Increasing landfill fees and restrictions

The cost of tipping fees within the waste and recycling industry is steadily increasing, according to the Environmental Research & Education Foundation’s (EREF) recent landfill tipping fee report. As J.D. Ambati, founder and chief executive officer of EverestLabs explained, the report investigated the average municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill tipping fee and how it varies across the U.S.; whether tipping fees are increasing or decreasing over time; and how tipping fees are correlated to other MSW management practices.

“The findings of the 2022 report show that the average tipping fees for munici- pal solid waste landfills in the U.S. have spiked 11 percent from 2021 to 2022. In fact, all regions in the U.S. experienced price increases in 2022,” said Ambati, who also pointed out that changes in the rates of tipping fees are based on the landfill’s operational expenditures and revenue.

“The EREF explains specific factors that could contribute to changes in tip fees. They include the Consumer Price Index (CPI), motor vehicle repair, vehicle manufacturing and cost of labor,” Ambati said. “They also explored the relationship between these four indicators and tipping fees and identified the strongest relationship between increased tipping fees and wages. Labor is one of the major expenses for waste management services and increasing tipping fees is one way that landfills make up for rising labor costs.”

In addition to rising labor, the volume of waste generation has been steadily increasing while the increase of landfill space has not. “In fact, the Solid Waste Environmental Excellence Protocol reports that the U.S. could run out of landfill capacity in 18 years,” Ambati said. “At the same time, MSW generation is expected to increase by 50 percent by 2050. This macro trend combined with regulatory pressures on the waste industry is also driving higher costs across the industry.”

Anthony “AJ” Diienno, vice president of recycled materials at Waste Harmonics, a national technology-enabled managed waste service provider, has over 10 years of experience in the waste and recycling industry and works with customers to develop comprehensive waste and recycling programs that best fit their needs to improve green initiatives and streamline costs.

According to Diienno, per a recent article published by Wastedive.com, “Ton-weighted average tipping fees for U.S. municipal solid waste landfills increased 11 percent from 2021 to 2022.”

“These increases are causing customers to do a deeper dive into their waste and recycling programs and look for ways to decrease their overall waste spend,” Diienno said. “Industry experts continue to work with their customers on finding ways and helping establish best practices to reduce, reuse and recycle, which will help them with landfill diversion and these rising costs.”

Michael McCamley at New West Gypsum Recycling also sees tipping fees increasing as landfill capacity is decreasing and obtaining new permits for land- fills is getting harder. “In the case of gypsum waste, some landfill operators have to install equipment to manage hydrogen sulfide gases,”McCamley said. “For gypsum recycling it brings more of a competitive advantage to recyclers because the cost of disposal becomes closer to the cost of recycling.”

So how does the increase in tipping fees affect the waste and recycling industry? Ambati said that the growth in tipping fees is often a catalyst for change for other businesses in the waste industry. For example, in a material recovery facility (MRF), the non-recyclable materials are sorted out from the recyclables and are sent to landfills for disposal.

“When MRFs drop off this material at a landfill, they have to pay a tipping fee based on the weight of the material they are dumping,” Ambati said. As a result, when tipping fees increase, recycling facilities will find other ways to increase material recovery so they pay less when sending material to a landfill. This will result in increased recovery of recyclable materials, which has both economic and environmental benefits.”

As MRFs recover more recyclables to avoid tipping fees, Ambati said they are more willing to sell recyclable commodities at lower prices, which will impact the recyclable commodity market. “We need robust programs that create demand for recyclables by enforcing packaging manufacturers to use more post-consumer recycled content in order to make recycling more economical,” Ambati said. “Such policies are part of extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs that have been signed into law in many states.”

In addition, the increase in tipping fees often discourages other MSW companies, including recycling companies, from disposing large amounts of material at a landfill and instead finding more cost effective ways to handle their waste.

According to Ambati, this could include adopting new technologies to facilitate waste reduction by increasing sorting and the recovery of valuable materials. The implementation of AI and robotics at MRFs is one avenue that can help recycling facilities increase material recovery and decrease costs.

“EverestLabs’ RecycleOS is an enterprise AI & robotics platform that can recover two to three times more material than the current technology in place, decreasing the amount of recyclables being sent to landfill,” Ambati said. “In fact, with our platform, Everest Labs customers are seeing 40 to 70 percent savings in landfilling costs.”

As tipping expenses increase, municipalities must evaluate how and how often to pay for these increased expenses. As director of public works for the City of Lakewood, California, Lisa Ann Rapp said that process will result in increased costs to residents of communities in the form of higher service fees.

“Alternatively, some communities reduce or alter services in other areas to address such rising costs,” said Rapp, who also serves as a board member from the solid waste management committee for the American Public Works Association. “Each community evaluates and makes decisions based upon what is in the best interest of their residents.”

Another area cities must monitor is the practice of illegal dumping. According to Rapp, as tipping fees increase it is import- ant to ensure companies do not choose to unlawfully dump material in the community to avoid paying those fees. “A further complication is that prices change for tipping fees and costs continue to increase for contracted services, or even municipal services, or public agencies that are dependent on user fees,” Rapp said. “Those usually are only able to implement user fee rate increases once per year, putting them in danger of running their budgets in the red.”

With landfill capacity decreasing and operational costs increasing, Ambati said there is no end in sight for increasing tipping fees. Therefore, it is going to be important for the rest of the waste industry to find new ways to innovate and adapt to these increasing fees.

“Improving the recovery of valuable materials in other sectors of the waste industry, including organics and recycling, is a key way to avoid large tipping fee costs,” Ambati said. “Adopting new technologies, like AI and robotics for American Recycler

sorting facilities, can help achieve higher recovery rates and help facilities save money.”

In addition to increased tipping fees, the waste and recycling industry is also facing an increase in construction and demolition (C&D) materials no longer being accepted at landfills. Because of this, companies are finding alternative ways of dealing with the debris.

“Babcock & Wilcox has supplied waste-to-energy combustion technologies to many customers that use some types of unrecyclable construction and demolition waste as fuel, including wood, unrecyclable plastics and other petroleum-based materials,” said Brandy Johnson, chief strategy and technology officer at Babcock & Wilcox. “Turning this waste into fuel to make power can be part of the solution to high tipping fees or landfill prohibitions on some types of construction waste, while being fully complementary to community recycling programs. This can also be done in an environmentally sound way, as modern waste-to-energy plants are equipped with state-of-the-art emissions control technologies.”

Diienno noted that the number of landfills around the U.S. that will except C&D waste also continues to decrease. “For example, there use to be close to a dozen landfills located in the Mid-Atlantic region you could send C&D waste to that have now been reduced to only a handful – less than five that are able to accept C&D waste,” Diienno said. How to navigate the challenges with C&D waste starts with helping the customer put together a program which starts early in the planning/procurement process of sourcing sustainable material to ensure landfill diversion. “The second part is proper planning of the right amount of material to try and minimize waste generated from projects. Lastly, proper planning for equipment is needed and training to ensure material separation of the different waste streams being generated. This helps ensure end markets for recycling versus having material go to the landfill,” Diienno said.

Of course, the level of C&D debris not being accepted at landfills depends on the landfill location. As McCamley explained, nearly all C&D waste can be recycled when handled and treated in the right way. “Some areas have both MSW and C&D landfills. When one landfill closes, waste is sent to another landfill,” McCamley commented. “For example, a C&D landfill in North Carolina closed and now C&D waste is being sent to a MSW landfill. Recycling has a higher cost over landfilling, but with increasing landfill rates, the gap is closing with an increase in recycling rates. As recyclers, we believe only non-recyclable waste should end up in the landfill.”