Dive Brief:
- The mayor of Miami-Dade County, Florida, is backing away from a proposal to build a new waste-to-energy facility. Instead, her office is advocating for building a new landfill or contracting new landfill capacity.
- County officials have spent nearly two years debating the location of a new incinerator to replace one that burned down in Doral on Feb. 12, 2023. But opposition from local officials near several proposed sites has complicated the debate.
- In a memo to county commissioners, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s office said the county could build a new landfill for $556 million with annual operating costs of $163 million as a long-term solution for disposal capacity. The county board is scheduled to discuss the issue Tuesday.
Dive Insight:
County officials have repeatedly delayed a decision on a location for a new waste-to-energy facility, despite originally planning to build a new one at the site of the now-decommissioned Doral facility.
But Levine Cava’s office decided in a memo sent on Saturday that “the costs of building and maintaining a new [WTE] facility are extremely high, and any site selected would likely generate legal and other challenges that would significantly extend the project timeline.” As a result, it’s now urging the board of county commissioners to abandon plans for a new waste-to-energy facility.
While the debate over a new WTE facility continues, the county has relied on sending more of its waste to landfills to meet its disposal needs. The county department of solid waste management handles about 2.4 million tons of waste annually, according to the mayor’s office. The Doral resource recovery facility handled nearly half of all the waste handled by DSWM prior to its destruction.
In September, the mayor’s office disclosed updated agreements with WM and Waste Connections for the use of their landfills. While WM had provided Miami-Dade County with 1.25 million tons of annual capacity across three Florida landfills in a 2015 agreement, it more than doubled that capacity to 2.7 million tons annually through Sept. 30, 2035, per a recent memo. The county also upped its capacity with Waste Connections to 800,000 tons per year, adding 300,000 tons of annual capacity with the company.
Over the past two years, the county has been piloting rail transfer and using long-haul trucking to transfer its waste to the private landfills. The county also owns and uses the North Dade Landfill and South Dade Landfill, though the two facilities are estimated to have five and four years of capacity left, respectively.
The mayor’s latest missive estimates that building a new WTE facility in Doral would require $1.5 billion in capital costs and $59.3 million in annual operations and maintenance costs. It projects a facility in such a location would be the cheapest and quickest to build of all available sites for waste-to-energy.
But that potential siting choice has garnered strong opposition from local politicians and even the Trump family, which owns a resort and golf course in Doral. At the same time, officials representing neighboring Broward County and the city of Miramar have threatened legal challenges in opposition to another proposed site on a former airport, which was an option that the mayor’s office had previously recommended.
The board is scheduled to hold a special meeting Tuesday dedicated to discussing solid waste issues. Commissioners also said they would make a final decision on a site for a new WTE facility by their regular February meeting.