Dollars and sense with recycling

By DAVID HULSE

MONTGOMERY, NY — If odor has been reduced, there is still legal action in the wind at the Sullivan County Landfill.

In its current configuration, the county’s solid waste program may be running on borrowed time. The county is seeking state approval for a phase two expansion that would keep the East Broadway facility operating for an additional decade or more. But the municipal neighbors, the Village of Monticello and the Town of Thompson, don’t want it.

The town met in closed session with its attorneys Tuesday evening to plan a litigation strategy against the expansion and the village has public hearings coming up this month for a local law prohibiting any further expansion. This comes on top of the lengthy approval hassle that the county labored through last year to win approval for the last of the cells in the original landfill design.

The county legislature, which has more and more been talking about alternatives, is scheduled to undertake policy discussion about the landfill and alternatives at a special May 5 meeting of the Public Works Committee.

“Whatever the plan turns out to be, even if there is no county plan, recycling is going to have to play a bigger part,” said county recycling program Supervisor Bill Cutler.

To that end, legislators last week heard a presentation from Tom Kacandes of Taylor Recycling, which is located in the Orange County Town of Montgomery.

Taylor presents two alternatives for Sullivan. The Montgomery plant recycles construction and building (C&D) debris and wood, bulky materials which present most of the landfill’s odor problems. The Montgomery facility, which Taylor has also reproduced in Iowa, recycles more than 90 percent of the 300 to 400 tons of material it handles each day, Kacandes said.

The process involves an assembly- line combination of hand sorting of debris and an automated series of screens that sort debris by size and metal content. Taylor’s expertise was used following 9/11 when the company set up an operation on Staten Island and helped officials sort the debris from the World Trade Center.

After the initial sorting of tires, televisions and any possible explosives such as appliances and liquid propane tanks, the assembly line process removes larger cardboard and textiles, wood, metals and stone aggregates. Sheet rock, which degrades to produce objectionable landfill gases, is separated and refined back into gypsum, which is resold. Copper, aluminum and steel are sorted by size and resold.

Taylor has agreements with Orange County municipalities who bring brush and stumps to the facility, which is ground for organic mulch. The topsoil is separated and resold. Other processed woods and furniture, more than 100 tons per day, are ground and separated from metals and resold as mulch, dyed in three colors with food coloring.

Since entering recycling in 1988, Taylor has grown to take in more than $10 million annually and employs about 55 people.

But the business future is in near total waste re-use process that would employ household garbage as well as portions of the C&D product in a process that converts waste to a uniform gas, similar to natural gas. “You can burn a lot of these materials now, but the burning is uneven and various chemicals are released. In converting these materials to a gas, the burning is even,” Kacandes said, and it could consume 80 to 85 percent of everything now going into the landfill. The only materials still being landfilled would be inert in nature, he said.

Kacandes said Taylor is considering developing a plant for gas production and would like to deal with Sullivan County to make this happen. “We can do it ourselves, if the county isn’t involved,” he added. Kacandes said the plant could be in operation in eighteen months to two years. The plant would require 300 tons of waste per day to produce gas, which is converted into electricity.

The issue for Sullivan County would be the loss of the majority of tipping fee revenues and the repayment of the county’s debt service on the landfill without those revenues, Kacandes said.