Recycling to Save Tax Money. Maybe a Lot of It
The closing and building of cells at the Transylvania County Landfill is one of the public's biggest long-term expenses. There's no way to stop this process, but it can be slowed by recycling.
ROSMAN — Solid Waste Director Kenn Webb sat in his vehicle on a hilltop and watched as workers from a bedding company tossed box after box from the back of their truck into an open cell at the Transylvania County Landfill.
“Cardboard, cardboard, cardboard,” Webb said in a discouraged tone.
It’s one of several easily recycled materials that routinely end up in the landfill. And their careless disposal is costing taxpayers. A lot.
While the Transylvania County Commission has recently wrestled with high-profile capital needs such as the new courthouse and school renovations, attention has slipped from another major expense: the steady expansion of its landfill west of Rosman needed to bury the nearly 100 tons of trash it receives daily.
In 2020, Commissioners committed to a program of building and closing plastic-sealed landfill cells that was expected to cost $131 million over the next 30 years, an option chosen because it was $10 million less expensive than the alternative — shipping solid waste to out-of-county landfills.
The first big bills in this program will soon come due. Though engineers are still calculating costs, the latest estimates come to $6.7 million for closing old cells and $8.6 million for building a new one.
Preliminary plans for the new cell will be unveiled at a meeting on Nov. 10, and, thanks partly to the increased flow of garbage generated since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it must now be be completed by August of 2025, when the current cells are expected to reach capacity.
Though there is cash on hand to cover some of the looming expenses, landfill expansions are poor candidates for financing, meaning the remaining bill will likely be paid by dipping into county reserves, leaving less to cover other projects.
There’s no way to stop this expensive cycle of closing and building cells, Webb said, but it can be slowed by more recycling.
Transylvania residents do quite a bit already, at least by statewide standards. The county’s 176 pounds of material recycled per person in fiscal year 2021 was the 19th highest amount among North Carolina’s 100 counties, according to the state Department of Environmental Quality. And the county is currently exploring a program to process one of the landfill’s bulkiest and messiest materials — Styrofoam.
But the many aluminum cans, milk jugs, soda bottles and cardboard boxes clearly visible on a tour of the active cell last week show that residents could easily do more. So do the examples of other communities that recycle a far higher percentage of their waste than Transylvania.
It’s not hard, said Joele Emma, education director at the Asheville GreenWorks environmental profit, especially if people don’t get bogged down in the complex dos and don’ts of plastic recycling.
“If you keep plastic bags out of recycling, you’ve done a huge thing,” she said. “If you recycle cans, water bottles and cardboard and paper — fantastic!”
Financing the Landfill
Taxpayers saw a preview of the costs of landfilling before the start of the last fiscal year.
Facing a budget gap of $1.7 million in the supposedly self-sustaining Solid Waste Enterprise Fund, the Commission agreed to measures including a slight property tax increase and a doubling of the fee for bags disposed of at collection centers.
But the Fund is mostly intended to cover ongoing expenses such as payroll and maintaining and upgrading equipment, County Manager Jaime Laughter wrote in an email.
It was never meant to pay for building new cells or to cover all the costs of sealing old ones with layers of clay, fill and plastic sheets about 40 times as thick as a standard garbage bag.
The several obstacles to financing a new cell include its lifespan of only about five years, meaning it would be filled long before the last payment was due on a long-term loan, Finance Director Jonathan Griffin wrote in an email.
The state requires the county to set aside money in the Fund for cell closure and maintenance, and at last check it had about $2.3 million on hand and $7 million invested, Griffin wrote.
But landfill operations are far more complex than most people realize, Laughter wrote, and are subject to a long list of regulations, one of which requires an as-yet-unknown portion of these funds be set aside for future closures and liability.
That means that “we don’t and can’t know” the amount available for new work until the old cell is closed, Laughter wrote.
What they do know: “The next cell construction is recommended to be a cash purchase from the general fund balance,” Griffin wrote, which “means the funds are not available for other capital projects such as those required for counties to fund like (the) courthouse, schools, etc.”
The Recycling Market’s Ups and Downs
Yes, recycling sometimes generates revenue. Boosted by an unexpected crest in the price of the low-density polyethylene found in milk jugs, for example, the county took in about $150,000 selling reusable materials last fiscal year, Webb said.
But even in the best of times, recycling “does not ‘make’ money because it also offsets the cost to collect (recyclables) and transport to the recycling receivers,” Laughter wrote.
Instead, the main goal of recycling is to reduce expenses by slowing the flow of solid waste into landfills. To do that, materials must at least be valuable enough for recipients to find end users.
A report this week from Greenpeace finding a tiny 5-percent recycling rate for plastics in the United States left some residents questioning whether that is actually happening.
After learning of the report, Sara Wilbur reached out to NewsBeat, writing in an email that “I’ve wondered over the years about plastic recycling in Transylvania County . . . Does it actually get recycled?”
The right kind does, said Webb. So did Barry Lawson of Curbside Management, a materials recovery facility (MRF) in Asheville.
It’s true that much of the plastic manufactured, especially blended synthetics, will long remain poor candidates for recycling, and that the total amount of plastic recycled in the United States plunged after China, which once imported about 7 million tons of used plastic annually from around the world, banned the practice in 2018.
“Understanding the macro issue helps us navigate the future of our micro piece — our locally owned and operated landfill,” Laughter wrote.
