State allows Sinclair debris in Mount Trashmore, though it's not ideal; solid waste agency says it's not getting rich on it

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 sits across the Cedar River from the abandoned former Sinclair meatpacking plant - is one of the questions that has been raised by two of 11 contractors vying to win a city bidding war to tear the Sinclair plant down.

The City Council is scheduled to vote on the contested competition 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. Site 1 has no liner and is among 15 landfills in the state that chose to close in recent years to abide by the state's new liner standards.

However, Moon noted that the DNR agreed on an emergency basis to allow the local solid waste agency to reopen the Site 1 landfill immediately after the June 2008 to take in flood-related debris.

That emergency reopening remains in place until Site 1 reaches its capacity or until the local 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 cell at Site 2 should be built and ready to take in trash by late summer.

Moon noted that putting asbestos-containing material in an unlined landfill is not a particular problem because asbestos does not leach into the ground water. The important thing with asbestos-containing material is to wet it to keep the dust out of the air and then to bury it quickly and cover it without compacting it, he said.

As for any other contaminants from the Sinclair site, he said the local solid waste agency has required ground water monitoring wells at the Site 1 landfill, which the agency must monitor for 30 years to test for contamination. The agency, he added, also has funds set aside to remedy any contamination that might appear.

Greg Eyerly, the city of Cedar Rapids' flood-recovery director, last week noted that the city specified that the Sinclair debris go to Site 1 so the city could keep track of it. He said the city had a liability for the asbestos-containing waste forever.

The DNR's Moon deferred to the city of Cedar Rapids' own attorneys to determine just what long-term liability the city might have for material like the Sinclair site debris that is not required to go into a special hazardous-waste landfill.

The solid waste agency's McShane dismissed the comments made last week by attorneys representing two of 11 demolition contractors, both of whom proposed hauling the Sinclair debris out of state even though the city says its bid documents stipulated that the material be taken to Site 1.

One attorney noted that 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, and she said that was a rate in line with the regional market.

Her agency, she said, isn't getting rich on flood debris. She noted that 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.

What she questioned was any plan to haul all the asbestos-containing Sinclair debris a long distance out of state in wetted, “burrito-wrapped” loads.

“That doesn't make a lot of sense to me,” she said. “You're minimizing your risks by taking it across the river.”