The announcement that the Ulster County Resource and Recovery Agency is examining part of the Town of Wawarsing for siting a county wide landfill, set off outrage in Wawarsing and very little comment from the rest of the county.

Former Supervisor Scott Carlsen, a resident of the Village of Ellenville, put it succinctly, “This is the same old thing, the county throwing Wawarsing under the bus.”

However, it is not yet a done deal, not by a long shot. The UCRRA CEO, Marc Rider, brought the Shawangunk Journal up to date this week.

“Right now, we have requests for proposals going out for engineering landfill services. Those are due back on January 24. So, we will take a look at that first and after that we will select a company and move towards a contract.”

Rider expects this part of the process to last until “mid-March.”

“We have had a good response,” he says. “26 engineering firms have replied. Once we have a selection the first thing will be to study groundwater and traffic. Either of those may or may not point to feasibility for either of the sites we selected.”

The county generates 150,000 tons of garbage a year, which is currently sorted in Kingston and trucked to Seneca Meadows, a giant landfill 250 miles away. The cost for all that is $13 million a year. A countywide landfill will cut that cost and waste, by receiving 38-ton trucks, 15 a day, from UCRRA centers in Kingston and New Paltz.

The criteria for selection for this purpose is 100 acres that can be used over a 50-year period for a countywide landfill, and, because of the trucks, are close to a good road. The first choice of site is on Milk Road, in Dairyland, the far northwestern corner of Wawarsing, right up against the border with Sullivan County. The second choice is on Brown Road, a few miles north of that site, closer to the Rondout Reservoir.

Despite pushback from locals, and a lot of uncertainty over whether or not Seneca Meadows will remain open, according to Rider, “nothing has really changed. We are still waiting to do the due diligence. But if and when one of the sites is deemed feasible then we’ll move forward.”

The opportunity to discuss some of the ideas proposed in the last month or two was too good to miss. This reporter couldn’t help but wonder if all the growing concern over microplastics being found in our bodies might inspire a revolution in plastic use. What if plastic waste was to be restricted? Planning for the current levels of waste in the county might be missing something.

Rider was blunt in his response. “I do not anticipate a reduction in plastic waste in our lifetimes. Plastic comes from the fossil fuel industries.” The implication is that their well-oiled lobby would keep the plastic industry producing as much as possible.

“Of course, I would hope and encourage people to recycle all plastic waste, but my planning for the UCRRA has to be that that won’t happen. And I’m not aware of any new regulations planned for plastics.”

Rider turns to the way things are right now. “We have seen a steady set of numbers in municipal solid waste and construction debris over the last few decades. No big jumps either way, up or down. I don’t think that people are going to create a lot less waste. So, when you’re talking of a ten-year window for a solution you can’t depend on people reducing waste dramatically. I need to be planning for people not reducing waste, because that’s pretty likely.”

What about a smaller landfill. Does it have to be 100 acres? A smaller property could open up possibilities in other townships in the county.

“I’ve been asked about that before, Rider says. “First, I would say that we are not looking for some mega-sized space, just a reasonable one. And second, if we do reduce the amount of waste that goes into it, we would just lengthen the time it will operate. If we reduce the size of the landfill and there isn’t a reduction in the amount of waste then we’re back at it again in twenty or thirty years, not the fifty or sixty that we’re hoping for.”

Taking another tack, he was asked about the so-called Hercules site in Esopus. It is contaminated with explosives, and has been tagged to cleanup by the EPA. We wondered why that clean-up couldn’t just be rolled into the long landfill preparation process. In other words, why clean up a contaminated site and cut down a woodland, when you could just clean up the contaminated site?

“It’s an EPA superfund site and we simply don’t have access to it,” he says. It’s owned by Dyno Nobel, now a subsidiary of an Australian fertilizer giant. The problem is “Dyno Nobel are not being forced to remediate that site.” Without that pressure applied by EPA, “cleaning it up would cost millions.”

And then, how about working with Taylor-Montgomery Recycling in Orange County? Dairyland resident Poppy Cannon-Reese told the Journal that she “spoke to them and they offered to take solid waste from the UCRRA. They say that Mark Rider had not reached out to them.”

Rider says, somewhat inconclusively, “There had been conversations with them prior to my coming on board. I did reach out to Jim Taylor. We will talk.”

Cannon-Reese, championing a Taylor-Montgomery solution, also brought up the potential to eliminate what she believes would be about 90 percent of the landfill matter by converting it into biogas, an emerging type of greener fuel. Taylor has been trying to build a pioneering biogas plant in Montgomery, but the process appears to have gotten slowed down by regulations that struggle to classify the new technology.

However, according to Rider, “we are planning to put out [a request for proposals] for biogas ourselves. That is a process we have to use.”

Rider has stood by a “Reuse Innovation Center” idea as way to reduce landfilled waste. This is something like a super-sized transfer station, creating a pipeline for companies and individuals to take appliances, bicycles, electronics, glass, metal, textiles, and a variety of construction and demolition material for repair, reuse, or resale.

We’re looking at a hub and spokes model,” Rider says, “with a warehouse as the hub, in Kingston.”

Rider goes on to describe how this could work. “So, there’s a warehouse with a small retail facility. People can bring their unwanted goods. It would be taking unused and unwanted goods and providing them another life.”

The spokes on the wheel would be municipal transfer stations, which would become drop stations. “If possible, items can be turned around and given to new owners right there. That would be the most efficient system.”

He adds, “This is not recycling, this is re-use. A lot of materials can come from companies doing deconstruction, instead of demolition. We currently get a lot of people who do ‘clean outs’ of houses and we get a lot of stuff sent here that could just be cleaned up and given another life.”

Their model is Finger Lakes ReUse in Ithaca, a charity that runs a large shop for salvaged materials, including an electronics center and a so-called “fixers collective,” where volunteers help repair whatever any residents need help with. The organization also offers job training at their facilities.

Rider says that UCRRA has just applied for an EPA grant to help fund this idea. “Now, those are highly competitive grants,” he says, “so no guarantees of success.”

Rider understands that the landfill decision is a thorny one, and he stands by the work UCRRA has done. “The agency,” he says, “was created in the 1980s to take landfill siting out of the hands of politicians. It’s important to remember that, and we need to be able to do our work.”

At the November 14 Wawarsing town board meeting, Rider dropped a hint that eminent domain, the seizure of private land for a public purpose, was not “off the table.” However, when asked straight-up this week, the situation seemed to have changed.

“Not an issue,” he says. “The DEC will not permit a landfill on property taken with eminent domain."