As the boat returned to the main channel and continued south, Jette, Page and a third volunteer, Jane Johnson, voiced their concern with the landfill.
“It’s like taking one of the most valuable properties in the universe and putting San Quentin or Alcatraz on it,” said Jette.
The landfill abuts San Antonio Creek. Pipelines snake down its levees carrying leachate — water collected from the compressed waste — away from the garbage and into a series of trenches and a collection pool.
Leachate concerns
Surrounded by water as it is, the dump’s leachate has been one of the main areas of concern from activists. In May, advocacy group the Green Coalition filed a lawsuit contesting county and state decisions to allow Redwood Landfill to expand to 26 million cubic yards of waste.
“We didn’t want them to build on a bad idea,” said Bruce Baum, a spokesperson for the group.
Though state regulations mandate that landfills be lined, usually with a protective layer of plastic, Redwood Landfill is unlined.
However, that doesn’t mean leachate is leaking into the surrounding water, said the landfill’s general manager, Jessica Jones.
Those same regulations also state that a landfill can be lined with a natural liner, she said, and Redwood Landfill sits on a thick layer of bay mud, between 20 and 40 feet thick, which acts as a natural barrier, especially as it is compressed by the increased weight of accumulated trash, she said.
Monitoring
The Green Coalition claims that the landfill’s groundwater is not being adequately monitored. They worry that while regulations mandate three years of independent, third-party monitoring, the landfill will self-monitor and be without accountability to a neutral source after that.
Redwood pays a third-party consultant to monitor its water, a standard industry practice said Jones.
The landfill has not found any evidence of leachate leakage, said Jones.
But Lawrence Rose, an assistant professor of medicine at UCSF who analyzed the monitoring results and testified on behalf of the Green Coalition, came to a different conclusion.
“A variety of toxic CAM metals were found, including mercury, as well as fluorides, nitrates, bromide, nitrite, phosphate, sulfide and ammonia,” he wrote in a document prepared for the state agency.
Levees
The coalition also worries about the stability of Redwood’s levees.
Central to the group’s concern is the landfill’s shape, which Baum likened to a wedding cake. As the landfill collects garbage, it will rise at a slope of 3 feet in and 1 foot up, instead of 4 feet in and 1 foot up, making it steeper and, in the Green Coalition’s estimation, more likely to collapse in a natural disaster.
Jones said that according to a series of complicated tests Redwood underwent as part of an environmental impact report certification, the landfill was found to be structurally stable.
However, Baum and Friends of the Petaluma River member Jonathan Totse both said they’ve seen evidence of erosion at various times during the rainy season.
The future of waste
Baum said the landfill’s expansion would not be in keeping with the principals of “zero waste,” a philosophy that encourages recycling and has found support around California in the last 10 years.
But with composing, recycling and a new “gas-to-energy” plant, which transfers methane and carbon dioxide from the waste into electricity, Jones said they’re on their way.
What’s more, she said the future of waste lies as much with local residents as the dump.
And without a landfill in Marin, Jones said trash would have to be transported out of county, which will put more diesel trucks on the road.
“That’s a real carbon footprint,” she said.
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