Tim Walker
AMR Reporter
The Pocahontas County Solid Waste Authority (SWA) held a special meeting July 16 with Jacob Meck, of Allegheny Disposal LLC, who presented a viable option for the SWA to continue solid waste collection and disposal in the county after the county landfill closes in the fall of 2026.
The county SWA has been criticized by the West Virginia Solid Waste Board because they have not yet developed nor started on a practical plan to operate after the landfill is closed.
SWA members have discussed some options in the past, but most of those have been seen as being impractical or just too expensive to work. The board members all realize how critically important it is to maintain viable garbage disposal in the county; however they have not as yet selected an alternative garbage collection and disposal method, other than they agree that the green box system will need to play a major role in the future. They also recognize that, unfortunately, the costs to the citizens will have to be raised significantly since the relatively inexpensive local landfill option will be gone.
At the special meeting, Meck presented a Power Point program that explained his options of building a transfer station either near his office in Green Bank for the exclusive use of his company or, if the SWA agrees, to build one on the site of the county landfill which would serve both his company’s clients and the public at large through the SWA. He said Allegheny Disposal would pay the set tipping fee to use the transfer station at the landfill, just as any other customer would pay.
Meck discussed why the truck-to-truck style of transfer station would be less expensive and better than the compaction style of transfer station used in Highland County, Virginia, which works well there, but would not work well here because of the amount of trash generated in Pocahontas County compared to Highland County – 7,000 tons per year here verses 1,600 tons per year in Highland County. He said the truck-to-truck style transfer station he envisions would require the purchase of less equipment for start-up, is cleaner, more efficient, faster to operate, and is less expensive to build than either a large generator convenience center, a compac- tion style transfer station, or a tipping floor style transfer station.
Meck said he would build it and haul the trash for the new transfer station at the landfill, while the SWA can staff and operate it once it is operational. He showed the SWA members a video of a truck-to-truck transfer station in the western U.S. and a diagram of what he is proposing to build. He estimates that equipment costs alone of the one he is proposing would be about $575,000, which includes an electric garbage crane used to sort out big items, a Bobcat S570 skid steer, and three reinforced walking floor trailers. The other transfer station styles each require over a million dollars of additional equipment. He said his station is also cleaner and more efficient because the trash is dumped from smaller gar-bage trucks directly into the large tractor trailers which will haul it a landfill in another county, while the other styles require the trash to be moved to a floor or into a compactor then moved again by excavators into the larger trucks.
Mack said the total cost to build and equip his proposed transfer station would be a little less than $1 million dollars, and he could divide that up for the SWA to pay around $25,000 to $27,000 a month for that. Of course, he said, that cost does not include paying the trash hauling or tipping fees at another county’s landfill, which could be considerably more expensive, but would need to be paid as part of any trash disposal system the SWA decides to use. He also envisions the SWA continuing to operate the green box system as part of his proposal, with the monthly cost for using the green boxes needing to be raised, as it would under any system that is put into place.
He said that the green box price structure could be revised perhaps to charge businesses more than residential customers to help keep the cost increase to residents as low as possible. That is the process in some Virginia counties.
Meck believes his proposal will enable the SWA to continue trash disposal at as low a cost as possible, although, once again, he said without a local landfill, those costs will have to be significantly higher with whatever the SWA decides to do.
The SWA members present at the meeting seemed to be more open to Meck’s proposal after hearing it and seeing it, than they were previously. However, they have yet to make a decision on this proposal or on any others.
Meck described the steps needed to move forward with this as well as the urgent need to get started quickly to ensure that community waste disposal continues uninterrupted when the landfill closes in the fall of 2026.
