Deschutes County sets sights on 2 locations for new landfill

By 2029, the Knott Landfill outside of Bend is expected to reach capacity and will no longer accept any more solid waste. Now, Deschutes County officials are looking at two potential locations for a new landfill. Tim Brownell is the director of solid waste for the county. He joins us to share more on how to plan and build a landfill, as well as the timeline for opening.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud, I’m Dave Miller. Trash in Deschutes County has been trucked to the Knott Landfill for more than 50 years, but the site is getting full. So the county is figuring out where to put a new landfill, one that it hopes will last for another century. Officials have narrowed the search down to two potential locations. Tim Brownell is the director of solid waste for Deschutes County. He joins us with the details. It’s great to have you on the show.

Tim Brownell: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. What’s your estimate for how much more space there is in the Knott Landfill?

Brownell: We anticipate that we have about six more years. So, towards the end of 2029 or 2030 we should be at full capacity here.

Miller: How do you make those kinds of estimates?

Brownell: Well, we actually track the amount of material that we have coming in on a daily basis, annual basis, and then we also survey the site four times a year, and that gives us a sense of how much we’re filling. Basically, we’re permitted to fill a certain amount of air space and there are limits to how high and how wide we can go, and  based on the generation and fill of waste here, I think we have until just about the end of 2029.

Miller: In terms of projections for the future, I imagine it’s two big numbers that you have to be pretty good at estimating: the population growth of the region and the average amount of trash that any one person or household is going to make. Both of those seem like you could make educated guesses based on data, but there still could be a lot of variation. I’m curious, population is always interesting but you focus on solid waste. What are the trends in terms of how much waste goes into a landfill as opposed to recycling, say?

Brownell: That’s a great question. Out in this part of the state - central Oregon - we’re currently diverting about 30 to 32% of the materials that households and businesses are generating and that’s been pretty constant.

Miller: Diverting, meaning that 70% of the waste from a household goes to landfill and 30% is recycled?

Brownell: Recycled or composted, that’s correct. We have a goal here in Deschutes County of increasing that to 45%, and we’re on the way to doing that. But even with that level of diversion, we are seeing that about 3,000 pounds of material per household per year are being generated and thrown out, and we aren’t anticipating that trend to change terribly quickly. So we anticipate the average growth of population out here as well as the anticipated disposal. And quite frankly, we’ve been tracking it for well over 25 years and we’ve seen almost a straight line increase. Some years less, some years more, but on average about a 3% increase in our waste stream every year.

Miller: In recent years, we’ve talked a lot on this show about the global challenges in recycling. The short version is that American recycling streams are such a commingled mess. We are hopeful recyclers that we put stuff that often Chinese recycling processors couldn’t handle, didn’t want. And so at a certain point, they said stop sending us your recycling stuff because you’re too messy. I mean, I’m exaggerating, but that’s essentially the way I understand the story. Has that meant a higher percentage of our stuff going into landfills?

Brownell: I wouldn’t necessarily say a higher percentage of stuff going in landfills. I think it’s created a bit more transparency and awareness of what needs to go into the recycling stream - as much as 25% of what was going into recycling containers was not recyclable. We’re starting to see that level go down, and the state of Oregon has been doing a lot of work in anticipation of the implementation of the [Plastic Pollution and] Recycling Modernization Act, where we’re going to have  a uniform list of what you can recycle throughout the state. So it won’t be different in Portland than it is in Bend, than it is in Eugene. So, I think that if we can get those things implemented and much more consistency in understanding and education programs, I think some of those issues will be abated.

Miller: Let’s turn to a new landfill. Where do you start when you’re planning a new landfill?

Brownell: Oh, goodness. Well, you really start looking at what you are trying to accomplish. And here in Deschutes County, the county had made a decision back in 2018 that, knowing that our landfill was going to be filling up, did we want to export our waste elsewhere or what did we want to do with it? And that the county feels very strongly that we should take responsibility for our waste and not export it, send it to other counties or other states. So we started on the process of trying to identify, what would it take to site one here and where would we do that?

Miller: Let me stop you there. Because, I’m fascinated by that first decision. Portland area people may know that our trash is trucked about 150 miles away to the Columbia Ridge Landfill near Arlington. Why did you decide against something like that?

Brownell: Well, partly we do have land here and we have less water than you do on the western side of the Cascades. And both of those things are important considerations when you’re looking at, where do you want your waste to go? And is it viable to site a landfill? I think the other piece is, we’re not taking the approach of, “out of sight, out of mind” here. If we are landfilling locally, it will be our responsibility and we will be seeing its impact. So I think we will be much more conscious about active diversion programs, recycling, composting, waste reduction, reuse, those sorts of things...

Miller:  And the way you’re describing this, it seems like both a practical consideration, but also even a moral one.

Brownell: I think it’s a public policy decision of local responsibility.

Miller: So that was the first question, will we keep it in our area or not? The answer was yes. And then the big question is, where will it be? What are the physical necessities for siting a new landfill?

