Tullytown's High Tech Trash Pile

From the Inquirer.

Pa.'s high-tech trash pile
By Sandy Bauers, Inquirer Staff Writer Posted on Mon, Aug. 18, 2008

For 38 years, the mountains of trash have risen, all but surrounding William Penn's historic summer home, Pennsbury.

Nearby, in Tullytown, a 14-story peak now looms over one end of the tidy borough in lower Bucks County.

From afar, the mountain is big enough that the trash trucks - queueing at the top to dump up to 10,000 tons a day - look like insects.

Over the years, the two mega landfills - GROWS (Geological Reclamation of Waste Services) and Tullytown, on 6,000 acres beside the former U.S. Steel Fairless Works - have become a regional trash hub, with two-thirds of its waste now coming from out of state, mostly New York and New Jersey.

Pennsylvania is the nation's leading trash importer, and here by the Delaware River sits the state's busiest landfill complex, which received 3.5 million tons last year.

It's going to get busier still. The owner, Waste Management, just received permission for a major expansion in April, and at least two more are planned.

This high-tech waste monolith is a heap of contradictions. It embodies many advanced technologies, including a system to capture methane - a product of decomposition - and send it to a nearby power plant to make energy.

Yet Waste Management is also being fined millions of dollars until a new system to handle leachate - liquid that collects at the landfill's bottom - is finished.

The owner and the site's neighbors have reached a certain harmony, bolstered by improving technology and the tens of millions of dollars that the firm showers on residents of its "host" towns.

But the relationship was stressed in recent weeks when officials learned the company planned to accept sludge from a Montgomery County water-treatment plant that had been slightly contaminated with radioactive matter.

It had come from a company that cleaned uniforms and coveralls worn at nuclear power plants.

Scared and angered, officials vowed to intercede.

But both the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state Department of Environmental Protection concluded that the contamination was insignificant - less than someone would be exposed to while watching TV - and was allowed under current regulations.

Last week the trucks rolled in, depositing 499 tons of the sludge in the GROWS landfill.

In retrospect, said Tullytown borough manager Andrew Warren, the sludge itself wasn't a big deal. The problem arose because "it was a surprise."

Notification had come, but it was obscured in a 32-inch high stack of Waste Management folders, all but toppling off a table in the borough hall - which money from Waste Management had built.

A former Bucks County commissioner, Warren maintains that the company "has been and is a good neighbor."

Likewise, Falls Township manager Peter Gray termed relations with the waste giant "very positive."

But what fault lines there were have sharpened.

When the landfill was created in 1970 - on a floodplain abutting the Delaware River, a debatable siting if proposed today - "it was with certain size limitations," said Maya van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper. Over the years, it has expanded upward and outward.

"And so that insult that began all those years ago just becomes greater and greater," she said. "It just keeps growing."

Many people think of landfills as holes, but they're actually mountains, and their anatomy has evolved.

When GROWS was built in 1970, it was one of the first lined landfills in the country. Before that, landfills simply leaked their liquids into the groundwater.

In 1988, the Tullytown landfill opened. In April, the DEP approved a new 124-acre disposal area, called GROWS North.

Its six layers of liner - several redundancies worth of barrier and absorbent materials - are still visible, even as massive machinery dumps load after load of trash into the first corner of its "cells."

The bottom is banked so that any liquid will flow to a collection system to be pumped out. Much of it from the complex is then pre-treated and piped to the Morrisville wastewater treatment plant.

The leachate system is partly governed by a 2006 consent decree, updated last month, that addressed the Tullytown facility's lack of storage capacity. More than $1.7 million in fines have been paid to the state, and more is accumulating.

Next comes two feet of stone, then eight feet of "fluff lift" - soft trash without things such as fence posts that could puncture the liner.

At each day's end, the trash is topped with six inches of soil to control odors and deter birds.

And misters release plumes of ionized water to absorb odors.

"What we try to operate here is a no-nuisance facility," said senior district manager Bob Iuliucci, who started as a bulldozer operator 20 years ago when the Tullytown landfill was being created.

"Landfills in reality are complex environmental systems that need to be managed as ongoing construction projects," said DEP regional director Joseph A. Feola.

And so they grow.

The bulk that arrives, in about 650 trucks a day, is municipal household waste, with some construction material, infectious waste and asbestos. No "hazardous waste" - a category that does not include slightly radioactive material - is permitted.

About 10 percent came from Bucks County, nearly 15 percent from Philadelphia and 71 percent from out of state.

Atop the newest leavings are 120,000-pound compacting vehicles with studded rollers that chew and compress the material into as much as a ton per cubic yard.

Under current permits, Waste Management anticipates having enough room to take trash through 2013 at Tullytown and 2014 at GROWS.

Then the landfills will be capped with an impervious layer much like the bottom liner, then 18 inches of soil and seeded with grass, although the company has been experimenting with wildflowers, shrubs and trees.

Over the years, Tullytown and Falls Township have been all but transformed by the influx of "host" money from Waste Management.

Falls has received more than $171.5 million since 1988, based on a percentage of tipping fees. It has kept taxes falling even as expenses rise, said township manager Gray.

Tullytown funnels much of its host money directly to residents, in effect paying their borough, county and school taxes, with $2,000 per household left over. Checks come in the mail every December. Both municipalities have built parks, hired additional police officers and repaved roads with Waste Management money. And all the residents get free trash pickup.

What worries Warren isn't the trash piling up, but the day it stops.

Both municipalities have savings accounts - $33 million in Falls, $50 million in Tullytown - but Warren fears it will go fast unless taxes rise to meet expenses.

"Fact of the matter is, we've been living high on trash for a long time," Warren said. "The days of reckoning are coming."

The way van Rossum sees it, Waste Management has essentially "bought off the community" so it can bring in what it wants with "little exposure or opposition."

She'd like the expansions to end, but that's unlikely.

Under state review is a 35-acre site, Tullytown East.

Meanwhile, the company has an option to buy 252 acres at the former U.S. Steel facility next door.