To sleep, perchance to leak

Taking action against a sea of abandoned landfills

Every landfill, even the best, will fail some day. When rainfall infiltrates through the deteriorating covers over lined landfills, toxic leachate may leak into underlying drinking-water supplies, or spill over the sides of the landfill. The large mountains of waste, sometimes hundreds of feet high and weighing tens of millions of tons, can become unstable and collapse catastrophically in massive garbolanches.

In 1991 the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) promulgated the first minimum national standards for landfills. Within three years it closed down more than 10,000 open dumps.

Nonetheless, the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) contains a fatal flaw. Subtitle D attempts to "entomb" the waste, ostensibly in perpetuity, by requiring landfills to have liners. Nonetheless EPA admits that "even the best liner and leachate collection systems will ultimately fail due to natural deterioration." When they do, the responsible parties may no longer be around, and formerly remote sites are likely to be surrounded by homes and development.

RCRA makes owners responsible for just 30 years of minor maintenance after closure of a landfill (the "post-closure" care period). California law, unique in the U.S., extends this responsibility to include "reasonably foreseeable" corrective action until there is "no threat to the environment" - but gives no further interpretation for these phrases. Currently California landfill owners post assurances between $162,000 and $3.8 million - dramatically less than the potential billion-dollar hazards that might develop for mega-landfills in urbanizing areas. See Table

When post-closure care ends, we can be sure that rainfall will enter the waste through breaches in deteriorating cover layers. Leachate (water containing dissolved waste substances) and landfall gas will form and escape.

Even if we extend the period of post-closure care, and improve its quality, the inherent risk remains, for eventually care will end, and the cover will fail. Quite simply, the co-disposal in municipal solid-waste landfills of small-generator hazardous wastes mixed with the decomposable fraction of our waste stream is extremely difficult or impossible to safely manage. Thus the European Commission in 1999 directed an end to landfilling of decomposable wastes in all 25 countries of the European Union.

One key step towards minimizing future risk is to minimize the wastes that we put into landfills. We already recycle 30 - 40%. We can raise this to 75% through expanded composting (with the added benefit of restoring fertility to our land). We will then be creating a smaller volume of landfills, and because the waste will no longer be biologically active, the landfills will be easier and less costly to manage safely.

Financing landfill risk

Nonetheless, for the immediate future we will continue landfilling some wastes, and there are already thousands of operating or closed landfills. How can we be assured of adequate maintenance for all these landfills far into the future?

The financial assurances currently in place for landfills cover only minor routine care: activities such as mowing the lawn, monitoring samples, and trucking leachate to sewage plants. These cost on the order of $5 million per site. The full range of reasonably foreseeable costs from abandoned sites - which almost certainly will become orphans of the state - is 100 times greater. The table shows omitted costs. Adequate financial assurance for all these risks would have to extend the legal period of post-closure care and cover at least a significant part of the true risks.

Trust funds will not solve the problem: they have been designed only to last for the pre-determined post-closure period, and no level of government has shown the will to ramp up the amounts to the levels shown above.

The first author of this article has prepared a report proposing "long term catastrophic insurance". This report, "Day of Reckoning: Protecting California Taxpayers from the Looming Landfill Crisis," will soon be available at the web site of the Center for a Competitive Waste Industry at www.competitivewaste.org/objectives.htm. When funding for the enormous future liabilities is collected through current rates, instead of being left to future generations, it will create an additional market incentive for recovering rather than disposing of our valuable discards.

The California Integrated Waste Management Board (CIWMB) is currently engaged in a proceeding to study the landfill liability problem. The Coalition to Protect States from Long-term Landfill Liabilities, of which the Sierra Club is a member, has called for the CIWMB to commission insurance experts to fully develop and then apply extended environmental-impairment landfill insurance.

Peter Anderson, executive director, Center for a Competitive Waste Industry; and Gary Liss, Gary Liss & Associates