How Alameda County spins garbage into habitat and education

In 1997 the Sierra Club and a number of other plaintiffs sued Alameda County to block the county's approval of excessive expansion of the Altamont Landfill, already the second-largest landfill in California. In 1999, after arduous negotiations, the parties reached a settlement agreement:

• the proposed expansion would be cut in half, and the rate of dumping would be limited;
• waste could be brought only from Alameda County, San Francisco, and the city of San Ramon;
• dumpers would pay a fee of $1.25 per ton to finance mitigations for some of the negative effects of the dump. Out of this fee 75 cents would go to an Open Space Account, and 25 cents each would go to an Education Account and to the city of Livermore for impacts on the community;
• the landfill would pay for a Community Monitor to track the landfill's compliance with environmental regulations.

The money raised is substantial. The Education Account takes in $350,000 per year, and the Open Space Account over $1 million each year. The Open Space Account now has over $5 million on hand.

The Open Space Account

Every time a ton of garbage is dumped into the Altamont Landfill, 4.86 square feet of open space may be saved.

The 75-cent fee mentioned above, combined with a previously existing 25-cent fee, build up to millions of dollars in the landfill's Open Space Account to be used for purchasing environmentally important lands in Eastern Alameda County.

The Altamont Landfill and Resource Recovery Facility Open Space Advisory Committee oversees the spending of the open-space funds. It has established a grant application process to review proposed land purchases, and this year approved a grant request from the East Bay Regional Park District to spend $450,000 from the account, to be matched by $400,000 from the state Coastal Conservancy and $100,000 from the Park District itself, to purchase 106 acres of the Vinson property to be added to Pleasanton Ridge Regional Park. The property, located at the north end of the park in Devaney Canyon, contains sensitive riparian habitat and a wildlife corridor. It will enable the District to give access to the park from the Dublin area and will provide a section of the planned Calaveras Ridge Trail connecting the Sunol and Las Trampas Regional Wildernesses. This purchase meets the top priority spelled out in the settlement agreement: it has "value for preservation of native biological diversity and wildlife habitat", as well as one of its secondary criteria: "visual character and non-motorized recreation".

The Sierra Club is delighted that the fund can support such open-space purchases, and especially that the money can be leveraged by contributions from other agencies to increase the amount of land protected.

Tom Harper, Sierra Club representative on the Open Space Advisory Committee

The Education Account

The 25-cents-per-ton payment to the Education Account has been nicknamed "Donna's Quarter" in honor of Donna Cabanne, a Pleasanton teacher and Sierra Club activist who was a leader in the fight to stop the megafill. Donna's Quarter generates over $325,000 per year to fund job-training projects and education on waste prevention and recycling in Alameda County, San Francisco, and San Ramon, the areas sending garbage to the landfill. The goal is to educate local youth about their own resource consumption and about careers in recycling, so that future generations will reduce waste and reliance on landfills.

The Altamont Education Advisory Board, consisting of appointed local teachers and recyclers, allocates project grants. Funded organizations and projects include:

• Kids for the Bay, which brings its "Four Rs Action Program" - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rot to students in low-income, urban schools in Alameda County;
• the San Francisco Department of the Environment for its "Food to Flowers!" Program, in which students separate their compostables (food waste, napkins, and other compostables) from recyclables and residual waste, reinforcing the "Fantastic 3" cart-based program at home;
• the Go Green Recycling Initiative Association, which works directly with PTAs and other school groups to "green" our schools through curriculum development, on-site composting, waste prevention, and recycling;
• "Our Schools, Our Planet" video projects sponsored by Earth Team, where high-school students use professional-quality video cameras and editing equipment to make films about waste prevention and recycling.

The Advisory Board encourages students, teachers, and others to apply at any time for mini-grants of up to $1,500; and in April each year for project grants of up to $50,000. The application and guidelines are included on the Livermore city web site at www.ci.livermore.ca.us/SWR

Ruth Abbe, Northern California Recycling Association representative to, and chair of,
the Altamont Education Advisory Board