Solid Waste Superintendent Tim Loveday said the county signed a $2.35 million contract with Cedar City-based Perco Rock last week.
The firm will build a new cell, double the size of the old one, at the Three Mile Canyon landfill above Rockport Reservoir. “Cells” are the holes where the garbage goes, and they’re lined to protect soils and groundwater.
The first cell ran out of space last year, sooner than expected, because of a spike in waste during COVID-19. Loveday has been able to switch to the older section of the landfill as a stopgap.
He estimates cell No. 2 will last about a decade.
“It's beside cell one, so it'll let us build up over onto cell one, and we'll gain a few more years of life out of cell one because we put the two cells together,” Loveday explained. “So we're looking at anywhere from 12 to 14 years, depending on what our waste stream actually is in the future.”
There’s a limit to how high landfills can pile garbage. Loveday said he keeps a 3-to-1 slope. Any steeper, trash could avalanche.
The new cell’s $2.35 million price tag is under the $3 million budgeted, according to Loveday. County public works built the access road to the new dump area in-house, which he said saved some money.
“Our long-term design would take us out to five cells, and that would give us, in total, about another 30 years of life, but it really depends on how much we're able to excavate. Even on cell two, I hedged just a little bit on the numbers because we don't know how much dirt we're actually going to be able to dig out.”
He added Perco will break ground this summer and must finish the excavation by Oct. 31.
After that, the county will seek final environmental permitting from the state and could begin filling cell two next spring.
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