A resident’s written complaint on landfill management in the Haines Borough has caused the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation to engage Community Waste Solutions in correcting concerns about exposed garbage.
On March 10, Haines resident Burl Sheldon filed a written complaint to borough manager Debra Schnabel on ongoing landfill practices that he said violate Alaska statues by allowing wildlife access to food scraps, and litter beyond landfill boundaries.
Sheldon cited Alaska law that mandates a municipal solid waste landfill cover putrescible waste, or something that could become rotten, with six inches of soil to control disease vectors, fire, odor, blowing litter and animal scavenging. He wrote that “Windblown litter is pervasive and often violates the 50 ft setback rule” that mandates disposal be at that distance from property lines.
Schnabel forwarded the complaint to Doug Buteyn, regional program manager for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.
Buteyn wrote back: “At present, DEC does not anticipate an inspection will be necessary in resolving this complaint.”
The agency rarely does landfill inspections in response to a complaint but instead utilizes program management methods that focus on compliance assistance, Buteyn told the CVN this week.
He said that DEC has contacted CWS owner Tom Hall to notify him of the complaint and is working with him in resolving it.
“They’ve started to cover the waste with materials they had on hand,” Buteyn said. “Last Friday (Hall) had found a source of dirt that he was going to start hauling to the landfill to replace the temporary cover he had on there with a permanent cover of soil.”
CWS is actively covering the waste with soil donated from community members. Landfill manager Sally Garton said they expect to cover active dumping deposits by April 5.
“We are working with Doug,” Garton said. “We already were working with Doug before the complaint was registered with Debra.”
By law, active trash sites must be covered with temporary cover, including dirt or tarps, within seven days. “Our issue was the intermediate cover, we put tarps, those birds chewed through it,” she said. “We did everything we could think of during the winter to cover it but it wasn’t enough, the birds will still chew through everything.”
The latest Haines landfill inspection, conducted by DEC in August 2018, rated CWS at 80 percent compliance and recommended three areas for improvement: submitting updated surface water samples, applying cover material to the working face and updating operation plans.
The landfill failed to submit mandated biannual water reports from May 2015 until June 2018, though DEC didn’t receive results until October.
In the September inspection, DEC employee Hannah Sullivan said completing the prescribed water monitoring is necessary to assess whether the landfill is impacting the surrounding waterways. “Completing the required sampling will either provide CWS with documentation that it is not impacting surface water or it will detect an issue in a timely manner in the event that something does show up in the monitoring samples,” she said.
Buteyn said recent surface water samples showed a decline in levels of mercury and copper, the two metals that tested above state standards in 2015.
The report shows mercury was below detection limits and copper was lower than state standards. “There’s a lot of reasons why they might have declined,” Buteyn said “Including the possibility that the hits were false positives.”
The 2018 water quality reports looked decent, Buteyn said. “I don’t see anything in there that stands out as being horrible. It looks pretty good.”
Iron was the only sample that tested above state standards, though Buteyn said those numbers don’t represent a landfill-caused issue.
He said that the high iron testing site was on the uphill side of the landfill and tested the water flowing into the landfill, not leaving the landfill property. “That’s the natural condition of the water as it comes onto the site,” Buteyn said. “I can’t ask the operator to clean natural water.”
DEC has set an April deadline for CWS to update and submit an operations plan. A new plan must be updated to reflect the significant changes in composting equipment CWS has acquired, Buteyn said.
CWS manager Garton said that March 18 was the first run of a composting system the landfill has been installing for over a year.
Sheldon’s complaint asked that the community proactively legislate, act and adjust now rather than later. “My sense is that going forward the company will continue to capitalize as much material as possible — from Haines and Skagway — without acknowledging any objective measure of prudence, liability or life expectancy,” Sheldon said.
The complaint comes after a working group met for more than a year to address solid waste management issues and recommended the borough create a system that would be paid for by an up to 1 percent sales tax increase. In August, the assembly voted down a ballot measure that would have brought the tax increase to voters in October