The Barnstable County commissioners approved a request for proposal (RFP) at their meeting its Wednesday, August 5, for two feasibility studies regarding the future of solid waste management on Cape Cod.
The RFP now will be presented to the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates, which has control of county funds, on Monday, August 19. Costs associated with the RFP have been estimated at about $130,000.
For more than a year a collaboration has been in the works between Jack Yunits, the county administrator; Cape Cod Commission officials Michele White and Patty Daley; Sean O’Brien, department director of the Barnstable County Department of Health and Environment; and Kari Parcell, the municipal assistance coordinator for the Cape Cod Cooperative Extension.
The biggest challenge with current municipal solid waste (MSW) management on the Cape, Ms. Parcell said, is that disposal contract prices have increased twofold.
“Our disposal capacity is decreasing throughout the state and a lot of that has to do with the moratorium on waste energy facilities, so at present we are not able to build more facilities that would quote burn or incinerate trash in the state,” Ms. Parcell said. “And the other piece is that we are no longer really getting permitting for landfills and they’re closing down. So when you decrease capacity, the cost of solid waste disposal increases because now you have to find ways to get it out of state.”
“There’s a need to address future solid waste disposal and waste diversion options,” Ms. White said.
In an attempt to tackle these issues, the group has created two feasibility studies intended to help support towns with their MSW management and reduce costs to towns and residents.
The two feasibility studies are MSW diversion options for recyclable, reusable, and hard-to-dispose waste materials, and MSW out-of-state disposal cost and benefit.
Ms. Parcell presented the first feasibility study, on MSW diversion options.
MSW diversion options for recycling include examining options and costs to divert household recyclables and hard-to-dispose materials so that they are diverted from landfills or incineration disposal.
“I like to look at recycling as the last resort before a trash can,” Ms. Parcell said.
The examination will include bringing in the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection’s 2030 Solid Waste Master Plan.
The 2030 plan is looking into accepting more recyclable items like mattresses—which are up to 90 percent recyclable—and textiles, according to Ms. Parcell.
Since October 2014, MassDEP has had a food waste ban. Under the ban, an entity that produces more than one ton or more of food waste per week is required to divert food from the waste stream.
“Now they’re looking to decrease that to 1,000 pounds rather than one ton, so that’ll affect a lot of communities here on Cape as far as food generation—hospitals, any type of university, large-scale restaurants that we see that are operating at high capacity during the season…” Ms. Parcell said.
The study will also examine on-Cape options to collect and process materials for eventual reuse and recycling, and include marketing campaigns working with focus groups, both in the commerce and business world as well as municipal, according to Ms. Parcell.
The primary waste stream components that should be recycled and will be examined in the feasibility study include organic food, leaf and yard waste; construction and demolition; asphalt, brick and concrete; textiles; mattresses; rugs and carpets; furniture and other bulky items; electronic wastes, including cathode ray tubes and computer monitors; white goods (appliances); propane tanks; tires; fire extinguishers; clean wood; automobile wastes not including gasoline and antifreeze; batteries; compact fluorescent lamps; and mercury and oil-based wastes.
“These are the types of materials that we are really looking at, that could potentially be collected, processed, bailed and identified for a vendor in a domestic capacity, could really work to save our municipalities money, as far as a fiscal incentive as well as an environmental incentive to remove trucking from going in and out of bridges,” Ms. Parcell said.
The Cape, she said, needs to learn what can be done locally to save residents money on waste disposal and save its beautiful ecology from recyclable materials consistently seen in the region’s waste stream.
Patty Daley, a law and policy specialist with the Cape Cod Commission, presented the second feasibility study, which is on MSW out-of-state disposal.
“The state solid waste master plan envisions no more additional incinerator capacity…and landfills across the state are going to be closing down, so this leaves our municipalities with limited options for disposing of the waste that we can’t otherwise divert and recycle,” Ms. Daley said.
The study analyzes the costs of collecting the material and getting it to out-of-state disposal facilities either through truck or rail haul.
“Probably some of the most important infrastructure we have on the Cape is the two railheads,” she said. “One’s at the Yarmouth transfer station and one is at Joint Base Cape Cod at the Upper Cape Regional transfer station.”
Ms. Daley said those stations will come into play in the feasibility study.
But Ms. Parcell said the Cape cannot rely on other markets to continue to take its solid waste indefinitely—hence the importance of local disposal options.
If funding is approved, the RFP of both studies would go up for an open bid, and bidders would have the option to bid on a single study or on both combined studies.
“We’re anticipating a September 2021 completion,” Ms. Daley said.
