During the Greensboro election campaign every one of the at-large candidates and those seeking district seats representing the city’s east side have pledged to not reopen the White Street Landfill to municipal solid waste, an initiative pushed by retiring Councilman Mike Barber.
While the additional cost of trucking Greensboro’s garbage to a landfill in Montgomery County has been a subject of debate, a consensus has developed along the campaign trail that Greensboro must start planning a less expensive alternative for disposing of its waste that does not harm the health of neighboring residents and, if possible, puts people to work.
As the candidates hone their positions on the campaign trail, two companies have begun courting residents of northeast Greensboro near the White Street Landfill, and members of the current council have exchanged barbed comments over how to solicit alternative waste disposal ideas from private companies.
On Oct. 20, members of Concerned Citizens of Northeast Greensboro, a group that was instrumental in closing White Street Landfill to household waste, packed council chambers for a presentation by Carl E. Lebby Jr., the president of a company called Ulturnagen that was formed in April. Lebby read aloud from a letter proposing an “alternative energy demonstration project” that would use plasma gasification technology to process the city’s garbage, export 397,500 megawatts to the power grid and create 200 new jobs.
Lebbe asked the council to pass a resolution in support of the project. That did not sit well with Barber, who pointed out that the council had already approved a request for proposals at the request of a second company called Cico LLC that is led by former Councilman Bob Mays. Barber wondered aloud whether the new motion would circumvent the process already under way to solicit proposals.
Barber said that Mayor Yvonne Johnson “spoke to someone and had them walk” Lebbe around the landfill.
“First of all, I made no arrangements to walk anybody anywhere,” Johnson shot back.
Members of Concerned Citizens, filling two or three rows of seats, cheered.
Questioned by Barber about whether anybody from his company had been escorted around the landfill, Lebbe responded, “Not to my knowledge.”
Barber dropped the name of Jim Kee, who won election to the District 2 city council seat on Tuesday, suggesting that the candidate himself might have given one of the company’s representatives a tour of the landfill.
In retort to Barber’s protestations, District 1 Councilwoman Dianne Bellamy-Small said that Lebbe’s proposal was a different approach, and that the request for proposals was specifically for the White Street Landfill area.
“This is a regional approach,” Bellamy-Small said. “They are bringing in nine other counties to be partner. We talk about regionalism… okay, this is what this is. This gives Greensboro an opportunity to be a leader with Winston-Salem, High Point and the surrounding counties…. This is a different proposal, a different way of looking at this than what we’ve looked at before. This takes White Street off of the table and gives these people the relief that they need to not worry about White Street being opened again.”
More cheers rose up from the gallery. “This has been very clever,” Barber quipped, but the council would vote to move forward with the request for proposals, amended to include regional alternatives. It narrowly passed, with Mayor Johnson, Councilwoman Bellamy-Small, Councilwoman Goldie Wells and Councilman Robbie Perkins voting on the losing side.
Kee was next in rotation during the speakers from the floor segment of the meeting.
“I’ll end by stating the position of the citizens of District 2,” he said. “We will not allow the reopening of the White Street Landfill.”
Kee said in an interview last month that he had not escorted anyone from Ulturnagen around the landfill, but he had met with representatives of the other company, Cico LLC, at the landfill. Kee spoke favorably about Ulturnagen’s proposal and the plasma gasification technology that it would use.
“No toxins would be emitted into the atmosphere,” he said. “That does not involve reopening the White Street Landfill. They’re looking at using the Dell site. It would create numerous jobs. This process will allow for the extraction of trash from the White Street Landfill.”
Despite Kee and Bellamy-Small’s suggestions that Ulturnagen would operate somewhere other than the White Street Landfill, a company presentation to the city council in late July, proposes to do just that. Under the heading, “Immediate Economic Impacts,” a PowerPoint presentation references “establishing the Greensboro Energy Complex at the former White Street Landfill that will transform the area (nearly 1,000 acres) socially and economically.”
