Landfills used to be the last repository, a place to bury forever the empty lipstick case, the juice box, meatloaf left out too long, broken pencils, oily rags, batteries: everything. But over the last 20 years, landfills turned into laboratories. “The landfill is a multi-million dollar piece of environmental infrastructure,” says Jackie Lang, Senior Communications Manager for Waste Management.

The Columbia River Gorge is home to five landfills. The dry climate of the eastern Gorge and the high hills that flank the Columbia River form almost perfect conditions for landfills, and the Gorge provides one final ingredient: a well-connected transportation corridor. Garbage comes to these regional landfills from as far away as Alaska and one time even from Antarctica.

The landfills are an almost unnoticed industry in a region focused on agriculture, fishing, dams, drones, and recreation. But the five landfills together receive over five million tons of garbage every year. They provide over 300 family wage jobs in a part of the Gorge where jobs are scarce.

They pay over $12.5 million annually to the counties in host fees in addition to property taxes. In Klickitat County, the host fee and taxes paid by Roosevelt Regional Landfill make up one fifth of the county’s budget.

“But clearly the future is in finding ways to use garbage for beneficial purposes,” says Ms. Lang. “As a company, we are committed to that as the end game.”

If there were a Guinness Book page for landfills, the Gorge ones would fill it. Columbia Ridge is the largest landfill in Oregon, Roosevelt Regional largest in Washington.  Both are in the top 10 largest landfills in the United States. Chemical Waste is the only hazardous waste landfill in the Pacific Northwest and the surrounding region, including western Canada.

From an aerial view the landfills look a bit like someone is in the midst of developing a golf course, but hasn’t yet planted the greens. The size is astonishing, yet hardly anyone goes there who isn’t somehow employed there. Once, almost everyone went to the dump: hauling a pickup load of yard trimmings or odds and ends of debris from a house remodeling project, and every community had a nearby dump.

Why landfills?
Then some 25 years ago people discovered that across the U.S. most of those dumps were leaching contaminants into groundwater and rivers, attracting rats, and polluting the air. There are times when you need big government to handle big problems. That time it was the Environmental Protection Agency that stepped in and set regulations to protect public health and the environment, effectively ending dumps and giving rise to landfills that are safe, sanitary, and monitored, but much too expensive for most communities.

To be economically feasible, landfills had to take not just your town’s garbage, but the next town’s and the next and the next. They were built far from the city out in the wide open spaces of the eastern Gorge, because in the cities, no one wanted a landfill in their ‘back yard.’

Portland, Oregon’s story is typical. In the 1980s, the metropolitan area’s scattered landfills were filling up. Every site that Metro planners selected, local residents rejected. With local landfills close to capacity, Metro finally appealed to the State for authority to site one regardless of objections.

“At the eleventh hour, Waste Management offered to build a landfill on a site they owned in Gilliam County,” said David Allaway, Senior Policy Analyst for Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. The condition was that Metro agree to send them all the metro area solid waste for 20 years. Today, five days a week, 50 to 60 trucks a day leave the Portland Metro area taking over 400,000 to 500,000 tons of garbage a year to Waste Management?s Columbia Ridge Landfill.

That much garbage needs big companies. The companies that own these landfills are listed on the New York Stock Exchange; two are Fortune 500 companies, one is listed in the Fortune 1000.

• Waste Management owns Columbia Ridge Recycling & Landfill and Chemical Waste Management of the Northwest.
• Waste Connections owns Finley Buttes Landfill and Wasco County Landfill.
• Republic Services owns Roosevelt Regional Landfill.

The big cities and towns wanted the landfills far away, and Wasco, Gilliam, Morrow, and Klickitat Counties welcomed them. In addition to property taxes, the companies pay the county where they’re located an annual host or license fee based on the volume of garbage. Usually the fee is based on the amount of solid waste brought to the landfill. For example in Gilliam County, the fee is $1.75 per ton. For the most recent year, that came to $3.1 million.

“It’s important to the County,” said Dennis Gronquist, Gilliam County Commissioner. “It’s allowed us to fund daycare, the senior lunch program, and provides some for schools. Waste Management and Metro have been super to deal with.” In a way, every time you put something in the trash bin, you’re helping rural Oregon.

