The city estimates that the Miramar Landfill is approximately six to 12 years away from reaching capacity. What happens when San Diego runs out of space for its trash?
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Once a week, households around the city take their garbage to the curb. They leave for work, and when they come home in the evening, their big black trash containers have been emptied “” the garbage disappearing almost magically while they were away.
Consider for a moment what was inside that big black trash container: Was it leftover dinner? Did an aluminum can or two get placed in the trash instead of that big blue recycling container? What about the cardboard packaging from the cereal box?
In San Diego, anything placed in a standard city trash can ends up in the Miramar Landfill “” recyclable or not. Indiscriminate disposal of cardboard, aluminum, glass, paper and plastics poses real problems for the storage of the city’s trash because, well, it doesn’t cease to exist when it’s picked up by the garbage truck.
According to Joe Corones, associate civil engineer for the Environmental Services Department, the city currently estimates that the landfill will reach capacity by 2012.
And while that date is fast approaching, previous estimates suggested it would close between 2002 and 2005. The close date was expanded after Assembly Bill (AB) 939 was passed in 1989, which required local governments to reduce waste disposed in landfills by 50 percent by the year 2000.
“We’re already in the year 2006 and we’ve just got approval from the state to accept our figure saying we’ve reached a 52 percent recycling rate,” Corones said.
Despite these efforts, the landfill is still inundated with recyclable material. In fact, 65 percent of trash now residing in the landfill is recyclable, wasting precious space, according to a 2005 statement from Environmental Services. Meanwhile, San Diegans continue to create 9 million pounds of trash each day “” that’s seven pounds per person.
While on a tour of the landfill, Corones pointed out mounds of recyclable cardboard and greenery, which, if diverted to recycling centers, could extend the life of the landfill even longer.
“If you look you can see a lot of paper and a lot of cardboard,” Corones said, “A lot of recyclable material that got in, it is in the trash. So when you’re imagining one can getting in there, it’s thousands and thousands of them probably on a daily basis.”
Corones suggested that many people don’t realize that trash does not get separated at the landfill. Once a recyclable item gets placed in a household wastebasket and is transferred into the black curbside trash containers for pickup, it is not filtered out by someone else.
For this reason, Corones emphasized, separation of recyclable materials is pertinent at home.
City collection services are automated, meaning a specially designed hydraulic arm grasps, lifts and empties city-issued refuse containers into the back of the collection trucks. After collection, the trucks go to the landfill’s city commercial area and dump its contents. Bulldozers then push the trash over the edge into an excavated hole.
“We got the idea to start actually excavating a hole rather than just filling canyons,” Corones said. “That’s what they used to do in the old days was just find a canyon and fill it in and cover it up with dirt.”
Corones explained that excavation and recycling programs have helped the landfill fill at a slower rate.
“Then you’ve got the economics of the city “” whether more people are moving in or more people are leaving, whether you can train them to recycle, whether there’s some natural disaster where we get tonnage that we hadn’t anticipated on getting “” that fowls things up and we try to have contingency plans,” he continued.
More recently, the city has attempted to expand the life of the landfill by increasing its height limit.
“We’ve applied for a height restriction waver with the Marines and they don’t seem to be too worried about the height as much as the Navy was,” he said.
According to Corones, the chief engineer for the landfill estimates that for every foot increase the landfill would get three more months of capacity. The city has applied for a 20-foot height increase, which would give Miramar approximately five more years of additional capacity.
While some of the trash is biodegradable and would decompose, that process is delayed at Miramar.
“It’s entombed for quite a while and it’s so dry here most of the time in San Diego. They don’t decompose very fast here in a dry environment,” Corones explained, saying that while digging in the landfill to install gas wells staff found newspapers more than 30 years old that were still readable.
While the city and the community are doing much to encourage and support recycling, some residents continue to place recyclable material in the trash. Maybe they just don’t know any better, Corones said.
But the question remains: What does the city plan to do once the Miramar Landfill reaches capacity possibly sometime during the next six to 12 years?
According to the Environmental Services Department, the city has already made arrangements to send its trash to other landfills once Miramar reaches capacity.
There are also controversial plans following a 2003 Environmental Impact Report to possibly construct a new landfill in Gregory Canyon near the Pala community east of Fallbrook.
The amount of time left before alternative sites must be chosen depends on how much San Diegans recycle and reduce the amount of trash they generate.