Agency open to landfill alternatives
Garbage doesn't usually make most priority lists but it's like many things taken for granted - you put it on the curb and it goes away.
What will happen when there's nowhere left in Lake County to take it? A proposed update of the Solid Waste Agency of Lake County's management plan, suggests new options, such as mass incineration or other technologies, should be considered.
"Before now, we said, 'Landfilling only. We don't need anything else,'" said Walter Willis, executive director of the agency. "It is kind of a big shift."
The agency hosts a public hearing on its recommendations at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Hainesville village hall, on Hainesville Road just north of Route 120.
According to the plan, which ultimately must be approved by the Lake County Board, the remaining two landfills in Lake County - Countryside in Grayslake and the Zion Landfill - have about 91/2 and 5 years, respectively, of remaining capacity.
Though an expansion is being sought for Zion, SWALCO determined given the time needed to site, permit and build new disposal facilities, its updated plan should consider other options. SWALCO updates its plan every five years.
In 2004, "We still had plenty of capacity in our landfills and didn't think we needed to look to the next generation of disposal options," Willis said.
Expanding recycling programs and supporting household chemical waste collections are included in the recommendations.
Mass burn incineration, a new landfill, or solid waste transfer stations also are open to consideration, as are alternative technologies such as thermal, biological or chemical conversion of garbage.
Those would require another new wrinkle in the plan: a "life cycle" environmental assessment. That would require any proposal to show how the technology compares with current methods in terms of energy consumption, and emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxide, as well as carbon dioxide.
"I want to bring a little more science to how we look at the next generation solutions," Willis said.