The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Deal would cut town’s disposal costs in half
Crested Butte is hoping to bury its solid waste just outside its own back yard at the Gunnison County Landfill, instead of sending the solid waste from water treatment over the mountains to Leadville and ultimately to the reclamation project at the Amax Molybdenum mine.
According to Crested Butte wastewater treatment plant manager Taylor Davis, the town is spending more than $55,000 per year to send 90 metric tons of solid waste—the sludge that remains at the end of the wastewater treatment process—to Leadville.
Davis is hoping to cut costs in half by taking 20 cubic yards of waste to the county landfill, 45 miles away, every week and paying a local company for the transportation.
“We pay about $1,800 a load to ship the town’s solid waste to Leadville and we’ve been shipping about 40 [cubic] yards every two weeks,” Davis says. “It would be a lot easier on everyone and cheaper to take the waste to the county’s landfill.”
Because the county landfill’s certificate of operation doesn’t include the disposal of municipal solid waste, a public hearing was required before an amendment could be added to the certificate that would allow it.
At the public hearing on Tuesday, November 3, Davis and Sean McCormick, who oversees landfill operations, learned that the arrangement could be mutually beneficial, instead of the give and take arrangement that had been presented to the Board of County Commissioners.
Davis told the commissioners that the waste is currently a Grade B biosolid when it leaves the Crested Butte plant and can be mixed with soil, but it isn’t fit for use on vegetable gardens.
He said the town’s waste is now being mixed with topsoil and wood chips and used in surface reclamation at the Amax mine site near Leadville.
To improve the quality of the waste to a Grade A biosolid, the material would have to sit outside for 30 days, and Davis doubted if that was a feasible option inside the town limits. But McCormick said the landfill had space to store the waste for 30 days, which would make it acceptable for use in reclamation at the landfill.
“We only looked at [the waste] as something to mix in with trash. We had not looked at it as a beneficial use, or not yet,” McCormick told the commissioners. “We certainly have a large topsoil pile and a large wood chip pile and the potential for a beneficial use of the waste could definitely be a good thing.”
He pointed out that the way the landfill decides to use the waste could also affect the cost, since handling it as solid waste would be more problematic and costly than handling just household waste. Handling the waste as a soil additive, however, would be much less expensive to process, McCormick said.
Director of public works Marlene Crosby supported the idea of using the waste as a soil additive and the commissioners asked McCormick to look into the state’s requirements for storing and using the waste in that way.
The county and town also need to coordinate the chemical testing of the waste, so the county knows what it is getting in the waste—and what it can legally get under state regulations—and the town knows what they need to be testing for in their solid waste.
The commissioners can take action on the proposal to have solid waste disposed of in the Gunnison County Landfill after the public comment period ends November 16. Davis said the town would like to make arrangements with the county to start sending the waste to the landfill shortly after the first of the year.