But there remains a market — if a highly volatile one — for the most commonly accepted plastic household items, summed up on Curbside’s website, as “jugs, tubs, bottles and jars.”
The going price for clear plastic milk jugs, made of low-density polyethylene, has fallen to less than 50 cents per pound after reaching more than $1 late last year, said Lawson, who does not accept material from the county and was speaking about the broader market.
Colored jugs of the same material bring a considerably lower price, but are still valuable enough to sell. So is, despite a summer drop in the market, the commonly recycled plastic (PET) found in water and soda bottles.
Most PET ends up in carpet, and its manufacturers either experienced or expected a slowing economy, Lawson said. Demand has recently increased slightly, he said, but even when it was at its lowest, he never stopped buying the material. Nor did he divert it to a landfill.
“We have accepted it. We have stored it and it’s moving freely at this point,” he said.
Plastic bags, on the other hand, according to the company’s website, “clog up our equipment and can cause a lot of wasted time and even equipment damage.”
Instead of placing them with other recyclables, either shop with reusable bags or return disposable ones to the dedicated recycling bins at stores, Emma said. Consumers should also try to reuse hard-to-recycle plastics such as plant containers — or find a company or individual that will.
“Just because they don’t go into the blue bin, doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for them,” she said.
Space-Eating Styrofoam
Styrofoam has long been near the top of the list of plastics that cannot be recycled, and that will remain true of some forms, including packaging peanuts and food containers, Webb said.
But other Styrofoam products, especially the blocks used in packaging, may be on track for recycling in Transylvania after a successful pilot project earlier this month.
Styrofoam, a brand name for expanded polystyrene, creates disposal problems precisely because of the quality that makes it so useful: it’s practically weightless.
Dumped at the landfill, the foam is one of the biggest pound-for-pound eaters of landfill capacity and can be easily blown into nearby land and water bodies, Webb said, creating a potential environmental hazard and a maintenance headache.
When concentrated and reused, on the other hand, expanded polystyrene “is a very useful plastic that is very light and can be easily melted into any shape to protect things like our TVs and lamps,” according to the website of Feed Me Foam LLC, which uses a portable machine to heat and condense the material.
On Oct. 15, the company processed about 380 pounds of polystyrene foam the county had collected over the previous month at the landfill and at the Pisgah Forest collection center, said owner/operator Paul Allen.
Though the weight is barely significant, it was enough to partially fill two 40-cubic-yard containers with material that would otherwise take up landfill capacity.
“Though we charge by the ton, the real landfill value is space,” Webb said.
A coalition of church groups paid Feed Me Foam’s $100-per-hour fee for the event in October, but the county could cover the costs of future, periodic processing, Webb said.
And his department is continuing to accept polystyrene foam at the landfill and at the Pisgah Forest collection center with the hope that as awareness grows, so will the amount of the material recycled.
The alternative, Webb said, is “we just keep doing the same thing we’re doing with Styrofoam, which is nothing. Just throw it away.”
And live with it in the landfill pretty much indefinitely.
“It will stay there for 500 or more years!” Feed Me Foam’s website says. “That’s not a typo! Styrofoam, which is a type of plastic, does NOT degrade or simply go away!”
The Big Benefits of a Little “Effort”
Beyond recycling Styrofoam, residents can simply take more care with items that have been successfully recycled for years, including the cans, cardboard and plastic bottles that litter the active cell.
Though Transylvania stacks up well against other North Carolina counties, only about 10 percent of all materials disposed of in the county end up being recycled, compared with 34 percent nationally, according to the Curbside website.
Part of the answer to raising the rates is spending still more money on solid waste.
Webb, for example, forwarded an article about a study conducted for a Michigan county showing that 75 percent of its solid waste could be recycled — a report written in advance of a planned $280 million sorting and recovery operation.
The city of Brevard recycled nearly 23 percent of its solid waste in July through the kind of curbside programs that are typically feasible only in densely populated areas.
“It would be very difficult to provide that in Transylvania County,” Webb said.
A closer parallel to Transylvania is Currituck County, in the northeastern corner of the state. It’s a popular tourist destination slightly larger in area and smaller in population than Transylvania, with, like its western counterpart, one program collecting the curbside materials that are included in the state’s calculation of per-capita recycling totals.
But that amount in Currituck, 344 pounds, is the highest and the state and nearly twice as high as in Transylvania.
Why? Awareness of the issue grew after a recent, unsuccessful proposal to end the curbside program, said Rachael Anderson, the county’s solid waste operations manager.
And, yes, the county has invested to add convenience. But these investments appear to be paying off.
While closing the three collection centers was a money-saving option presented last year to Transylvania commissioners — and favored by Vice Chairman Jake Dalton — Currituck maintains eight such stations staffed by attendants who closely monitor recycling and advise residents.
“I think we’re a super-convenient county when it comes to trash,” Anderson said.
But opportunities for increased recycling are already available to Transylvania residents, Webb said.
From his hilltop perch he could point to a steel container designated for recycled cardboard near the landfill’s entrance. The workers from the bedding company would have had to take a few minutes to break down their boxes into sheets and then briefly stop at the container to drop them off before proceeding to the open cell.
“It’s effort,” he said. “That’s really all it is.”
My family have been avid recyclers since the 1980's. But I am still bothered by being told to put packing styrofoam in with the bagged trash. Perhaps that's going to end soon? We go to the Pisgah Forest center.