Sending most of Juneau’s trash south on a barge during future decades is a better option than a new landfill or burning it in a waste-to-energy facility, according to a study presented to Juneau Assembly members this week.
Juneau’s current privately owned landfill has about a decade of life left, so local leaders need to be thinking now about future options in case the operator closes it sooner than expected, Denise Koch, the city’s director of engineering and public works, said during an Assembly Committee of the Whole meeting Monday.
Also, Koch said, private ownership means changes in fees and operations can occur with little input from city leaders — as happened this week with new rules for construction and demolition waste — but the leaders will be targeted by residents complaining about the changes. She said “it’s a little bit hard to know precisely how much life span is left in that landfill because it’s privately owned and operated.”
“If we wait until where one day Waste Management makes an announcement that their landfill is closing they’ll probably give us two or three years’ worth of notice,” she said. “And if we wait until that point to start having this conversation it will be too late. There’s a long lead time on getting the capital in place if we wanted to do something different. The permitting to do something different would take a long lead time. So that’s really why we’re talking about this today.”
Waste Management Inc. — a Texas-based company that has rebranded itself as simply WM — operates Capitol Recycling and Disposal in Juneau. The Capitol Disposal Landfill (originally known as the Channel Landfill) has been operating since the 1960s. Juneau, along with Haines and Glenallen, are the only Alaska municipalities with waste disposal sites that are 100% privately owned, according to Koch.
A study with three options for extending waste disposal by 50 to 100 years after the landfill’s closure was presented to Assembly members at the meeting. Terra Miller-Cassman, an environmental engineer with Jacobs Engineering Group, which conducted a study, said if the city opts to take over responsibility for waste management all of the options will require building a transfer station where trash is brought for further processing.
“This transfer facility would serve as an interim waste management solution while the CBJ explores other disposal options,” she said. “It would also help to better manage large influxes of waste from things like tourism or disaster debris, and it could act as a centralized point for waste management as well.”
Juneau does have other existing facilities for handling waste — including recycling and composting — operated by a mix of public, private and tribal entities, and efforts are being made to expand such services. But Monday’s presentation focused on future options for the bulk of the city’s 30,000 tons of waste a year.
The best option is barging waste and recyclables south, which would cost up to $14 million for the transfer facility plus the ongoing transport costs, Miller-Cassman said. Ranked second is a new city-owned landfill that would cost up to $162 million for a 50-year site and up to $323 million for a 100-year site — with determining a location as well as the high potential cost being among the issues resulting in the lower ranking.
Least desirable is a waste-to-energy facility that would cost up to $110 million — plus some ongoing costs to ship ash south — because nearly 100% of Juneau’s energy comes from renewable hydroelectric power, Koch said. Also, such a facility would be relatively inefficient in a community of Juneau’s size.
“The waste stream in Juneau is substantially smaller than other regions where waste-to-energy plants have been constructed,” she said. “Juneau generates about 100 tons per day of waste, while the majority of waste-to-energy plants in the U.S. expect to operate at 800 tons per day of waste or more.”
Miller-Cassman said a 2024 waste characterization study shows “up to 59% of waste in Juneau is categorized as either recyclable, reusable or compostable with current diversion programs.”
“So this means that there is potential for increased waste diversion in Juneau,” she said.
Assembly members, at the end of the presentation, unanimously approved a motion of support for including a waste transfer station into a “zero-waste campus site” concept the Engineering and Public Works Department is working on for future consideration.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
