Last week, Marc Ryder, Executive Director of the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA), informed the Plattekill Town Board that his agency has all but eliminated Plattekill as a future county-wide landfill site.

In an effort to ensure transparency, Ryder said he has given several public presentations to local towns on the issue of landfills. He explained that 18 months ago, Ulster County contracted with the engineering firm Cornerstone to conduct a landfill siting feasibility study. The firm began by reviewing the HydroQuest study, which had identified a handful of possible properties.

Cornerstone also evaluated whether old town landfills in the county could be remediated and reactivated for a county-wide landfill. The firm was also tasked with regionalization, which Ryder thought was not applicable. Instead, he looked at “any grouping of parcels that could equal 100 usable acres for a county landfill.”

Cornerstone’s report concluded that five sites in Ulster County might be feasible for a landfill: two in Plattekill, one in Esopus, and two in Wawarsing.

Ryder, however, is focused on Wawarsing.

“After reading the report, I determined that I would make recommendations to prioritize the two sites in the Town of Wawarsing as possible county-wide landfill sites,” he said. “For us to do our due diligence, I recommended that we take a pause and not continue any due diligence on the two Plattekill sites.”

Ryder said that although both sites in Plattekill met the criteria for a landfill, they are ultimately too small for such a project. One site is 86 acres, and the other is 115 acres.

“They would not be adequate for a county-wide landfill and also have environmental issues; one has a tributary of the Hudson River running through it, and both have wetlands. While residences are technically outside the threshold to allow for a landfill, about 50 residences are in very close proximity to each of those sites. I determined that it would be unlikely that the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) would permit a landfill at either of those two sites.”

Ryder said UCRRA authorized him to issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) to further investigate the two sites in Wawarsing.

“We are in the process of drafting the RFP, and I imagine it will go out in late August or September,” he said, adding that UCRRA will prioritize studies of soil, transportation issues, and hydrology, as these were not part of the Cornerstone report.

Ryder said Ulster County annually transports about 140,000 tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) and construction and debris (C&D), with 500 round-trip miles to take it away, equaling 1.8 million road miles a year. “It is not sustainable economically or environmentally, so we need to come up with other solutions; it’s the whole reason for looking at a county-wide landfill to handle our own waste.”

Supervisor Dean DePew asked if Ryder received any pushback from the UCRRA board upon his recommendation to remove Plattekill from the list of possible landfill sites. Ryder said he made it clear to UCRRA that there were significant difficulties in getting a permit from the DEC for the sites in Plattekill. DePew responded, “Ideally, I would love to see it in writing, somewhere in black and white, that we are removed from future consideration.”

DePew also mentioned that Ulster County receives waste from neighboring Dutchess County. Ryder said, “Our flow control law does not prohibit outside waste from coming in, so often, the incinerator in Dutchess County is closed for various reasons for multiple days at a time, and the haulers have to move waste somewhere, so we’ll often accept that waste from Dutchess County.” He added that if UCRRA ever sites a county-wide landfill in Ulster County, “We will either restrict it to in-county waste or, if we have regional partners like Sullivan or Greene Counties that helped provide funding and worked with us through the permit process, we might consider it, but we don’t anticipate that necessarily.” He said taking waste from other counties would impact the permitted capacity for Ulster County residents and could result in the landfill’s closure much sooner.

Regarding revenues, Ryder said they charge $115 per ton, whether from Ulster County or not, with $75 going to transport the waste upstate to Seneca Meadows and the disposal costs. Seneca Meadows is a 400-acre landfill located near the Town of Waterloo, N.Y. The remaining $40 covers UCRRA’s operating, equipment, and labor costs.

Ryder said UCRRA has already removed 5,000 tons of food waste from landfills through composting operations.

“We’ve requested a permit modification from the DEC as we are slightly over that, so we’re looking to add capacity up to 7,500 tons of food waste. When County Executive Jen Metzger came into office, her first executive order stated that Ulster County, as a whole, will be diverting 100% of its organic waste by 2030.”

Ryder is working on a $2 million grant “which will help provide resources to increase our capacity but also could potentially increase resources for each of the towns in the county to take on their own compost processing or collection. There will be a menu of different items that we will be able to fund through the grant, whether it’s collecting the compost at the town’s transfer stations and processing it on-site with in-vessel composting capabilities or collecting and bringing it to UCRRA,” he added.