Most of the Portland trash is sorted, then trucked up the Columbia River Gorge to Arlington.
Dirty MuRFs and RDFs are acronyms pros in the waste-management business think about often. The guy wearing slippers and taking out his trash? Not so much.
But the regional garbage business is a big business – worth about $325 million annually and worth your attention; Metro pays private companies $30 million a year just to transfer, haul and dispose of the region's garbage, so agency officials are wading deeper into the waste stream and seeking ways shrink the Portland area's environmental footprint.
Metro folks want to know what you think about trash – even if you don't that often.
"It's very difficult to engage the average citizen in a conversation about garbage," said Tom Chaimov, a Cornell-trained geophysicist tasked with coordinating Metro's Solid Waste Roadmap Program. "Some of that stems from sending people like me out to talk to them. I'm kind of a garbage wonk, and I use jargon that has a specific meaning."
Enter the consultants. On May 5, DHM Research will talk trash with RCs (ahem, "residential customers") at two focus groups organized by Metro. In coming months, the regional government agency will elicit additional feedback through its online Opt In survey and apply what it learns to six roadmap projects that are aimed at improving the system's economic, social and environmental sustainability. The agency will also re-brand the roadmap as something less wonky.
Got any ideas?
"The focus groups will help us start to figure out how much people think about what they throw away," explained Metro Parks and Environmental Services Director Paul Slyman. "Do they realize we truck the majority of the garbage from this region 150 miles through the Columbia River Gorge and put it in a hole in the ground? And if they realize that, do they care?"
From curb to dump
The garbage business has evolved with metropolitan Portland's population and environmental ethos.
Between 1940 and 1990, an estimated 14 million tons of the region's garbage was buried at the St. Johns Landfill, a lakebed just south of the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette rivers. Metro assumed responsibility for closing and covering the landfill in the 1980s and restored it as part of the Smith and Bybee Wetlands Natural Area.
With the closure of the St. Johns Landfill in 1990, Metro became the anchor customer at Waste Management Inc.'s new Columbia River Landfill, near Arlington, in Gilliam County.
Today, local governments contract with private waste-haulers, ranging from mom-and-pop to multinational companies, to pick up household garbage and take it to regional transfer stations. Metro, which owns two transfer stations, pays long-haulers to take the waste to privately owned landfills in Gilliam, Yamhill and Benton counties.
"This is basically a utility Metro runs," Slyman said.
The system works without a hitch most of the time, and garbage bills are low compared to other household utility bills, he added. So why mess with the system?
Changing with the times
Regional market conditions have changed significantly during the past 20 years: Recycling rates top 50 percent, and a growing pool of vertically-integrated companies with the capacity to transfer, haul and dispose of our waste are competing for business.
Metro's garbage contracts expire at the end of 2019, presenting an opportunity to think about garbage from a triple-bottom-line sustainability standpoint. During the next few years, agency officials working on the roadmap will consider:
- What service alternative should Metro pursue to provide a full suite of services in the vicinity of its Metro South sorting station;
- What should Metro do to dispose of non-recovered discards over the long term;
- What are the direct and indirect costs of handling the region's waste under various system configurations;
- What actions should the agency take, if any, to ensure that organics handling capacity is available as food waste is removed from disposal;
- What model of the public-private transfer system (e.g., service levels, tonnage allocations, rate regulation) optimizes roadmap objectives;
- From what revenue base should Metro recover the cost of solid waste services and programs, and of general government?
"We're always looking to make the services more efficient," Chaimov said. "We'll be looking how to get the best benefits for the lowest cost."
Consider trucks and energy.
A truck dumps trash at Metro Central.
On any given day, about 50 diesel-fueled semis barrel eastward on Interstate 84 to dispose of the Portland region's soiled diapers, old shoes, broken glasses and coffee cups at the Gilliam County landfill. About a quarter of the region's approximately 2.1 million tons of annual waste is buried here in the land of few faces and wide-open spaces.
Seattle and Vancouver, Wash., also send their waste to disposal sites along the Gorge – but these cities use fuel-efficient rail cars or barges to do it.
"How come they've figured it out and we haven't?" Slyman pondered aloud. "We'll see if there's a more environmentally sustainable way" to do business.
Garbage to gold
Rising energy prices and constraints on greenhouse gas emissions are pushing waste-to-energy technologies to market across the nation. Here in Oregon, a 2007 law sets a target of cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gases 10 percent by 2020 and 75 percent by 2050, using 1990 emission levels as a baseline.
Metro already captures methane from decomposing garbage buried at St. Johns and pipes some of the gas to a nearby cement producer to use as fuel.
Metro could consider new energy and environmental criteria when awards the next round of garbage contracts, agency officials noted. Several companies are already turning garbage into electricity and transportation fuels at Oregon waste-to-energy plants (WEPs).
Covanta Marion Inc., a Brooks-based subsidiary of Covanta Holding Corp., burns about 550 tons a day of Marion County's municipal solid waste to generate about 13.1 megawatts for Portland General Electric. This is the only such operation in the state.
Up the road in Tigard, Agilyx Corp. converts waste plastic to synthetic crude oil at the largest commercial-scale facility of its kind on the continent. The local startup has produced and sold more than 100,000 gallons of fuel, according to a company news release, and has attracted about $77 million in its last two financing rounds.
Waste Management Inc., which is among Agilyx's investors, has also taken an equity position in Bend-based InEnTec Inc. The company recently completed construction of a commercial demonstration plant that gasifies garbage at Waste Management's Gilliam County landfill. The so-called "syngas" can be converted into transportation fuels like ethanol and diesel, industrial products like hydrogen and methanol, or used as a natural gas substitute for heating and powering buildings, according to a Waste Management news release.
These are dynamic times in the regional garbage business – even if it's not necessarily broken. You put full cans out on the curb at night and drag back empty ones in the morning. Clockwork.
"Doing nothing, frankly, is an option," Slyman underscored. "But what we're trying to do is to ask ourselves now are there better ways to serve customers, protect the environment and treat our garbage more like a commodity than something we just throw away – out of sight, out of mind."
Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the amount of waste generated annually by the Portland region. The region produces 2.1 million tons of waste annually. This version has been corrected.