The Illinois legislature, reacting in part to environmental concerns about garbage dumps, passed a law in 1981 requiring local-government approval to open any landfill.
But that well-intended state law has helped create a serious problem-a garbage-disposal crisis that threatens to cost area taxpayers millions of dollars in the next few years, according to industry experts and public officials.
Partly as an unintended effect of the law, the Chicago metropolitan area is expected to run out of space in its garbage dumps by 1991 or sooner, industry and public officials say. That`s because, while existing garbage dumps are filling up with refuse, no new landfills have been given final approval in the metropolitan area since the law went into effect.
The proposed new dump that is closest to reality is a landfill that a group of local governments wants to build near Elgin. It received approval from the Cook County Board last month. It awaits final approval on its technical merits from the state, though its technological safeguards generally are considered among the most advanced in the field.
Many public officials and environmental groups are urging a shift away from landfills and toward recycling and incineration-but that shift will take many years.
In the meantime, it currently takes six or seven years to get a permit for a new disposal site and have it built. And dumps, like them or not, will continue to be necessary in the foreseeable future, if only to receive ash from incinerators.
The result of the lack of new landfills is likely to be similar to what happened in another artificially created crisis-the oil shortage of the last decade. It`s likely to mean skyrocketing costs to dispose of refuse as existing dumps fill up and trash is carted farther and farther away from Chicago.
Some Illinois environmentalists defend the law, however, largely because of what they say is the inadequacy of federal and state regulations over how landfills are built and where they are located. They note, for example, that about 20 percent of the top-priority pollution cleanup sites in the nation selected by the federal government formerly were municipal landfills. The environmental concerns surrounding landfills largely have to do with contamination of streams, rivers and underground well-water supplies.
And, the environmentalists say, if regulations are inadequate, at least the process of local hearings will ensure that serious environmental concerns get serious consideration.
Yet the existing Illinois law has gone beyond simply giving consideration to environmental concerns, according to various government and industry officials. So far, they say, it has prevented new landfills in the Chicago area.
”I think the crisis is pretty much due to the effect of this law,”
generally called Senate Bill 172, said Thomas McNamara, an attorney in the Chicago firm of Jenner & Block who represents companies in the refuse-hauling and disposal business.
The average citizen ”should care about this,” McNamara said, ”because the cost of waste disposal will go up dramatically, since waste will have to be trucked long distances.”
”This law is extremely important in creating this crisis, and I don`t know anyone in this business who doesn`t think it`s a crisis,” said another Chicago lawyer, Richard J. Kissel. Kissel has tried to get sites for five landfills since the passage of this law. None passed.
But it`s not just lawyers for landfill companies who believe the Chicago area faces an urgent problem and that Senate Bill 172 is at least partly responsible.
”It seems to me the public would be better served, rather than by stopping these landfills, to ride the garbage-disposal companies and be sure they do things right environmentally,” says Jim Pendowski, chief of the solid-waste division of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.
”In the Chicago area, there haven`t been any new landfills sited since the passage of Senate Bill 172,” Pendowski said. ”It seems to me that the process under this law allows for more negative action than positive action. Now, the system is extremely negative.”
Frank Dalton, general superintendent of the Metropolitan Sanitary District, agreed that the current law has been a significant cause of the oncoming crisis. ”Ninety-nine percent of the Chicago area does have a problem of garbage disposal in the near future, and it`s not being solved,” Dalton said. ”What`s missing is some party that has the responsibility for siting.” Although there have been some expansions of existing landfills and one incinerator approved in the Chicago area since 1981, the law ”has certainly helped to force the crisis sooner,” said Joan Anderson, a member of the state Pollution Control Board who also sees some positive aspects of the law as it affects the environment.
She noted that any applicant for a landfill permit ”ought to figure on it taking seven years to operation, practically speaking,” adding that the expected severe shortage of refuse-disposal facilities will be here sooner than that.
Kevin Greene, research director of Citizens for a Better Environment`s Chicago office, said that in the current absence of tough Illinois state regulations on siting and construction of landfills, Senate Bill 172 has helped prevent dumps that might be environmentally unsound.
Gerald Paulson, head of McHenry County Defenders, another environmental group, agreed. ”Because there`s been a lack of good regulations, we`ve had no choice but to fight these issues out through the local siting process,” he said. ”We know there is a need for more landfills, at least in the short run, but we want to ensure that they`re built as safely as possible.”
But there are also environmental concerns about prolonging the life of existing landfills that might not have been optimally designed.
”Older existing landfills are not being replaced by newer, better-designed and monitored facilities, resulting in increased impacts to the environment,” said Richard Schuff, a former Wisconsin state official who was in charge of land disposal issues there until going to work recently for Waste Management Inc., in California. He said Illinois is an example of a state where the older landfills are not being replaced.
