Site 1 defended as best place for Sinclair debris

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources said Monday that the city and the local solid waste agency have state permission to bury demolition debris - including asbestos from the flood- and fire-damaged Sinclair site - in the “Mount Trashmore” landfill.

The status of Mount Trashmore - which is formally called the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency's Site 1 landfill and which sits across the Cedar River from the abandoned former Sinclair meatpacking plant - is a question that has been raised by two of 11 contractors in a bidding war to tear down the plant. The City Council is scheduled to vote on the contract on Wednesday.

On Monday, Alex Moon, the supervisor for the DNR's solid waste program, said it would be preferable to have the Sinclair demolition debris - or any waste, for that matter - go into a modern landfill outfitted with a liner rather than Site 1.

However, Moon noted that the DNR agreed on an emergency basis to allow the reopening of Site 1 immediately after the June 2008 flood to take in debris. That emergency reopening remains in place until Site 1 reaches capacity or until the solid waste agency gets a new lined cell built at its Site 2 landfill at County Home Road and Highway 13.

Karmin McShane, executive director of the solid waste agency, on Monday said the new lined cell at Site 2 should be ready to take in trash by late summer.

Greg Eyerly, Cedar Rapids' flood-recovery director, said the Sinclair debris was directed to Site 1 so the city could keep track of it, because the city has a liability for the asbestos-containing waste forever.

McShane dismissed comments made last week by attorneys representing two of the demolition contractors, both of whom proposed hauling the Sinclair debris out of state. One attorney said taking the material to a private landfill with a liner in Illinois was about one-fifth the cost of burying it at Site 1. He suggested the city and solid waste agency were steering the work to the local landfill and didn't care about the expense because the federal government was paying for it.

McShane said her agency charges $120 a ton for asbestos-containing material no matter where it comes from - a rate she said was in line with the regional market.

Her agency, she said, isn't getting rich on flood debris. She said the agency has had the expense of reopening a closed landfill, has had to hire more employees to run the landfill and will have to pay to re-close it.