Ms. Lang sees it as a partnership. “People in the Portland metro area have a lot to be proud of. They are doing a fabulous job reducing waste and recycling. They can also be proud that they are providing an economic engine for a thriving rural Oregon community.”

County officials say the landfills are good neighbors. They take care of the roads leading to the landfills, pick up litter, erect fences to keep stray litter on site, fund scholarships, buy 4-H animals, and they make a point of saying that landfills give off little odor.

The overseers
That has to do with the regulations EPA sets and then are implemented and overseen by states and/or counties. Landfills, besides taking garbage, must: prevent leaching, cover incoming garbage daily, and keep methane from entering the atmosphere.

Before fracking came along and overtook the top spot, dumps were one of the major methane emitters. Of the two big greenhouse gases, methane and carbon dioxide, methane is 28 times more potent, a very bad actor. Landfills can either burn it off in flares or capture it to create energy, which three of these landfills are doing. Capturing the gas and getting it to places where it can be used or burned is one of the reasons building a landfill is so expensive.

The same for leachate, a term sort of unique to landfills. It refers to liquids that move through the landfill and pick up harmful substances—things you don’t want in groundwater, rivers, farmlands. The Gorge’s hilltops provide landfill sites that keep landfills high above groundwater. Then landfills have multiple layers of compacted soil and liners to prevent leakage. (See graphic: Anatomy of a Landfill). Most recirculate the leachate back into the landfill to speed up decomposition and gas production.

The companies are required to have wells around the site and to test and monitor gases and leachate. Regulating agencies inspect multiple times yearly. The four landfills on the Oregon side of the Columbia are regulated by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. In Washington, the Klickitat County Health Department regulates Roosevelt Regional Landfill.  Both agencies say the landfills are state-of-the-art and well managed.

“It’s an environmentally sound way of handling solid waste,” said Kevin Barry, Klickitat County Public Health Director. He said Roosevelt Regional often exceeds standards. “For example, federal regulation requires a 60 mil liner we use 80 mil.”

Chemical Waste Management is a different type landfill. It’s the only one that can and does take hazardous waste. As you would expect, putting hazardous materials into a landfill needs a different set of regulations: materials may need to be stabilized, treated and encapsulated.

Each of the five landfills is set up to take a lot of garbage: enough capacity for the next 100 to 150 years. “The hope is to get to zero waste,” Mr. Barry said, “but we’ll always have garbage and this is the responsible way to handle it.”

Recycling rates have been creeping up, but the market for them goes up and down. “Almost all recyclables have a negative value right now,” said David Skakel Tri-County Hazardous Waste & Recycling manager.

Since no one wants a landfill close to them, garbage moves: sometimes surprising distances.

From Where to where?
Cities, counties, or regional agencies, and private businesses contract with a landfill company. You’d think that the trash—that you put in your bin, gets picked up and taken to a transfer station, compacted, and hauled to a landfill—would go to the nearest one. Sometimes that’s true, but just as often not. The landfill business is competitive, so companies give out only a few names that they have contracts with:

• The Tri-Cities and Clark County, Washington (which contains Vancouver metro area) sends solid waste by barge to Finley Buttes.
• Hood River and Wasco Counties’ waste goes by truck to Wasco County.
• Portland metro garbage is trucked to Columbia Ridge (and to another Waste Management landfill near McMinnville.) The City of Seattle and Kitsap County, WA garbage goes by train to Columbia Ridge.
• Several Alaskan cities send garbage by barge to Seattle where it’s put on a train and taken to Roosevelt Regional. It also gets garbage from California and Montana.
• Chemical Waste Management of the Northwest receives hazardous material from Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Hawaii, Alaska and Western Canada.

“Oregon DEQ was concerned when the companies first proposed bringing garbage from out of state,” said Lissa Druback, Oregon DEQ’s Solid Waste/Hazardous Waste/Spills Manager. The result was a ruling that requires out-of-state entities to meet the same requirements as a similar Oregon entity: recycling, separating trash, etc.

