With fuel prices reaching record highs, rail transportation has suddenly become more attractive. Has the time come for solid waste to be transported by rail instead of truck? The answer is: that depends.

By Donna Gordon Blankinship

The decision about where to send the next generation’s garbage and how to get it there is being debated all over the nation. It’s impossible to create a formula that applies to every municipality, but some experts believe rail haul is the best way to go for transporting large quantities of solid waste to distant landfills.

As more large cities and counties take a serious look at rail haul, the editors of MSW Management feel it is time to take a thoughtful look at the issue. In this article, we’ll examine several municipalities that have made the decision to haul by rail. We’ll also talk about those who have considered rail haul and made a different decision. And we’ll examine the factors that helped these governments make their choices.

A good place to start the discussion is in Seattle, WA, which has been hauling its garbage to a landfill in Arlington, OR, since 1988. One of the first cities to switch to rail transportation for its solid waste, the decision was made for purely economic reasons, says Brett Stav, senior public relations specialist for Seattle Public Utilities. In the mid-1980s, when the city’s own landfills were starting to fill up, they sought and found an available landfill that could meet their needs for many years into the future.

Since the Arlington Columbia City Landfill was across the Columbia River in the state of Oregon, about 258 miles from Seattle, transportation had to be part of the decision-making process. Seattle sends more than 900 million pounds of garbage to the landfill each year, which translates into about 100 car loads by train each day, five days a week.

The city’s population has remained stable since it started hauling garbage to the Oregon landfill. At the same time, Stav said, recycling participation has increased, but so has the amount of garbage people throw away because of packaging. Currently, 40% of everything Seattle throws away goes into the recycling bin. The city’s goal is 60%. A new city ordinance aimed at improving the numbers now bans recyclables from the garbage, which Stav hopes will result in smaller loads going to the landfill.

Transportation Expenses
It should come as no surprise that transportation is one of the biggest expenses of solid waste disposal. Transporting trash to landfills that are further and further away from the places people live can only make this part of the equation continue to grow in the future.

There was very little need for long-haul transportation and—by association—rail, until the 1980s, when local landfills like Seattle’s started filling up and new solutions were found further away from town. Seattle was one of the first in the nation, and probably the first on the West Coast, to decide to go with rail transportation, says industry consultant Bob Wallace, managing partner and vice president of business solutions for WIH Resource Group in Phoenix, AZ.

Wallace, who used to work for one of the Seattle regional haulers in their transportation department, said the choice of track or rail usually comes down to a couple of factors: how much waste and how far away is the landfill. He believes that if a municipality transports 150,000 or more tons a year to a landfill that is 250 miles or further from its transfer station, economics favors rail. Otherwise, the logical choice is almost always truck.

The reasons behind this formula mostly focus on how expensive it is to build the infrastructure needed to put your trash on tracks. If the rail yard is not near your transfer station, rail-haul costs must include the expense of trucking the containers to the rail yard. If the landfill doesn’t have its own rail yard, then there’s a similar expense at the other end.

Wallace says many municipalities now include studies of rail haul in their decision-making process, but most of the time distance becomes the deciding factor. If the decision were made for other reasons, such as the environment, rail would win every time, Wallace and others interviewed for this story agree.

The smallest municipalities he’s heard of making the switch lately are two other Washington counties, Kitsap County in northwest Washington and Snohomish County, just north of Seattle. He says Chicago and New York municipalities are some of the largest areas looking seriously at rail haul and the biggest one currently involved in a transition toward rail haul is Los Angeles.

Wallace said one of the issues he expects to see resolved in the near future is the fact that most landfills do not have rail service. Until a railroad track and station is built at the landfill, rail haul is probably not even an option.

Another serious issue he doesn’t expect to see resolved in the near future is the current competition for rail service. Thanks to a rebound in the economy and high fuel prices, plus a lack of drivers available for trucking companies, rail companies are seeing a resurgence in their popularity, Wallace says.

“Economics still favor rail on longer moves,” he says, pointing out that it takes only five or six guys to run a 50-car train. The same amount of freight would take at least 50 people to haul by truck. That comparison doesn’t even mention fuel costs or highway congestion.

This new current boom in rail’s popularity could be a problem for municipalities considering rail-haul. They may find it difficult to get their trains on the very busy tracks, says Wallace along with others in the industry. If the choice becomes building your own infrastructure, including tracks, the cost will soon be out of reach and truck transportation will begin to look a lot better.

Sticking with Trucks
The differences in cost are not big enough, yet, to make one choice or another the obvious decision. A look at the decision process in Portland, OR, which, like Seattle, also sends it garbage to the Arlington landfill, makes this very clear.

In 1990, Metro, the Portland regional government, asked for bids from rail, truck, and barge companies for a long-term contract to transport the area’s garbage to Arlington, which is about 150 miles from Portland. The cheapest bid was for truck transportation, at about $208 million over the length of the contract. Barge came in at $230 million and rail was $265 million, according to Jim Watkins, engineering and environmental services manager for Metro.

There were also environmental considerations, because 65 to 70 trucks drive through a scenic area five days a week—about 2,000 tons a day. “From an overall trucking standpoint, it’s a very small percentage of the trucks going up the gorge—not much compared to those already using it,” Watkins says.

Residents along the Columbia River Gorge opposed the plan to truck Portland’s garbage and preferred rail or barge, but cost difference was so significant and the real impact of sending 70 trucks through the area did not compare, Watkins says. However, he thinks the environmental issues will be more prominent the next time the decision is made, sometime in the next year or so. According to Watkins, rail could be more competitive at that time, especially because the infrastructure is there and other municipalities like Seattle are sending their garbage to Arlington by rail.

