Starkville’s landfill, located near the intersection of Rockhill and Butler roads, has been out of use since about 2018. The city is working toward a remediation to formally close the landfill, but there’s more to the process than what meets the eye. What has been done so far? What is there left to do? How long might that process take?
When and why is the landfill being closed?
The roughly 15-acre landfill, which is overseen by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, first ceased operations in 2016 after the city self-reported that garbage had begun to extend past the landfill’s established boundaries. After receiving a new operating permit by the MDEQ, the landfill resumed operations in March 2017.
But after Mayor Lynn Spruill was sworn into office later that year, she said the city continued to have issues at the landfill.
“Fires … that we had to address,” Spruill said. “As we got a little deeper into it, we closed it. … We had gone over the bounds of a cell that we were in the process of using at that time.”
The landfill ceased operations for good in 2018, Spruill said. Since then, the city has used the Golden Triangle Regional Landfill on Old West Point Road to hold its garbage.
What has been done so far?
Shortly into Spruill’s first term, the city purchased the land to the north and east of the landfill that had been encroached upon, and Spruill consulted with Calvin Ware, former director of sanitation and environmental sciences for MDEQ, and John Cunningham, a senior project manager with Neel-Schaffer who specializes in environmental permitting and compliance, to see what needed to be done to close the landfill.
Cunningham provided the city an estimate of what the remediation and closure would cost, which he said was based on different bid projects of similar natures.
That estimate was in the “neighborhood” of about $1 million, Spruill said.
In 2019, the city raised sanitation fees by $1.50 for residential pick-up and $5 for commercial pick-up. Those funds were earmarked for the landfill remediation and placed in an escrow account, Ward 2 Alderwoman and budget chair Sandra Sistrunk said.
Now, the city has amassed about $1.1 million in that account, which Spruill said is close to what is needed to fund the remediation and closure.
What must be done next?
The city submitted a closure plan for MDEQ’s approval in 2019, Cunningham said. Once the closure plan is approved, the city will advertise for construction bids and select a contractor to complete the work.
The remediation process will involve relocating all waste back into the landfill’s boundaries, leveling out slopes of waste and compacting it all down.
Once that is completed, the landfill will be closed through the process of “capping,” which involves placing a two-feet layer of permeable soil atop the waste, covering it with topsoil and establishing a vegetative layer of grasses to prevent erosion, Cunningham said.
After the landfill is properly capped, the area will have to be monitored for several years to ensure the integrity of the capping.
The physical work to remediate and close the landfill should take about six months, Cunningham said. However, the city is still awaiting MDEQ’s approval of their closure plan.
“It’s been several years, so I’m guessing that (MDEQ is) busy doing things that they think are … more a higher priority than our landfill,” Spruill said. “So I don’t have any idea, but for the time being, it is closed, and it is not getting any further out of compliance, so we are in a holding pattern.”
Will the landfill be redeveloped?
Cunningham said there are limits to what can be developed on the site after the landfill is closed, which is determined case-by-case by MDEQ.
Placing a building on top of the site, for example, would not be a “wise” investment.
“You’ve got all kinds of things in that trash,” Cunningham said. “You compact it the best you can, but there’s still room for that rubbish to settle over time. Part of maintaining the landfill is … you’ve got to go back in there and correct it if … you lose the integrity of that layer of soil. You wouldn’t want to put a building on top of that. … Your foundation could fail.”
Some former landfills have been redeveloped as sites to fly drones or as areas with walking trails. Cunningham also said there is some interest in building solar farms on these sites.
As of now, Spruill said the city has no plans to redevelop the site.
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