Town addresses transfer station questions

This last week some construction work was done on Hospital Hill for the new transfer station approach.

Noticing this work, some local residents expressed concern about the details of the new transfer station.

The Independent Record staff presented these concerns to Fred Crosby, assistant to the Mayor, from Thermopolis Town Hall. Crosby explained that the transfer station is not an open pit landfill in its design, it will be a large building. This covered building will have several ports to it where trash trucks from the town’s collection will come and dump the trash inside the building.

This is called tipping because the trash trucks raise up and “tip” the trash into a shipping container below. A semi-truck is then used to take that sealed shipping container to another location. Therefore, there will be no open air depositor for the trash.

The building will be located on land owned by the town near the end of the old airport runway and away from any major residence. Because it is a building with several doorways, it probably would not be considered an eyesore and not a distraction from drivers on the highway.

Crosby noted some history of this situation. The Department of Environmental Quality, DEQ. and the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, changed how trash management works in Wyoming and limited the number of landfills allowed. This caused many landfills in the state to eventually close, including Thermopolis’s.

The town’s landfill expired in July 2020 but is being extended until the transfer station is completed. The town’s landfill still has plenty of room for use, 20 acres in fact.

However, current regulations require the landfill to be divided in cells and layered with a very expensive engineered containment system. The cost of each layer is $1 million per acre in 2008. All of these regulations and costs made it too expensive to continue to use the landfill, thus a transfer station was the next option.

Also, the town considered many options for the location of the transfer station, but all but one would require the purchase of private land. That process was proved too cumbersome to accomplish so the location at the of the old runway was used.

The town did swap some land with the Rush family so that an access road would be doable to the transfer station location.