Too much gas and diesel used transporting garbage? For those who analyze such things, in a product’s lifecycle manufacturing a lipstick case, battery, juice box and so on is called the ‘upstream’ end. The ‘downstream’ end is when it’s thrown in the garbage and taken to a landfill.

The upstream issue
“Our society at times borders on obsession with the trivial. These discussions almost always focus on what happens at the compost site or the landfill. Almost never does anyone ask about the upstream impacts. But that’s where the majority of impacts likely occur,” wrote David Allaway, Oregon DEQ policy and program analyst in the Solid Waste Program.

“Upstream processes contribute about 20 times more domestic greenhouse gases than waste management does,” Allaway said. “Landfills are viscerally offensive to people, but when we in DEQ measure the impact of landfills versus production and upstream supply, the impacts upstream are typically 10 to 20 times higher.” The impact of transporting garbage, he says, is in insignificant in comparison.

While that discussion goes on, those working on landfills are busy figuring out how to make new things from garbage.

The frontier

The landfill companies are, as Ms. Lang said, “finding ways to use garbage for beneficial purposes”—developing power generation, mining, manufacturing.

Garbage buried under a soil cover decomposes; as it does, it emits methane. Harnessed in a gas-to-energy plant, methane turns generators to produce electricity. Processed a different way and you get transportation fuels, both the fuels and electricity are renewable energy.

“EPA considers landfill gas-to-energy projects as carbon neutral, because the carbon emissions are from organic material that was recently in the atmosphere,” said Kevin Ricks, Generation Asset & Special Projects Manager for Klickitat?s gas-to-energy plant on Roosevelt Regional. “It’s different than taking gas that was sequestered in the earth, and then bringing it up and burning it—now you’re adding to the carbon in the atmosphere.”

Three of the landfills have onsite gas-to-energy plants. Together they generate 41.4 MW.

Finley Buttes leases land to a power company. Waste Management owns the plant on Columbia Ridge. Their plant generates 12.8 megawatts (MW) and sells it to Seattle City Light. Waste Management also leases some land there to PacifiCorp for 90 wind turbines generating 150 MW.

Klickitat County owns the plant on Roosevelt Regional Landfill. As mentioned earlier, it is one of the biggest gas-to-energy plants in the nation. It’s a $70 million facility with 10 family wage jobs: total payroll $1.1 million on gross revenue of $7 million.

When all its generators are running, the plant can produces 36 MW, an amount equal to the output of more than 20 wind turbines.

Typically the plant runs produces 26 MW. It has two 10 MW combustion turbines (think jet engines) and recovers heat to run a 6 MW steam generator and steam turbine. The electricity produced is “sold into the California market, just because that’s the highest value,” Mr. Ricks says.

Taking landfill gas and refining it to run turbines is a complex process. The very complexity is what makes Mr. Ricks (who formerly worked in the Navy’s nuclear power program) love this job.

Vacuums pull landfill gas to the plant. The gas holds lots of components not visible to the naked eye. Before it can be used, individual machines remove sulfur, siloxanes (used in in many products like: cosmetics, hair products, lubricants), and water. “The gas when it comes in, it’s saturated, so we’re pulling in about, call it 44,000 pounds an hour of gas and 4,000 pounds of that is water vapor,” Mr. Ricks said. “We remove the water and the water is condensed, and it goes back to the landfill.”

Klickitat County is investigating the possibility of developing a plant to produce renewable natural gas for transportation fuels. That would require additional steps to remove nitrogen and carbon dioxide, but creates more value for Klickitat County, because electricity prices are currently at an all-time low.

A new company starts operation this spring on another section of the landfill. Spokane, Washington incinerates its garbage and sends the ash to Roosevelt Regional. The new company is opening a plant to mine the ash for metals.

Wasco County Landfill is the smallest of the Gorge landfills. The type of garbage they take, Manager Nancy Mitchell explained, doesn’t have the enough moisture needed to create the amount of methane needed to run a power plant.

“We’re good neighbors,” Ms. Mitchell says. “We do a lot for the County. I invite people to come to the landfill and talk to me. We’re proud of what we do.”