Even though the distance doesn’t meet Wallace’s formula for making rail affordable, Watkins says there are always other factors. “Rail is an automatic even if the distance is right,” he adds.

In the meantime, Portland has addressed its environmental concerns by finding ways to reduce truck emissions by using low sulfur diesel fuel and new particulate filters.

Choosing Rail
The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts faced its future landfill and transportation needs in the mid-1980s and, by 1991, rail-haul was identified as the transportation mode of choice, despite both infrastructure and cost considerations. The Sanitation Districts serve about 5.1 million people in Los Angeles County. The service area includes about 800 square miles and encompasses 78 cities and unincorporated areas.

PHOTO: SHANKS GROUP

Three remote landfills have been identified as the future repositories for the county’s solid waste. First is the Puente Hills Landfill in unincorporated Los Angeles County, which has been purchased by the county and is the site of the sanitation districts’ future transfer station. The county also plans to buy two other remote landfills—the Mesquite Regional Landfill in Imperial County and the Eagle Mountain Landfill in Riverside County—once those properties are out of litigation.

Extensive public education along with gradually increasing rates to pay for the needed rail infrastructure both helped move things along in what culminates this year after a 20-year transition.

“What you’re seeing today is the culmination of long-term efforts,” said Grace Chen, assistant head of the Solid Waste Department for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.

The project involves four major elements. First is construction of a recovery and transfer station, where recyclables are removed from garbage collected all over the region by various companies. “With a system like waste-by-rail, you don’t want to move any more materials than you absolutely have to,” Chen said. After recyclables are removed, the remaining garbage is loaded into inter-model containers and loaded on trucks.

Next: the county must build a rail yard where the inter-modal containers can be delivered by truck to be put on a train. The county decided to build its own rail yard because the yards run by the railroads in the area were so overcrowded. “I don’t know of any other system that has its own rail yard,” Coke said. “We think that will allow for a more efficient operation.” In 2004, the districts reached agreements to buy 17 acres adjacent to the Union Pacific Railroad for development of the inter-modal facility. In addition, the county is continuing to explore the possibility of using existing inter-modal facilities instead of building its own site.

The third part of the process is arranging for train transportation of the garbage trains, which are expected to go to the remote landfill on existing rail lines. Each train would haul approximately 3,000 to 4,000 tons of waste. The county is still negotiating with Union Pacific Railroad to arrange for using the tracks for its waste-by-rail program.

The fourth part of the process is making sure the county has a landfill that is ready to accept waste-by-rail through an adjacent facility and rail spur. The rail line, in this case, will be at the landfill. For the Mesquite landfill, which is 220 miles southeast of the metropolitan Los Angeles area, a five-mile rail spur will need to be constructed, Coke says.

The county expects to have all the pieces of the puzzle put together by the end of 2009, said Janet Coke, manager of the waste-by-rail section for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. The county currently operates three landfills. The largest site receives 13,200 tons a day and will close in 2013. The other two, smaller sites, take in just under 2,000 tons a day and each has 20 to 25 years of life remaining. About 20% of the county’s waste is already being shipped outside of county borders.

Coke said the most important advice she can give to other municipalities thinking of hauling their solid waste by rail is: “Understand it’s a long process. You need to plan for the changes in the process, whether permitting or construction.”

In the end, both Coke and Chen believe that waste-by-rail will provide a very long-term, secure disposal plan. In the Los Angeles scenario, 100-year plans are being made.

Ten Years to Go
King County, WA, the county in which Seattle is located, but with a separate government and solid waste program, is one of the many municipalities looking toward the future with an eye toward rail-haul. Kevin Kiernan, engineering manager for the King County Solid Waste Division, said the county started talking about 10 months ago about how it will get the waste from its area to a remote landfill.

PHOTO: HERZOG

Kiernan said they are several years away from making a decision about even where the waste will go, but everyone is looking very hard at neighboring Snohomish County and the city of Seattle. The Solid Waste Division identified waste exporting as the most likely possibility after studying these two systems.

Kierman said it’s possible that King County would coordinate with Seattle and Snohomish County, which are both sending solid waste by rail to Oregon. King County’s Cedar Hills Regional Landfill has about a decade-worth of capacity left, so that gives the county a while to make up its mind before the site closes.

Kiernan said several existing landfills in the region would be possible destinations, as well as the possibility of citing a new landfill east of the Cascade Mountains. But a new landfill has high start-up costs, so he believes it’s more likely the county will decide to work with an existing landfill run by a private company in either Idaho or Oregon. A report by the county also said it was possible to haul the county’s trash as far away as California, since once the garbage is on the train, how far it goes is not much of a cost factor.

One difficulty with such a plan, according to the report, is an emergency situation such as a major earthquake in the Seattle area. Because of this possibility, an additional issue the county is discussing is the possibility of closing the Cedar Hills Landfill early and preserving some of its capacity in case it is needed when rail service is disrupted by an emergency. Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway projects it would need two to three weeks to restore rail service in the Northwest after a major earthquake. Snohomish County’s emergency response plan includes activating a backup in-county landfill in case of an emergency.

The county has also considered partial waste export, but found that option would not be cost-effective. The short-term decision was not to close the Cedar Hills site early because of cost considerations.

The county has a long list of other questions it needs to answer before closing the Cedar Hills Landfill and figuring out where the next generation’s garbage will be sent. As Kiernan says, the discussion is well underway; the answers are still unknown.

The future of waste by rail in King County and around the nation is still very much a work in progress.

Donna Gordon Blankinship is an author working in Seattle, WA.

MSW - November/December 2005