County looks at a North Dade Landfill twice as tall

As Miami-Dade struggles to dispose of solid waste after a fire closed its resource recovery facility in Doral that handled more than half the county’s total, a committee this week unanimously approved a study to make the North Dade Landfill nearly twice as tall.

The county plans to pay an engineering firm $550,000 to create a compete design package with plans to obtain permits for the vast landfill expansion.

“We need to actually get the study done,” said Oliver Gilbert III, county commission chairman, at Monday’s meeting of the Chairman’s Policy Council.

“That’s not saying I’m going to support extending the landfill.”

The landfill, at 21500 NW 47th Ave., just south of the Broward County line, has two pieces, or cells, one of 100 acres now taking trash that has a maximum permitted height of 135 feet, and another cell of 80 acres permitted for 95 feet but not in use.

The contract sought would have Dadeland-based Stearns, Conrad & Schmidt Consulting Engineers Inc. plan for the heights of the landfill cells to reach 250 feet and prepare to get state permits for that. Final approval of the contract faces a full county commission vote.

The landfill is what is called a Class III facility that accepts only trash, not food waste and other garbage. Waste haulers deliver to the landfill old furniture, lumber, cardboard boxes, yard trash, construction and demolition debris and the like. All are crushed by a bulldozer with spiked wheels to reduce their volume and then the debris is buried weekly. Methane gas that the buried debris throws off is burned, though the county plans a gas-to-energy conversion system that has yet to be built.

Expansion of the landfill is just one element of a shorter-term fix for the solid waste conundrum that also involved expanding the South Dade Landfill, contracts with private firms to handle the waste, and moving waste by rail north to landfills.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s plan also envisions in the longer term a complex chain that would see a disposal waste plant at the old Opa-Locka West Airport, a transfer site to that plant at the fire-closed Doral plant, and eventually a Zero Waste Master Plan that would eliminate the landfills.

The North Dade Landfill is projected to exhaust capacity by 2026, a closure that the mayor reported in August “would cause residents and commercial haulers to drive 40 miles” to the South Dade Landfill, which would push that site quicker to its own closure. Closing the North Dade Landfill would also cost the county $17 million a year in disposal fees and $46 million to close, the mayor’s report said.

Raising the landfill above its current height limit could add more than 30 years to capacity and $400 million to county revenue, the mayor reported.

Widening and deepening the South Dade Landfill, she said, “will ensure that we can continue to meet our development requirements.”

Meeting those requirements would allow the county to issue permits for new developments. Unless the county can show that it has sufficient waste disposal capacity for five years, the state would bar Miami-Dade from issuing development permits.

The mayor cited negotiations with both Waste Management and Waste Connections to add disposal capacity under current contracts. The goal, she said, is to replace capacity that might have been generated by partial operation of the burned-out Doral plant “but it could also provide some excess capacity for the system.”