The St. Louis Landfill serves rural St. Louis County with five transfer stations and 19 canister sites, feeding into the site. Several semitruckloads a day are emptied into an open trench of landfill. On Tuesday, the St. Louis County Board conducted a workshop at which the board began to consider the future of solid-waste management in St. Louis County.
The board will be asked to approve a feasibility study to determine whether it’s in the county’s best interest to pursue a next-generation landfill — one that could even be used to help solve issues throughout the Arrowhead region, such as the 2027 sunsetting of the city of Superior’s landfill on Moccasin Mike Road. Much of the municipal solid waste from Northeastern Minnesota ends up there, including the waste from the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District (which includes Duluth, Hermantown and Proctor).
Currently, there is no plan in place for what happens to municipal solid waste for much of Northeastern Minnesota after the landfill on Moccasin Mike Road reaches capacity and is capped for good. “We’re the driver,” said Mark St. Lawrence, environmental services director for St. Louis County. “We’re bringing in more than 60 percent of the waste being generated in the region. It only stands to reason that if we’re going to have one centrally located landfill, it be in St. Louis County.”
A centralized landfill won’t happen at St. Louis County’s Virginia site. That landfill has about 20 years left before it trips its 4.2 million cubic yards of capacity. Surrounding land is not viable for expansion. “We’re looking at what happens 35-50 years down the road,” Gray said. “We’re going to have needs.”
Instead, a proposed feasibility study would look at Canyon, where there is an existing Waste Management demolition landfill, and other potential areas. “We’re looking at it from the standpoint of being along the (U.S.) Highway 53 corridor, so that you’ve got good roads,” St. Lawrence said.
St. Lawrence and Gray were both quick to explain that it’s early in what could be a five-to-seven-year process. If a site were identified, an environmental impact statement would need to be developed, and permitting would present a large hurdle. For starters, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has not permitted a new municipal solid waste landfill since 1993, when it approved the county’s Virginia facility. The MPCA uses a hierarchy of waste management with landfilling at the bottom — falling behind waste reduction, reuse, recycling, composting and the processing of waste to energy, which includes incineration. The MPCA has referred to landfills as “a last resort.”
“They’re trying to avoid landfilling if possible,” St. Lawrence said. “But they haven’t banned landfilling and they’re not going to ban landfilling.”