By Greg Nikkel
Weyburn city council is considering a five-year plan for the city’s landfill that can extend the lifespan from between 36 and 62 years, depending on how much recycling and planning goes into how the landfill is organized and used by the City.
Council heard a detailed presentation by Tony Sperling, president of Sperling Hansen Associates, a consulting firm based in B.C. that provided the five-year plan for the City of Weyburn.
As Sperling laid out the plan in phases, he left room for a sixth phase which, if followed to the extent he laid out, could extend the landfill for another 62 years.
The plans come at a cost, which is the rationale for the proposed hike in tipping fees from their current level of $46 a tonne up to a break-even point of $80 a tonne by the year 2022.
If the City goes with phases 1-5 as laid out, the work on the landfill will cost a total of $3,345,000, and if the City goes with the sixth optional phase, the price tag will be $4,924,000. The operating costs, which Sperling noted are basically fixed, will be around $740,000 a year or around $76.63 a tonne, with 40 per cent of waste being diverted by recycling.
The plan also makes provision for the eventual closure of the landfill, with a cost of $4.4 million if the City goes up to phase 5, or $6.16 million up to phase 6. Sperling estimates the city will have to set aside about $235,000 a year towards covering the closure costs.
The phases of the landfill renewal proposes to rebuild and plan the use of the landfill from its current point, including contouring and building up layers of the landfill in a pyramid shape, with the top layers added by the fifth phase. Some of the operations that will need to looked at include the relocating of the entrance gate and scale, as he said the current entrance and scale are unsafe as they are currently configured. The plans also call for the building of two entrance/egress roads to the landfill, and building of U-shaped and Z-shaped bays for recycling and composting of waste, the relocation of the oil recycling area, and defining a new burn pit location.
The work is proposed to start in 2017, with the bulk of the expensive work slated for 2018, including relocating the entrance and bringing in a new scale, relocating the oil recycling area, building the residential recycling area and defining the burn pit area, with an estimated cost of $1.5 million.
Part of the plans are also meant to deal with the leachate from the landfill, and Sperling laid out plans for using clay or a geomembrane, which is a high-density polyethylene, which would prevent leaching into the water table.
The leachate would be collected with an on-site leachate collection system, with the ideal system to pump it to the City’s sewage lagoon to be properly treated.
To help the city prepare for taking measures to extend the lifespan of the landfill, council approved a plan to change refuse collection to once every two weeks in the winter months, but going back to once a week through the spring and summer.
This change in refuse collection will also switch residents to having garbage picked up on a certain day for their area of the city, instead of the current system where the pickup day is bumped every time there is a statutory holiday.
For some residents, pickup will be on the same day as when recycling is picked up, which is already once every two weeks. If an area’s pickup day falls on a holiday, then the garbage will be picked up on the next business day, but will return to the normal pickup day after that.
According to information provided by Claude Morin, superintendent of Public Works and Parks, going to bi-weekly pickup during the winter months (with the exception of the two weeks following Christmas) could save the city $13,313 in refuse collection costs, or a reduction of 7.75 per cent, and the Public Works operating costs would be reduced by 0.5 per cent overall.
The change will not take effect until the first week of January 2018, and the bi-weekly collection will be in place until the end of March, then it will go back to once a week.
Part of the rationale for this change in service is the increase usage of the recycling bins by city residents.
According to the Environmental Resource Committee, the curbside recycling program picked up 23,540 kg in August, 22,480 kg in September and 22,870 kg in October.
The numbers have been consistent month-to-month, with on average around 3,000 carts being picked up monthly with household recycling.
