Cost of shipping waste from Tinian not finalized yet

No exact figures on shipping waste were given yet to stakeholders as they met for a preliminary update on the military’s feasibility study on transferring Tinian’s waste to the Marpi Landfill in Saipan last Tuesday.

Various agencies met at the office of the Bureau of Environmental and Coastal Quality to discuss the interim solution as Tinian’s open dumpsite that sits at Alter City Group’s property is set to close in a year’s time.

No exact figures on how much the shipping of waste would cost, however, rough estimates of equipment costs and associated operating costs were among the topics discussed.

“We didn’t really get down to the specifics about what those exact costs would be,” U.S. Marine Corps Forces Pacific-Defense Policy Review Initiative operations officer Tim Robert said.

Robert said they still need some data that they weren’t able to collect prior to the meeting.

“They’re still trying to get some information particularly on Alter City Group and the other developers on Tinian. I’m actually very satisfied with the work they’ve been doing gathering all the information and that is going to give us a better idea as to what is the cost, what it’s going to take for us to have our solid waste issues resolved at least for the interim,” Tinian Mayor Joey Patrick San Nicolas said.

“The military doesn’t have a good grasp as far as the amount of construction debris that are going to be…I think there was a good estimate for Alter City but with respect to Titanic Resort, so that’s kind of a missing data on how much waste Tinian is going to be producing,” BECQ-Division of Environmental Quality acting director Ray Masga said.

A final draft of the study is anticipated to be finished in a couple of months and the stakeholders are set to meet again on April.

“We hope to have a final draft type of report with much more detail on cost estimates as we collect some final data from some of the pieces that we didn’t get earlier,” Robert said.

Upgrades on the Marpi Landfill were also part of the discussion as its cell one is about to be maximized and upgrades on cell two is needed such as constructing a burm to prevent leachate from going into the unlined cell three.

BECQ administrator Frank Rabauliman noted that the funding for that project is also needed to be determined.

“Over the next year all of that needs to happen because it is the desire of ACG and Tinian to close the dump in 2017,” he added.

While no plans are final yet, the building of the transfer station on Tinian was already permitted.

“As far as the construction of the transfer station, CIP put in all the design plans and working with Hofschneider Engineering,” Masga said, “It’s a matter of when they will start [building the transfer station]. Whether or not they will finish within this time period, I don’t want to speculate on that.”

Sharing costs
Asked who is going to shoulder the cost of the shipping, “It’s all yet to be determined. I think everybody that’s certainly using the landfill, using the barge shipping, transfer stations, everybody’s going to pay for it, portions of it,” Robert said.

“That’s sort of what was implied in the study today based on all the data that they’ve gathered. They showed that a large percentage of the waste is going to be generated…a large portion of the waste that’s going to be generated in Tinian is going to be from the tourists, the resorts. And about a fourth of it is going to come from the population, the municipality. A very small percentage of the solid waste that’s going to be generated is going to come from the military, according to the military,” Rabauliman said.

He added that the military is targeting to reduce their solid wastes by about 55 percent through recycling and other efforts so that it won’t add to those that are going to be shipped off-island.

According to earlier military impact documents, the Marine Corps Forces Pacific’s live-fire range project requires some 353 tons of off-island waste disposal for a training period of 20 weeks. They project to support an average population of 1,200 per year. For a period of 45 weeks, they project 794 tons of waste for off-island waste disposal.

More studies are being done on the military’s impacts.

Long-term goals

San Nicolas said they are looking at a 10-year timeframe for their interim solution of shipping off waste to operate.

“Of course the long-term goal is to have our own [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act] compliant landfill on Tinian but that’s going to be several years down the road,” San Nicolas said.

“It’s the desire to have landfill [in Tinian] in the future but everybody is recognizing that that is too long into the future to meet the immediate solid waste solution,” Robert said.