Brownell: It goes back to that first question, what do we anticipate our waste stream to be? How big? And if we’re saying we want a facility that will last at least 100 years, then we have to do the back of the envelope calculation of, how big a piece of property are we looking at?  And it was determined we needed to permit approximately 250 acres of land to serve as the landfill, which would require at least 500 acres of property to be able to have buffers, and be able to keep it as isolated from the public as possible. So we really had to look at, okay, around this county, where would we have the potential of having 500 acres of land available, both public and private?  And then we had to put that layer on top of three different areas of concern.

One would be geologic and engineering concerns. The second would be natural environment concerns, and the final would be land use. Where does the land use allow for that type of siting to occur? So, we started with about 200 potential sites around the county.  And very quickly, many of them dropped off due to some of the various concerns around wildlife or around groundwater or around fault lines, seismic concerns, etc.

Miller: And as I mentioned in my intro, you are now down to two sites that are under consideration. Can you describe what’s known as Moon Pit, which I have to say if it were just based on the coolness of the name, that one would win, but that’s not one of the criteria you mentioned. So what is Moon Pit?

Brownell: Moon Pit, It’s actually the old family name of the family that owned this property, but it’s currently an aggregate mine, mining rock out to the eastern part of the county. We’ve been working with the mine owner as to their interest, which is significant of us basically doing reclamation work on that site. When you’re mining, you’re creating pretty significant holes in the ground and that actually creates an opportunity for us to put in an engineered solution to reclamating that land once it’s depleted of the rock.

Miller: So, in a sense, part of the work would already be done for you, instead of having to dig.

Brownell: That’s correct.

Miller: Are there negatives there?

Brownell: Yeah, you do have to blast and remove rock. That mine has upwards of 100 years of unmined material. So it could call for having two operations going on at the same time. And if they were not to do the mining, and we were to have to do some excavation, that’s quite expensive to do, blasting rock and removing it to be able to fill those areas or prepare them for fill.

Miller: The other site is called Roth East. What are the benefits or potential drawbacks of that site?

Brownell: That’s a little farther out to the east in Deschutes County, near a place called Pine Mountain, quite isolated. There, the terrain is not rocky. The first 250 [to] 300 feet down is dirt and loose rock which makes excavating and preparation for filling a good bit easier. The downside is that it’s more on the edge of environmentally sensitive areas.  The stage graphs, combining zones, as well as other winter ranges for elk and antelope and mule deer.

Miller: Those are all issues that will be looked into in the coming months, or I guess years in terms of environmental impact and other impacts as you narrow down these choices. I’m curious what you learned or what stood out to you from the public comment period and review recently. What did you hear from the public?

Brownell: Well, we’ve heard quite a bit. I think everybody has a concern of, what would the impacts of a facility like this be on the public lands as well as private lands. So some of the sites were closer to residential communities and had people very concerned about  how this might impact drinking water or odor issues. The farther out properties,  we got a lot of comments from people in regards to impacts on recreation, or more specifically on environmental issues and concerns around wildlife and vulnerable species.

Miller: I was surprised to learn that this could be the first new landfill in Oregon in 33 years. It just seems like a very long time, given that we humans are very good, especially in this country, at generating trash. Why aren’t landfills created more often?

Brownell: Well, I think it’s a challenge. It’s a permitting land use challenge. But it’s also a public perception challenge - that people are concerned that we may impact their drinking water, we may impact their air, that we may impact other species. So it’s a long process, the permitting process we have to go through. What we’re doing now is really a technical process to determine what might be truly viable sites. Then we have to go through - and this has taken us almost two years to go through that process - it’s gonna take us another at least four years to go through the permitting and public processes, and permitting processes with the state and county. So, many more obstacles to go.

Miller: What’s gonna happen at the site of the current landfill - The Knott Landfill - when it is all said and done and its life as a landfill, accepting new truckloads of trash, is over?

Brownell: That’s another good question that we’re really starting to look at.  A landfill is here, it’s gonna be about 130 feet deep of material that still is decomposing at a slow rate. So it’s not stable land, it’s not property that you’re gonna be building on top of any time soon. I mean, hundreds of years. It also has some gas that we’re gonna continue to capture and control. So you don’t wanna put buildings on top of that. So it’s gonna be more of a passive use. Sometimes you’ll see people put golf courses on them or hiking trails. We’re looking at doing some potential public access such as trails, those sorts of things. But the other thing we’re taking a significant look at is the potential of putting in a solar array, upwards of 50 acres of solar photovoltaics to generate renewable energy. We anticipate we could generate up to 25 megawatts of renewable power here on this site. And that would be a good application for it. So we’re seeing what that might take.

Miller: Tim Brownell, thanks very much.

Brownell: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Miller: Tim Brownell is the director of solid waste for Deschutes County. He joined us to talk about the years-long process that they are still only a few years into, for siting and creating the new landfill that should last for a century in Deschutes County.

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