My turn: Regional waste disposal deserves some thought

The landfill smells bad. It becomes more visible every day and is along the main route visitors pass to view our glacier. It's an attraction for birds, who pick up its contents and then drop them on nearby neighbors. The birds are, in turn, a threat to airport traffic (think of a 737 landing in Gastineau Channel). And it may be leaching toxic substances into nearby water.

But it's cheap. The landfill is the cheapest way we have found to dispose of solid waste, and lowest cost is the most common denominator for much of what passes for public policy.

We have a few alternatives, however.

1. We can continue to use the landfill for another 30 years or so. But how high it will get and what we do after it is filled have not been addressed. Recycling, however intensive, will only slow the process - not reverse it.

2. We can burn trash at the landfill, with or without generating electricity. Air control regulation seems to have high priority with the Environmental Protection Agency, so obtaining the necessary permits is, to say the least, uncertain. Power generation from solid waste is a cutting-edge technology, but is met by many with skepticism. In any case, a simple incinerator will cost about $40 million, according to the city's consultants, and its residue would continue to go into the landfill.

3. Finally, we can ship it out of town to a regional landfill. This is the alternative most eagerly sought by many of our sister municipalities in Southeast. They too have a solid waste disposal problem and have resorted to exporting their garbage in an effort to meet their needs. Juneau's trash may hold the key to solving our neighbors' solid waste problems.

The Southeast Conference, meeting today and Tuesday has endorsed the concept of a Regional Landfill Authority, and created a Working Group to develop the necessary formative documents. We will hear a report on those efforts at the Assembly meeting today.

In our sometimes intensive efforts to maintain Juneau as Alaska's capital, we are well advised to keep in mind our possibly decisive role in the regional landfill concept. If we want our sister cities to support us as the capital for all Alaska, we need to offer them our support for a concept that they consider vital to their interests. We now ship recyclables to the Seattle area for about $70 a ton. Perhaps we could ship trash to Kake, for example, for about half that cost. We are paying "tipping fees" now to operate the landfill in its present location, so the cost of shipping to a regional landfill could be offset by savings from our present operation.

Some may be uneasy with the concept of shipping our trash to someone else's community, but that's what we are doing now with our recyclables in this era of low demand for recyclable material. The City and Borough of Juneau Assembly has elected to ship recyclables South at our own cost for a few months, but our budget concerns may overtake that decision and we may very soon find ourselves dumping them in our own landfill. Conversely, if the receiving community finds an urgently sought new source of revenue, and is one whose support as a capital we eagerly seek, we find valid reasons to adopt the regional landfill alternative.

Whatever Juneau's ultimate choice for solid waste disposal may be, we should make that decision knowing that a regional solid waste disposal site is an alternative, and that it offers an opportunity to display solidarity with our neighbor cities that can only contribute to our larger interests.

• Bob Doll is a Juneau resident and is in his second term as a member of the City and Borough of Juneau Assembly.