Point Reyes Light - October 9, 2003
Supe rules out garbage-dropoff facility
By Andrew Pridgen
Supervisor Steve Kinsey on Tuesday told a small group in Point Reyes Station that county government does not intend to provide any drop-off site or transfer station for West Marin garbage.
The former landfill in Point Reyes Station closed in 1998, resulting in an immediate increase of roadside dumping and the misuse of recycling centers. Indeed, so much household garbage was illegally dumped at public recycling facilities that in the next three years five of the six 24-hour sites in West Marin had to close.
The only 24-hour site surviving is on Lagunitas School District property, and illegal dumping there is threatening its survival.
If the site closes, that would leave only a facility at Toby’s Feed Barn, which is open when the business is, and a Bolinas composting facility sponsored by Stinson Beach Water District and Bolinas Public Utility District.
Proposal to charge more
Instead of providing West Marin residents with a place to drop off bulky trash and yard waste, Kinsey during Tuesday’s meeting in the Dance Palace suggested that West Marin households rent more and larger recycling bins (for additional fees) from Waste Management. The garbage-pickup company serves all of West Marin.
Kinsey said the county estimates only a tenth of one percent of West Marin residents would use a dropoff facility on a regular basis. The number would be even less, he predicted, if the supervisors as expected rewrite the county’s franchise with Waste Management come January.
"We’re coming up on a renegotiation with Waste Management at the start of next year," Kinsey said. "As they may be looking for rate changes, we can bargain for increased services."
A Waste Management spokeswoman, Marissa Miller, described two new services the giant garbage conglomerate could make available in West Marin as early as next spring:
• A "single-stream" recycling program, which would allow customers to dump all their recyclable garbage in one 65-gallon can. The problem with this approach, as Joe Garbarino of the Marin Recycling Center has noted, is that households can sort their recyclable garbage at no cost while mass sorting is expensive and not always effective.
"You don’t want to do single-stream," Garbarino told The Light Wednesday. "What happens when you collect 800 cans of recycling a day and compact them into a garbage truck? People get lazy. All of a sudden, there’s glass shards in paper, not to mention wine, peanut butter, dirt, and whatever else. It’s a real mess. There’s just no way to sort it."
• A "green-waste" recycling program, which would let households dispose of cut foliage in a 65-gallon can. Miller, however, did not say how many months it would take a household to dispose (at the rate of one 65-gallon can per week) of the fallen limbs from a single storm.
A few West Marin residents, including several who have previously opposed a new dump or dropoff facility in West Marin, called the proposed services too expensive, unnecessary, and geared to suburbia.
"Driving through Novato, I see these big cans on the curbs, and they’re not overflowing, and we’re not Novato," said Point Reyes Station resident Ken Levin. "The only time I see a problem is [garbage] cans overflowing with empty wine bottles at Stinson Beach after a weekend."
‘Lies, damned lies & statistics’
County Public Works program manager Jeff Rawles said West Marin may have "a false image of itself as being conscientious when it comes to garbage and recycling."
Rawles on Wednesday told The Light that county residents on average recycle 71 percent of their garbage, including foliage, while West Marin residents recycle only 25 percent.
However, West Marin’s low percentage is skewed, he acknowledged, because it does not account for what happens to most of the coast’s green waste.
Statistically, if more of West Marin’s yard waste were funneled through Waste Management, it "would really bump up those numbers," Rawles said. "It would cost more to recycle green waste, but probably not as much as people would think."
Stinson Beach resident Web Otis of the Bolinas-Stinson Resource Recovery Center told Kinsey the composting facility has not reached capacity. However, he said, it has no room for any non-foliage recycling.
Worse yet, Otis noted, "whenever you open up a dump, there are people who leave their trash near or around it. We would not want to get into that in Bolinas."
‘Someone is lying’
Garbarino of Marin Recycling was equally adamant that the "single-stream" recycling proposed by Kinsey and Waste Management is fraught with perils.
"I just got a copy of a study done in Sonoma County. What’s happening is that more and more of these [single-stream] loads meant for recycling are ending up in landfills," said Garbarino. "Right now the statewide average for single-stream is that 25 percent turns into garbage.
"When big [garbage companies] come up with different numbers, well, someone is lying."
Although using the Waste Management-owned Redwood Sanitary Landfill in Novato requires roundtrips of up to two hours for most West Marin households, Kinsey said the location is adequate for people living on the coast.
"Redwood Landfill is projected to work for the entire county for the next 40 years, so that means we have to start looking for a new site in about four years," Kinsey joked.
Importing garbage
"In seriousness, we don’t have volumes of waste [in West Marin] to justify a new facility. Not only that, a facility out here could bring waste from urbanized parts of the county or Sonoma."
In fact, the more Marin residents through recycling reduce the amount of Marin garbage being dumped at Redwood, the more garbage and sewage sludge Waste Management can import from communities throughout Northern California.
Kinsey has previously said that since the landfill is private, there is nothing Marin can legally do to stop the influx of out-of-county waste. In contrast to what Kinsey implied at Tuesday’s meeting, county-owned waste-disposal sites, such as those in Sonoma, often bar out-of-county garbage.
County Public Works manager Rawles said that along with the cost to acquire land to create a "technologically sound" dump or dropoff facility, the bigger cost would come from having to "staff it around the clock."
Complaints about situation
"That’s just something that’s not feasible now," Rawles said.
Point Reyes Station resident Lauri Sturdivant, a recycling consultant to county government and an organizer of "waste-awareness" programs in West Marin, said she’s heard many complaints about the lack of a dump in West Marin.
"I know there are people out there who want something," she said, "so I tell them to put it in writing and send it to Steve."
Kinsey meanwhile announced Waste Management will start picking up bulky trash from West Marin customers beginning Nov. 15.
To avoid last year’s problem of big items like couches and refrigerators sitting out on the street for weeks before being hauled away, Waste Management will schedule their pickups ahead of time. The company will soon give West Marin residents instructions for scheduling pickups.
In other major news from the meeting, seven years of litigation over the closing of the West Marin Sanitary Landfill in Point Reyes Station will end Oct. 31.
On that day a Marin Superior Court judge is scheduled to simultaneously rule (in two separate cases):
• Whether the Martinelli family is financially responsible for properly capping their defunct landfill.
• What portion, if any, of the closing costs should be borne by Waste Management, its subsidiary Shoreline Disposal, the Martinelli family, Bolinas Public Utility District, Stinson Beach Water District, and the County of Marin.
The three local governments are involved because their franchises with Shoreline and Waste Management called for dumping garbage in the landfill.
While Kinsey estimated the cost of closing and maintaining the Martinelli landfill would be in the "neighborhood of $3 million," he would not speculate how much of that cost would be incurred by whom.
"At this point we’re all in the dark about what the verdict is going to be," Kinsey said, responding to questions from Point Reyes Station property owners Ken Levin and Michael Mery, who live downstream from the landfill. "There won’t be any public feedback; a decision is a decision. We can, however, appeal."