Think Out Loud

Coffin Butte Landfill proposed expansion raises environmental and health concerns

By Stella Holt Dupey
Aug. 9, 2024 7:10 p.m.

Broadcast: Monday, Aug. 12

The Coffin Butte landfill is permitted to accept 1.1 million tons of waste each year.

The Coffin Butte landfill is permitted to accept 1.1 million tons of waste each year.

Nathan Wilk / KLCC

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Coffin Butte Landfill, which is located in Benton County, might expand soon. The site draws waste from nearly two dozen Oregon counties and accepts more than one million tons of garbage annually. But the facility’s operators have applied for a permit to expand the landfill even further, raising public health and environmental concerns. A 2022 Environmental Protection Agency report found high levels of methane in the air at Coffin Butte Landfill. People living in nearby towns say that the landfill shouldn’t get bigger under any circumstances, and some longtime residents have been suffering from health issues due to living in such close proximity. Isobel Whitcomb, a science and environmental reporter, is here to share more about what they learned while researching this issue for Canary Media.

Editor’s note: In the interview, Isobel Whitcomb incorrectly described the status of the landfill permit application. The application is still under review by a third party land-use firm. The deadline for that review is August 16th.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Coffin Butte Landfill near Corvallis accepts more than one million tons of garbage every year from nearly two dozen Oregon counties. It’s gotten a lot bigger over the last 10 years or so, but the facility’s operators have applied for a permit to expand it even further. That’s raising public health and environmental concerns, and it’s not just neighbors who are worried. In 2022, a report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found multiple methane leaks at the landfill with some reaching highly flammable concentrations.

The independent science and environmental reporter Isobel Whitcomb wrote about this issue for Canary Media, and they join us now. Welcome to the show.

Isobel Whitcomb: Hi, Dave.

Miller: I want to start with this EPA investigation two years ago. What did they find?

Whitcomb: Yeah, so I want to start by mentioning that methane is not only highly flammable, it’s also a potent greenhouse gas; so it traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. The EPA periodically tracks methane emissions at a variety of points over a landfill such as Coffin Butte. And when they visited Coffin Butte in 2022, they found 21 points where the methane emissions exceeded 10,000 parts per million. For reference, the EPA’s limit is 500 parts per million.

Miller: Wow. Was Republic, the landfill owner, forced to change their ways as a result of this report?

Whitcomb: No – that’s the short answer. The EPA does have limits on how much methane a landfill can produce. But enforcement and monitoring is generally pretty lax. Some of my sources called it an honor system. Actually, a more recent EPA inspection in June found 40 more exceedances, so that’s a sign that not much has changed.

Miller: What has Republic said about these methane leaks?

Whitcomb: So, the short answer is that Republic says they are working on it. They’ve said that Coffin Butte has three times as many gas collection wells compared to industry best practices; a gas collection well is where a landfill kind of sucks in the gas being produced and then eventually pipes it to be burned. So they say that, and they also say that they’re investing seven million dollars to upgrade their systems, and they’re expanding the gas collection system, the piping. So yeah, they say they’re working on it.

Miller: Were nearby residents placated by that messaging: “We’re working on it,” and we have more infrastructure in place than is even required?

Whitcomb: No, not at all, because the evidence suggests that the landfill is still emitting methane. They won’t be placated until there’s evidence that methane emissions are at safe levels and that that gas is being collected.

Miller: You mentioned a follow-up investigation by the Environmental Protection Agency. At a press conference in Springfield on Friday, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden called for the EPA to finish a follow-up inspection that they did in June. How much do we know about that follow up?

Whitcomb: All I know at this point is that they found 40 more in exceedances, but I do know that Senators Merkley and Wyden recently applied for funding in the 2025 appropriations bill that would expand monitoring at Coffin Butte Landfill. So that would pilot a continuous monitoring system, which experts on landfills say that that kind of system would improve the way that landfills operate across the country.

Miller: How does what’s happening at Coffin Butte – in terms of these methane emissions – fit into the national picture that’s developing at landfills?

Whitcomb: Coffin Butte sounds like and is a pretty egregious example, but it’s really far from an anomaly. Methane leaks are common across the country. EPA enforcement, as I mentioned, is largely an honor system. For this article, I spoke to experts at Industrious Labs, which is a nonprofit doing some landfill monitoring. And in a report earlier this year, they looked at landfills across eight different states, and they found that 96% of EPA inspections found exceedances – so, places where methane emissions were higher than EPA maximum limits.

Miller: We started with methane, but neighbors are also worried about other emissions from the landfills. What else can or does go into the air around there?