Lebbe’s Oct. 20 pitch also sweetened the deal for the city considerably from a financial standpoint, compared to his presentation in July.
At the recent presentation, Mayor Johnson asked Lebbe what the project would cost the city.
“It’s no cost to the city,” Lebbe replied. Yet in the PowerPoint presentation made to the council in July, Ulturnagen states that it would need to use the city bond rating to finance construction and states that the city would pick up the tab for health hazard and environmental studies for the facility. Lebbe could not be reached for comment about this story.
A private Canadian company, Plasco, currently operates a plasma gasification pilot project that processes 85 tons of waste per day in Ottawa, and has signed a contract to operate a 200-ton per day plant in Red Deer, Alberta.
Several municipalities and county governments have explored the possibility of processing their waste through plasma gasification technology. The most prominent may be Los Angeles, whose bureau of sanitation submitted a report in June concluding that the city would no longer pursue the technology.
St. Lucie County in Florida, with a population of 265,108, is moving forward with plans to begin processing its waste with a plasma gasification plant by 2011.
The county started looking for an alternative to burying or incinerating its solid waste in 2004, Assistant Solid Waste Director Ron Roberts said in an interview on Monday. The county solicited proposals from 126 companies and organizations for models that fit the criteria of being observably proven, in commercial operation, economically viable and environmentally friendly.
“After three years and 7,000 pages of information, we found that plasma gasification was the only technology that made sense for us,” Roberts said. The county then put out a request for qualifications, and only one company, Atlanta-based Geoplasma, responded.
As Roberts described it, plasma gasification plants essentially zap garbage with an electrical arc at temperatures of up to 10,000 degrees Farenheit inside a foot and a half-thick ceramic shell and reduces it to electricity, steam and slag that can be made into paver bricks. In comparison, incinerators run at about 800 degrees. Roberts said the plant requires about a third of the energy it produces to operate, with the remainder available for export.
Roberts acknowledged that the technology is relatively untested in the US.
“In Asia right now there are probably 15 plants using standard gasification or plasma gasification,” he said. “In the United Kingdom there are probably nine gasification plants. The paradigm shift has already occurred from incineration and landfilling. The United States is at the bottom of the curve, in my opinion.”
The other proposal is being floated by Cico LLC, a company led by former Greensboro City Councilman Bob Mays. Under Cico’s model, recycleable material would be culled from solid waste in two separate steps, and what was left would be broken down through a process called bioconversion that uses water and bacteria to break down matter inside a giant container. To sell residents on the plan, Mays said the company would take up to $1 million per year in revenue derived from the operation and plough it into an economic development nonprofit controlled by neighborhood leaders.
Paul G. Gilmer, a licensed real estate broker who lives close enough to the landfill to see it from his bedroom window when the leaves are off the trees, went before the city council with Mays in mid-September to ask the city to issue a request for proposals.
“Even though I have strong reservations about reopening the landfill to MSW, I’m a realist and I know that if this doesn’t happen this year or next, it will happen because of the sheer cost of not opening it,” Gilmer said. “When this occurs it will be without any input or control from my neighborhood.”
Ralph Johnson, the co-chair of Concerned Citizens of Northeast Greensboro, is listed as a member of Cico’s project committee in materials the company submitted to the city, but his remarks before council fell short of a ringing endorsement.
“If there’s any projects that may affect the citizens and health and things in east Greensboro, I need to hear about it because there’s been a whole lot of miscommunication with the neighborhoods, and there’s a lot of mistrust,” he said. “We really don’t know who to believe. You know, you hear a lot of plans being made for east Greensboro, but what happens a lot of times is that we get the short end of the stick. I’ve been listening to a lot of proposals that’s been presented.”
YVONNE JOHNSON Most candidates for Greensboro City Council have pledged to keep the White Street Landfill closed to household waste, but two proposals for alternative solid- waste disposal have been proposed, and the new council will have to make a deci- sion. (photo by Brian Clarey)