Of special concern, Schuff said, was ”ground-water contamination from landfill leachate.” He was referring to the pollution of underground water sources from the liquid that seeps out of poorly designed landfills.
If the environmental concerns are substantial, so are the predicted costs of the looming landfill crisis.
To look into the future, residents need only look east. Along the crowded East Coast, the garbage crisis has arrived. For example, the price of garbage disposal for Philadelphia residents has shot up 275 percent since 1981, according to Philadelphia Deputy Mayor John Flaherty.
Philadelphia`s annual cost for garbage disposal jumped to about $75 million this year from $19.9 million in fiscal 1981, Flaherty said-an increase due to the rise in landfill ”tipping fees” and transportation costs.
Tipping fees are the costs haulers are charged to dump garbage at a landfill. Costs have risen so much in Philadelphia partly because that city`s trash is hauled as far away as Ohio and upstate New York, Flaherty said.
”Soon the cost here is going to match what they have on the East Coast,” said William Child, chief of the Illinois EPA`s land-pollution control section.
Wisconsin`s law on landfill siting, passed in 1984, is considered something of a model by several industry and government officials. That state`s Department of Natural Resources has final say over whether a landfill is properly designed and sited, and whether it`s needed.
But landfill companies proposing a new dump site must by law negotiate with any local governments or neighbors within 1,200 feet of the site over such details as hours of operation, payment for checking water quality in drinking wells and compensation for lost property value. In these
negotiations, local governments have won outright cash payments and agreements to take local trash free.
If the negotiation doesn`t lead to an agreement, a state arbitration panel decides the points of contention. But the state makes the ultimate decision on permits.
In Illinois, by contrast, government bodies in counties or towns where the landfill is proposed make the key decisions under current law about whether a dump will open.
”Generally, the county or town will turn it down,” Kissel said. ”No one wants to be on a political body and site a landfill.”
As a result, said Paul Huebner of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Wisconsin has approved 10 to 12 landfills a year, of which about half are for municipal waste. Illinois, by contrast, has allowed ”probably less than five” new landfills under the entire six years of the current law, Pendowski said. Some landfill expansions have been approved under the existing Illinois law, but Pendowski said that although expansions help, there are limitations on how far upwards and sideways a dump may expand.
Meanwhile, space in operating dumps is being rapidly depleted. For example, Waste Management Inc.`s huge CID landfill on Chicago`s Southeast Side already has cut its daily disposal rate to 7,000 cubic yards from 24,000, causing some haulers to take refuse farther away from the metropolitan area.
Even without the effects of the 1981 Illinois law on landfill siting, the garbage industry already is an anomaly among industries that can be described as public services.
Many essential public services such as police and fire protection and water and sewer service are routinely provided by local or state government. And others-telephone and electric service, for example-are regulated industries whose profit margin is set by the the Illinois Commerce Commission. But the removal of garbage, by any measure an essential service, is dominated in the Chicago area and elsewhere by private firms that operate largely without regulation of their prices.
Private haulers, as well as city drivers where trash pickups are municipally handled, are dependent on the privately run garbage dumps, and those dump operators are setting sharply increasing rates because dump space is dwindling. In turn, those rate increases are passed to the customer, be it a small restaurant operator or a large municipality.
Further, private operators, rather than the local or state governments, are at the forefront of finding new locations for garbage dumps, and the governments generally react to those proposals rather than taking action on their own.
So the prices paid by public agencies and the siting of new garbage dumps-essential matters to the taxpayer-are to a great degree in the hands of private industry.
Some officials within state and local government, concerned about the stranglehold private industry already has on this essential public service, have suggested publicly run landfills or garbage incinerators. Some officials of the Metropolitan Sanitary District are calling for that agency to use some of its vacant Cook County land to build garbage incinerators that could in turn provide electricity to run Sanitary District sewage-treatment plants.
Among local government activities taking place in response to the landfill crisis are an incinerator project in south suburban Crestwood and the landfill being proposed near Elgin by the Northwest Municipal Conference.
The Northwest Conference-composed of 31 northern and northwestern suburbs-has suggested what would apparently be one of the more technologically sound garbage dumps in the metropolitan area.
The dump is known as a ”balefill,” which simply means it is a landfill that would take compressed bales of garbage. A collection system would accumulate the poisonous leachate that seeps to the bottom of the landfill, so it would not ooze into area waterways and drinking-water wells, as has happened elsewhere. The landfill would be divided into 12 individual cells so that if one leaked, the leak could be more easily stopped and cleaned up. The dump also would have an artificial, polyethylene liner-not required under current law or regulations-as well as a compacted clay liner underneath.
And in Crestwood, an incinerator that would burn rather than bury garbage from at least seven southwestern suburbs recently won a local permit and the approval of the state EPA.
THURSDAY: A legal loophole that allows pollution with little regulation.