Whitcomb: Methane comes from the organic materials that we put in our trash, like food; but, of course, we put plenty of plastic and even cosmetics in the trash. And although these don’t biodegrade easily, through off-gassing they release a variety of different usually toxic chemicals. Examples would be benzene and vinyl chloride, and these cause a variety of different health effects.

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Miller: What kinds of health effects have been identified as stemming from possible emissions from landfills?

Whitcomb: Cancer is a big one. It’s very hard to identify whether an individual landfill is causing heightened cancer rates, but across the country, we know that higher cancer is associated with living near a landfill. Some of these specific compounds I mentioned are associated with brain, lung, even leukemia. And actually, something I didn’t mention in the article, residents are concerned that they are living in a cancer cluster. One of the people I interviewed had multiple neighbors who had had brain and blood cancer, and they’re keeping track of that.

Miller: What else did you hear from local residents about what it’s like day-to-day to live very close to this landfill?

Whitcomb: First of all, it’s smelly, and we’re not just talking about the smell that you get from your garbage can at home when you haven’t taken it out. I went there, and it’s more similar to the smell of nail polish remover. It’s a very chemical scent. So not only is it unpleasant, it reminds neighbors of kind of the toxic stuff they’re bringing in. On days where that smell is particularly pungent, many people said they limit their activities outside. In addition to that, they’re very worried about wildfires. Fires are common on landfills because of the explosive methane; in fact, there have been two this summer at Coffin Butte.

Miller: What’s happened with those two fires?

Whitcomb: So in May, there was a fire on the landfill that was extinguished on-site. And then, very recently in July, there was a grass fire that started near a stack where they were burning methane.

Miller: One of the issues that you heard about has to do with the protocol for washing landfill equipment. What did you learn about best practices, about how landfill operators should do this washing?

Whitcomb: So, things like trucks get caked in gunk from the landfill – things like human feces. And they’re supposed to power wash the equipment on top of the landfill. And that’s because underneath the landfill you have this lining that prevents this liquid called leachate from getting into the groundwater. I found from speaking with a former mechanic at the landfill, that he and his colleagues were instructed to power wash equipment at their shop, which is off of the landfill. So they were working in hazardous conditions where they had things like human feces on the floor of their shop and washing into nearby waterways.

Miller: There was another issue that you dug into a little bit which has to do with a treatment that’s applied on top of the landfill waste to prevent material from escaping in various ways. What did you hear about that?

Whitcomb: The EPA inspection – on top of the methane exceedances – found that the tarp on top of the landfill, which prevents gas from escaping, was eroding.

Miller: What exactly is Republic, the landfill owner, asking for in its current permit application?

Whitcomb: So, the current iteration is the second version. They’re asking for a slightly smaller expansion than their original request. But basically, there’s a road that runs next to the Coffin Butte Landfill, and they’re essentially asking to build a second landfill across the road that would be slightly smaller.

Miller: How much bigger, though, would the site get? How much bigger would the landfill get if this permit is approved?

Whitcomb: I believe the second landfill would be up to 270 feet tall, and it would buy the landfill about six more years of time.

Miller: What alternatives are there to ever bigger landfills? And this is not just a question about Coffin Butte. This is a societal question.

Whitcomb: Yeah. There are alternative ways to deal with our waste. We just have to look over to other countries in Europe, for example, that have effectively eliminated landfilling. Part of the issue is infrastructure. So we don’t really have the infrastructure to properly sort our recycling, which is why most of the materials we are putting in the recycling bins are actually going to landfills. And it’s also a cultural issue where we don’t really have the know-how in place, where regular people know how to sort their recycling and properly decontaminate it. Ideally, we’d have infrastructure that can sort out commingled waste.

Actually, Lane County – so, Eugene’s county – is building a state of the art facility that would be one of the most progressive in the country. And this would basically take commingled waste – everything, food waste, plastics – sort everything out, including plastics, into different forms for the market and also collect biogas to be used as fuel.

Miller: This permit is going to be considered by the Benton County Planning Commission. What’s the time frame for the permit deliberation?

Whitcomb: I actually heard from one of my sources last week that the permit application was returned to Republic Services because it was marked incomplete. So, they’ll almost certainly refile once they make some adjustments to that. And after that point, Benton County has 30 days to decide whether this application is complete. And then once they do say, “Yes, this is good,” it’ll be another 150 days to consider the application and take public comments.

Miller: Isobel, thanks very much.

Whitcomb: Yeah, thank you.

Miller: Isobel Whitcomb is a science and environmental reporter based in Portland who wrote about this landfill in Benton County for Canary.

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