Working on
Waste Options

Solid Waste Services projects aim to extend life of Anchorage landfill

By Jamey Bradbury

nchorage is running out of space for its trash. The city’s existing central transfer station, or CTS, started life as a garbage shredder and was never meant to serve as a waste transfer station. Meanwhile, the municipality’s 275-acre regional landfill is steadily filling—and once it does, there’s no place for a new landfill site.

That’s why Anchorage Solid Waste Services, or SWS, is working on several projects that will extend the life of the regional landfill by twenty years or more and provide recycling and waste diversion options that will save Anchorage residents money in the long-term.

“It behooves us to take care of the landfill we have because once it’s gone, solid waste costs will increase,” says Mark Spafford, SWS general manager.

To that end, SWS has several projects in the works. Cruz Construction completed SWS’s newest landfill cell last year, and Davis Constructors is managing the development of a new CTS. At the same time, Cornerstone General Contractors is rebuilding an SWS facility damaged in the 2018 earthquake.

Every year, more than 300,000 tons of trash move through Anchorage’s landfill, nearly 90 percent of that coming from CTS.

“Because of how much garbage is accumulated, every four or five years we have to do a landfill cell expansion,” explains Michael Rhodes, SWS manager of engineering and planning. SWS is currently permitted a total of twelve cells.

Last year, Cruz Construction completed cell 9a—a new, lined landfill cell—by excavating material from a 14.5 acre site and lining the bottom and sides of the cell with high-density polyethelene plastic. Cruz also built a leachate collection system for the cell.

The material removed from cell 9a will be used to cover garbage in existing cells, since trash dumped at the landfill must be covered with six inches of dirt to prevent the elements or animals from disrupting the refuse.

The remaining two cells at the landfill will be excavated, lined, and ready for use by 2025, says Rhodes.

At the Anchorage Regional Landfill, Cornerstone General Contractors has completed demolition of a warm storage facility and vehicle maintenance facility that was damaged in the 2018 earthquake. Cornerstone will also demolish the SWS administration building, which experienced similar damage.

Cornerstone is replacing the previous concrete masonry unit, or CMU, block administration building with a pre-engineered metal building that will be safer in future seismic events.

“This is my first project with SWS,” says Cornerstone Project Manager Anthony Chen, “and they’ve been awesome to work with. This has been a very fulfilling project.”

In addition to working with FEMA to procure funding for the project, Rhodes says the biggest challenge of rebuilding the earthquake-damaged facilities has been diminished material supplies due to COVID-19.

“We had to extend that project by at least a couple months because of the bottleneck of materials,” Rhodes says, adding that the project should be complete by spring or summer 2022.

While COVID-19 slightly delayed some projects, the CTS project has stayed on schedule—and even helped the community through the pandemic.

“We put 325 Alaskan families to work during the pandemic,” Spafford says, pointing out that the CTS will continue to provide long-term community benefits. Though solid waste service fees will rise over the next five years, even with this increase Anchorage will still have some of the lowest trash disposal fees in the state and the region.

The new $120 million CTS should be finished in late 2022 or early 2023 and is a design-build project developed by California-based Tetra Tech, Inc. Davis Constructors and Engineers is the project’s construction manager self-performing concrete, foundation, drywall, and exterior. Davis is also providing design assistance and construction for five other buildings on the 27-acre site.

In August, Davis poured 28,000 cubic yards of concrete, including a wear-resistant and chemical-resistant tipping facility floor. The tipping floor includes a suspended slab and a 16-by-28-foot wide tunnel that will allow two tractor-trailers to pull in, side by side, for filling.

The CTS structure itself is another pre-engineered building. The floors will be equipped with an ice prevention system; high-speed fabric doors will help maintain heat preservation inside the building. The building will experience up to ten air changes per hour, which should prevent the smell of trash from affecting the facility’s neighbors.

In addition to odor, the greatest problem at the former transfer station was traffic: “Up to 1,000 Anchorage residents flock to the station on weekends, so we designed the residential access to snake around the site, and we included three lanes, allowing cars to queue off the public roadway,” says Jed Shandy, Davis’ project manager.

Rather than tear down the former transfer facility, SWS is converting it to a recycling center. The proximity of the two facilities will mean municipal residents can drop off their recyclables and refuse in one location. The additional space means SWS can divert even more recyclable material and organics than it currently does. “We’ll be able to add twenty years of life to the landfill just from that,” Spafford says.

The CTS will also offer an opportunity to educate the public on the extensive infrastructure that goes into recycling and processing waste: The building will include an “engineering on display” area with views into the tipping floor.

“We want an inviting area for people to learn about the history of solid waste and recycling in Anchorage,” says Spafford, “to see our equipment in action, and to be a tool to help people learn to reduce, reuse, and recycle—because our landfill is a finite quantity.”