A framed color photo of three straw figures being burned in effigy hung on one wall in the office that Bill Abolt used to have at the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) headquarters on the Oakton Community College Campus in Des Plaines.
The photo was a reminder of the emotions ignited by the project spearheaded by Abolt as former executive director of SWANCC. This wasn’t a mob, just suburban homeowners protecting what they valued.
“You’re dealing with what people are concerned about,” Abolt said, “which is the quality of their life, their health and their land values. So I think it’s reasonable to be concerned. . . . I think there are some problems in Illinois that make it difficult to work through problems like this.”
“This” is a very fundamental problem-finding a cost-effective and environmentally sound way to dispose of municipal waste. But many northwest suburban residents believe SWANCC’s solution threatens something even more fundamental-the community’s need for safe drinking water.
SWANCC believes it has found a local answer to a national dilemma.
Rather than pay trash haulers to transport garbage to far-away landfills, the 23 member communities of SWANCC in Cook County have opted to open their own landfill (or balefill) and three transfer stations. Each town’s trash would be delivered to one of the three transfer stations, where it would be baled, then transported to a balefill on a 410-acre site located near West Bartlett and Gifford roads in unincorporated Cook County near the village of Bartlett. The location was once a gravel strip mine.
Towns in Du Page County and the Fox Valley would be adversely affected by the balefill, said Mary Byrne, head of Citizens Against the Balefill. If poisons seeped from the dump, they could leak into the drinking water of Wayne, St. Charles, Geneva, Batavia and South Elgin, she said.
Opponents also say construction of the dump would damage the habitat of area wildlife such as the great blue heron, which nests on balefill property and flies to Du Page County to fish.
The balefill and transfer station system uses the latest waste disposal technology, according to Abolt, who left the post at the end of March. Currently, Brooke Beal of Bloomingdale is SWANCC’s acting executive director.
Combined with what SWANCC believes is the state’s most aggressive recycling and composting program, a new household hazardous waste collection program and new initiative to reduce commercial waste, Abolt feels SWANCC has developed a solid integrated program that addresses economic and environmental issues. SWANCC is also committing $12.5 million to restore 700 acres on and around the site to pre-settlement conditions, and continued monitoring of the balefill beyond its 20-year life.
The alternative is to keep paying skyrocketing costs for trash hauling-costs he said have gone up nearly 250 percent since 1981 because of increased transportation costs to get to a dwindling number of landfills that are charging higher disposal fees. “What is the benefit of that?” Abolt asks. “Does recycling increase when you spend more money to send it further away. Does the safety increase?”
But what some may call “state of the art,” others call “experimental,” and they want no part of it. Prospective neighbors of the balefill and their political leaders claim the balefill poses a serious threat.
“We are opposed to a group of municipalities ganging up on another municipality and dumping garbage on top of a major underground water supply,” protested retiring Bartlett Mayor John Stark. “All landfills leak. We’ve had experts testify to this. And when you select a site on top of a major underground water supply that is going to provide drinking water to 350,000 people, it is a potential catastrophe.”
Opponents say this is more than a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) protest. They question the logic and motives in selecting this particular site.
“Let’s face it,” South Elgin Village President Thomas Rolando said. “What they want to do is put it as far away from their communities as they can, so they put it right on the western edge of Cook County.”
“The agency has gone through numerous public hearings to hear and address the concerns in every permit application from Cook County, to the state of Illinois and eventually to the Army Corps of Engineers,” says SWANCC’s Beal. “I think the project is an environmentally sound and cost-effective solution to the solid waste problems.”
Environmentalist have joined homeowners in the protest over potential pollution to the environment and destruction of natural habitats, and warn that more landfills are counterproductive to long-term goals of recycling composting and source reduction.
“The balefill perpetuates the out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality that many people have toward garbage,” says Kevin Greene, program director for Citizens for a Better Environment. “People think `Oh, we’ll just throw the garbage out and there’s a place it will be taken.’ It’s a technological quick fix. In the long term, it’s going to make it very difficult to develop more comprehensive solutions that involve everyone in addressing the problem. As long as that huge balefill or incinerator is sitting there it acts as a disincentive for manufacturers and packagers to develop products that are less wasteful.”
The facility has been licensed by Cook County and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. Still needed is an Army Corps of Engineers permit for the balefill, plus rulings from the Illinois Appellate Court on a suit to stop the balefill and the Illinois Pollution Control Board on a complaint by Des Plaines against the first of three transfer stations now under construction. The Corps previously denied SWANCC’s permit, but is currently accepting public comments on a revised application.
Both sides predict these matters will be resolved this year and SWANCC expects to open its first transfer station in January 1994, and the balefill by 1995. SWANCC would negotiate with existing landfills to take the baled trash until the balefill opened.
The site was first proposed in 1987 and the eight to 10 years this is taking is about the norm for landfill siting, according to Ed Repa, director of Technology Review Programs for the National Solid Wastes Management Association in Washington, D.C.
The problem is nobody wants a new landfill next door, making it hard to get them sited. In a recent NSWMA survey, 37 states reported closing 2,216 landfills between 1986 and 1991. Permits for new landfills or expansion of existing landfills lagged behind, with 41 states reporting 364 new landfill permits and 38 reporting 407 permits for expansion.
Many states require public hearings, but Illinois also gives local communities veto power over facilities within their corporate limits, something Repa said is not common.
Ironically, landfill capacity has remained stable nationally and rose in Illinois the past two years, according to the Illinois EPA. This is the result of expansion, a nearly 20 percent reduction in the amount of waste that is landfilled because of recycling and composting programs, and the trend toward building larger landfills.
IEPA projects eight to 10 years of remaining capacity, a fact environmentalists sometimes use as an argument against new landfills. But Mike Nechvatal, head of the Illinois EPA’s solid waste management, warns against drawing such conclusions because it takes at least that long to site and permit a new facility. Nor does capacity address the high cost of transportation.
Regulators also believe safe landfills can be built. “Whether there’s a chance it will leak in 20, 50, 1,000 years, I don’t think I can address that,” Nechvatal said. “But I think that we can say it has every safety device built into it to minimize the risk of those kind of leaks or we wouldn’t permit it.”
But the people who would live near the balefill obviously are thinking farther down the road.
“I’ve been village president for 24 years,” South Elgin’s Rolando said. “Nothing has crossed my desk more than how precious water is going to be in the future, and here we are, sitting on top of the biggest shallow aquifer in northeastern Illinois, supplying billion of gallons of drinking water. Even if the chances are one in a 1000, what are we doing to the people who are going to be here 100 years from now.”
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Corps of Engineers will accept public comment on the proposed balefill until May 6. Written comments can be sent to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, District Engineer (Attn: Regulatory Branch), 111 N. Canal St., Chicago, Ill. 60606-7206; refer to application No. 1993-00009.
