Trash, like most of the nitty-gritty functions of a modern society, is often out of sight, out of mind. Most people don’t think about the intricate network of pipes delivering and removing liquids from their home until it breaks, or their trash disappearing each week from the curb unless a pickup is missed.<\/p>\n
But by the end of the year, King County officials will need to figure out a long-term solution for dealing with the mountains of waste generated by more than 1 million people. Driving through the Cedar Hills Regional Landfill — the only landfill in the county — on a recent morning, King County Solid Waste Division assistant operations manager Scott Barden pointed to low-lying hills sitting in front of much larger ones. These smaller hills are areas of the landfill stretching back to the 1960s, but the county’s last landfill is in its last years.<\/p>\n
“There probably will never be another landfill in King County,” he said, piloting his pickup truck toward a road winding up the side of a mountain jutting hundreds of feet in the air. The mountain is made almost entirely of trash.<\/p>\n
The view from the mountaintop is a sweeping panorama of the surrounding ridges, from the nearby Poo Poo Point where hang-gliders launch into open air and circle near Issaquah, to the jagged silhouettes of the Cascades to the east. Around 125 semi-trucks make the pilgrimage most days to this peak, where they dump containers carrying up to 18 tons of trash on its summit before tractors zip in to crush, compress, and rearrange the county’s garbage. Each night tarps are placed over the trash, and each layer is regularly filled over with dirt, sand, and permanent tarps as the landfill is built up. Deer, elk, and dozens if not hundreds of bald eagles frequent the landfill and can be seen most days swooping into piles of trash.<\/p>\n
But this section of the landfill is almost full, nearly at its height limit of 788 feet above sea level. Around 300 feet below, a work crew was surveying the bottom of the landfill’s newest section, and likely its last. A massive pit 120 feet deep will be filled with the county’s trash through 2028, when its peak will match the one Barden’s truck sat on. By then, King County will need another way to deal with the roughly 3,000 tons of refuse that residents generate every weekday.<\/p>\n
None of this is new knowledge. Seattle Weekly<\/em> ran an article in 2017 exploring the ways King County was looking to deal with waste. However, what is different now is that the county has until the end of 2019 to select how it will proceed. King County produced a comprehensive solid-waste-management plan last year that lays out two long-term options for waste management after Cedar Hills closes. While county executive Dow Constantine directed the landfill to build its final section and buy the county nearly a decade to implement its new plan, the deadline is on its way, said King County Solid Waste director Pat McLaughlin. “It makes this decision-making process very time-critical because we have a relatively short period of time remaining before that next disposal solution is in place,” he said.<\/p>\n The first option would resemble Seattle’s approach. Seattle is the only major city in the county that handles its own waste disposal. If this plan is picked, the county would contract with the railroad to ship its waste away. Seattle sends its garbage to a landfill in Arlington, Ore., and it’s unclear where the county could ship its refuse.<\/p>\n The second option — one supported and championed by King County Councilmember Kathy Lambert — would build a waste-to-energy plant where garbage from the county would be incinerated in a vacuum to create electricity. Lambert said the county will seek a study, expected to be completed by this fall. The county would own the facility but not run it; it would act as a county utility. Lambert has been studying ways to deal with trash for the past dozen years and has toured waste-to-power facilities in the U.S. and Europe.<\/p>\n