbage creates. Inside that massive mound, the landfill is broken down into regulated sections.
“It’s really like putting a giant puzzle together,” Enoch said from the back seat of a Dodge truck as it rumbled up a muddy access road along the mountainous landfill during a facility tour provided to The York Dispatch.
Deer tracks along the path indicate the landfill has a functional relationship with its surrounding habitat, if only a forced coexistence between industry and nature.
That coexistence, however, does not mean it is a sanctuary, Evgeniadis said. In some cases, development displaces what was once prime habitat.
“The deer were already there,” Evgeniadis said. “This is their home.”
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