Landfill, water plant focus of visit

It may not be the top tourist attraction in Naples, but members of the East Naples Civic Association recently toured the county landfill, offering rave reviews from attendees and several repeat visitors.

"Oh, I come out here every year," said Collier County District 1 Commissioner Donna Fiala. "It's fascinating what they do!" Collier County privatized landfill operations in the mid-1990s, when commissioners approved an agreement with Waste Management Systems of Florida. Since that time, county solid waste officials say technology has improved substantially.

"This is one of the most proactive and progressive landfill programs in the state," said Collier County Solid Waste Management Director Dan Rodriguez. "We have to be, to handle 800,000 tons of waste per year." Rodriquez said the county's goal is to conserve capacity by diverting as much recyclable materials as possible from the landfill. That way, more than 70 percent of the remaining matter will become soil again in about 20 years.

That means hazardous materials such as oil, flammables, car batteries, etc., are shipped out once a month to a specialty disposal company.

Latex paint is sent to Scott Paints where it's recycled into a commercial grade product the county buys back at a discount price.

Most of the vegetative debris is packed off to Ochilanta where it's used to fuel boilers for processing sugar.

Clean concrete materials such as culverts or pilings are used to build artificial reefs.

Computer circuit boards go a different direction to have heavy metal and plastic content recycled. Tires and appliances are also separated from the waste stream and nearly 229,000 tons of construction demolition debris, including wood, metal, drywall and cinderblock are collected separately and trucked to a Lee County processing plant each year.

All of this is done in the quest for improved efficiency and to make the plant a better neighbor, according to Rodriquez.

For many years, the landfill wrangled with off-site odor and was cited four times by the Department of Environmental Protection. To address the problem, the site's gas burning flare system was expanded and drywall was removed from the waste stream, improving conditions considerably.

"The odor was so bad, it made your eyes water," said Fiala. That's because gypsum in the drywall turns into hydrogen sulfide — that rotten egg smell — when it gets wet.

Rodriquez and staff use electronic "sniffers" to monitor airborne odors on site, but count on a number of trained human sniffers to report any off-site smells in surrounding neighborhoods. He said when an occasional obnoxious smell wafts through an area, chances are that it's not from the landfill.

Photo by BRENDA HAWKINS, Collier Citizen

Collier County Solid Waste Director Dan Rodriguez is joined by ENCA president Bob Murray and Jeff Macasevich on top of the 90-foot closed cell known as "The Hill" during a visit to the county landfill.

"Six years ago we almost had to close this site," Rodriquez said of the 250-acre compound just north of Collier Boulevard at I-75. "Now, we've extended its life by at least 20 years at the direction of the board and we've still got lower rates than anywhere else in Florida." Once upon a time, it wasn't unusual to see things like old automobiles and farm equipment in landfills; today, those items are prohibited and the recycling reclamation projects are generating revenue as well.

Standing atop a 90-foot-high closed cell (a huge pile of solid waste now grown over with grass), it's observed there is no odor. It took nearly five years to build the cell, called "The Hill," receiving about 400 dump truck-loads of solid waste each day. According to Rodriquez, part of the secret of keeping the active cells' smell to a discreet minimum is not cutting corners.

At the end of each day, the working phase is covered with six inches of soil. In many landfill operations, that soil covering is removed each day to add more waste, but Waste Management officials leave it in place, a thick, natural, insulating barrier.

A vacuum pump then pulls the by-product of a sophisticated gas extraction process through a pipe network to deliver it to a 78-foot flare, the tallest in the state, where the gas is continually burned off.

The landfill's "leche," or garbage water, is piped to a wastewater treatment plant through a system of lift stations and generates virtually no groundwater contamination.

The group then moved on to the county's nearby South Regional Water Plant, where lunch was served in the facility's spacious command center.

Plant director Paul Mattausch oversees the plant's 900 miles of pipe.

That's longer than the distance from Naples to Chattanooga, but Mattausch says every inch of it used to provide over 25 million gallons of drinking water as well as 14 million gallons of irrigation water every day.

Details of the plant's freshwater limestone and membrane or "nano filtration" softening processes and reverse osmosis systems for treating brackish water were presented in a slide show.

"Bottled water is not what it's cracked up to be," said Mattausch. "It costs about 100 times more to buy than to make, plus you don't know the source, how it's been treated and handled or how long it's been in transit, out in the sun or sitting on a store shelf. But, I know what comes out of your tap." He credits the use of diversified sources and processing treatments for being able to keep up with demand for raw water, which he predicts will exceed 130 million gallons in order to yield 90 million gallons of drinking water a day by the year 2025.

The water department provides potable water service to over 150,000 customers in portions of Collier County from Barefoot Beach to the Isles of Capri, who consumed a total of 9.1 billion gallons of drinking water in 2005.

It's fascinating stuff for people with concerns about our water supply. Southwest Florida Water Management refers to Collier's water plant as a "...model utility" because of its use of alternative water sources such as brackish ground or reclaimed water.

Even the manner in which the wastewater is disposed of earns merit, meeting tough environmental deep-well injection regulations. The dregs left after treatment are pumped into a saltwater aquifer, 3,000 feet deep, were officials say it poses no threat to relatively shallow, fresh water aquifers just a few hundred feet below the ground's surface.

To arrange a tour of the landfill, call 732-2508. For a tour of the water plant, call 732-2558.