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Dillingham fine-tuning incinerator operations

Molly Dischner/KDLG

Dillingham's new incinerator has been burning all summer, but the city says it's still making adjustments.

 

Forced by the state to do something other than open burn out at the landfill, and limited by space and the cost of fill dirt when it came to burying trash, the City of Dillingham bought a new incinerator with a grant from the Legislature last year. But as the incinerator nears the six-month mark, the city is learning that burning trash isn't quite as straightforward as hoped. KDLG's Molly Dischner reports.

 

Bryan Hoffmann operates the incinerator five days a week, and makes it sound pretty simple.

"We take the garbage, anywhere between 1,500 to 2,200 pounds of waste goes into the buckets," he said one morning, as the incinerator burned. "We load it into the hopper. It burns. It just comes out at the end, a whole bunch of ash."

The resulting ash gets buried — typically there is about one or two totes of it per day to bury, Hoffman said. That takes up a lot less space than burying all the garbage.

But the city is discovering that it is a little more challenging than that. Dillingham fired up its incinerator to burn the city's trash in May. It was estimated to use 60-70 gallons of fuel each time it fired up when the city chose the model it purchased. But so far, that estimate hasn't panned out.

Credit Molly Dischner/KDLG
Bryan Hoffman loads trash into Dillingham's incinerator on Oct. 5, 2015.

City Manager Rose Loera said there are several variables at play in how much fuel is used — how many times the incinerator starts and stops, what is burning, how wet the garbage is. This summer, the operators had to adjust the burn cycles, the burners, and the garbage going in. With one start up a day, it was using 120 to 150 gallons of fuel, she said. Burning for fewer hours, as it is now, is less efficient.

In September, the city estimated it would take about 35,000 gallons of diesel in a year. In October, it was unclear if that was still going to be the case.

The city has also been producing more garbage than expected. The estimates called for burning on a more limited schedule as of Sept. 15, but by early October, it was running five days per week. Loera said public works was still adjusting staffing patterns to get enough burn time to go through all of the city's garbage.

But one problem is something residents can actually solve, Hoffman said. The city initially told people to sort glass out, and focused on that message. But metal is bad for the machine too. It clogs up the machine, and gets stuck coming out at the end if it's too large for the conveyor belt.

"The worst is the metal," Hoffmann said. "And concrete. That kind of stuff doesn't burn. It comes out in the end and then it gets stuck in the conveyor belt."

Previously, the city burned its trash in open containers, which was cheap, but not necessarily pleasant for homes in the area. Then the state Department of Environmental Conservation said it would not grant the city a permit to do so as of June 1, 2014, so the city investigated other options, including burying trash. That gets expensive, because the city has to buy dirt to cover trash every day, Loera said. It would also require digging new cells at the landfill eventually. And it isn't a perfect solution environmentally — there were concerns about compacted trash leeching metal into the water table, and animals could peck through the top layer.

City Council member Paul Liedberg said the DEC was pushing the city toward purchasing an incinerator.

"To some degree they were looking for an alternative for rural areas," he said. "To some degree, we're a test case. They were looking at this as an opportunity to deal with waste in the villages that might be better than how many communities do it."

Liedberg and others visited Egegik, which has had an incinerator for years, and Pennsylvania, where an incinerator manufacturer is used. Ultimately, Loera said they made a choice based in part on a request for proposals that asked for a model that would minimize fuel consumption.

The model chosen was purchased with a grant from the state Legislature.

The city also purchased a compactor, and buried trash for almost a year while it waited to get the incinerator fired up. Some trash is still buried. Loera said public works essentially has to decide how to best get rid of the city's trash and try to stay within its budget on a week by week basis, which can mean burying some.

Loera said the landfill's budget this year was estimated at about $370,000, based on the city's best guess of how much trash there would be and how much fuel would be used. She isn't sure what the final cost will come in at - fuel use is higher than expected, but diesel has been cheaper.

"We'll do the best we can, try to keep it within that budget area, but that's really an unknown," Loera said. "It's something we have to do."

Despite the challenges, city officials, including Liedberg, said it could still turn out to be the right choice.

"There was a lot of variables early on, and there still are variables on how we operate the incinerator," Liedberg said in early October. "I think we probably need to get through a year here on whether we made the right call on whether this was the best alternative or not, or the best way to go.

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