With Time Running Out for Larimer Landfill in Colorado, Leaders Close in on Alternatives

2018 will be the year Larimer County decides what to do with its trash once the county landfill reaches sunset.

The 53-year-old Larimer County Landfill will close by 2025. By that point, Fort Collins leaders hope the city will be in the home stretch of its mission to send no waste to landfills, which will mean nearly doubling the city’s 2016 landfill diversion rate.

Northern Colorado leaders will recommend a path forward in April after years of planning, Fort Collins staff said at a City Council work session Tuesday night.

“We’re really at a special point in time,” Fort Collins environmental planner Honore Depew said at the work session. “The only publicly owned landfill in Northern Colorado will be closing in a little more than half a decade, and the outcomes of this project will determine how materials are managed throughout the region for decades to come.”

Construction of new facilities should take place between 2020 and 2025. Officials could go with any combination of nearly a dozen options for waste disposal, ranging from a one-stop garbage transfer station to futuristic facilities that turn trash into fuel.

What we do with our trash is an important environmental issue because organic waste in landfills produces large amounts of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane. The Larimer County Landfill is the third-largest polluter in the county, behind Rawhide Energy Station and Broadcom (formerly Avago Technologies).

A group of staff and officials from Fort Collins, Loveland, Larimer County and Estes Park — dubbed the North Front Range Wasteshed Coalition — will put out a final report this year delving into the pros and cons of nearly a dozen trash options. The final decision will be up to elected officials, who will figure out how to fund the selected projects next year.

Here are the trash options being considered, sorted by staff in order from most feasible to least feasible. Leaders decided which projects are most doable based on construction and trash hauler costs, time frame and cost-to-benefit ratio, but they’re not finished reviewing feasibility yet.

R3 Consulting Group delved into the benefits and drawbacks of each option in a 2016 county-commissioned study.

1. Build a central transfer station where the landfill is now. This would serve as a one-stop drop-off site for garbage, recyclables, organics, and construction and demolition materials. All the materials would then be trucked to different locations for disposal or recovery. A central transfer station would mean more options for residents and haulers but also a big increase in heavy vehicle traffic near the landfill. 
2. Build a new landfill. Larimer County already owns a 640-acre site near Wellington that would work for a new landfill, but the new location is less centrally located than the current landfill. That means there’s no guarantee haulers would decide to take trash there.
3. Build a composting facility for yard waste. 
4. Build a composting facility for food waste.
5. Build a processing facility for construction and demolition materials, many of which end up in the landfill right now because the region doesn’t have a processing facility for them.
6. Build a “clean” materials recovery facility, which uses human labor and machinery to sort recyclables. Clean materials recovery facilities accept only recyclable materials. 
7. Build a food waste pre-processing facility for anaerobic digestion. Food waste would be processed here and then sent to an anaerobic digester to make biogas through a chain of biological processes. 
8. Build a direct combustion waste-to-energy facility that burns trash and uses the latent heat to generate energy. 
9. Build a refuse-derived fuel waste-to-energy facility that turns trash into a homogeneous product that can be used to generate energy. 
10. Build a “dirty” materials recovery facility, which accepts both recyclables and non-recyclables but has a lower diversion rate than facilities that only take recyclables.
11. Do nothing. The county would avoid the cost of building new infrastructure, but haulers’ costs would increase because they’d have to carry trash farther to other landfills. Those additional costs would probably result in heftier hauling fees for residents, and all the additional driving would mean more greenhouse gas emissions.
    

To read the full story, visit https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2018/01/14/time-running-out-larimer-landfill-leaders-close-alternatives/1020865001/.