MAPLE CITY -- A green energy effort is under way at a Leelanau County landfill, a site with a history of pollution problems.
Waste Management is harnessing methane gas to power new technology at its Glen's Landfill in Maple City, a system that reduces wastewater runoff and the number of trucks on the road. The effort will save the company money and reduce the toll on the environment.
A new system to evaporate leachate -- rainwater that runs over garbage -- is powered by about half the landfill's captured gas emissions. The other half is still burned off with flares.
The idea is to reduce leachate by steaming off water and creating a concentrated leachate product that can go back into the landfill to aid garbage decomposition. Leachate formerly was trucked to Frankfort for treatment, so the effort reduces both company costs and the number of heavy trucks on the road, company officials said.
"This internalizes everything," said Jim Palmer, the company's district manager.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality approved the new technology, but did not require it, said Scott Conradson, a senior environmental engineer with the state agency.
The Maple City landfill had two leachate spills in March due to operator error during truck-loading, incidents that brought citations and a nearly $30,000 DEQ fine, Conradson said. The new leachate evaporation system should help prevent future spills, he said.
Palmer agreed.
"That's the whole problem with trucking stuff," he said. "It's an upgrade."
The evaporator cost about $2 million, but will stave off leachate transportation and treatment costs. It went online in late June and already processed 1.6 million gallons of leachate.
The landfill generates about 40,000 gallons of leachate daily and about 950 cubic feet of gas per minute, Palmer said.
Waste Management's new leachate evaporator system is better for the environment, Conradson said, but the effort is spurred by economics and not environmentalism.
"They are in the business to make money and this will save them money," Conradson said. "It's purely financial."
Conradson said the landfill is well operated under Waste Management, though the site caused groundwater contamination under a previous owner.
Now all 13 Lower Michigan landfills owned by Waste Management use landfill gas to generate energy.
