Last Thursday, representatives from the Village of Wellington, including Projects Manager Mike O’Dell, gathered with local livestock waste haulers for their third annual meeting to discuss hauling issues in relation to Wellington and the surrounding areas.
The meetings began when O’Dell started with the village. The goal was to curtail problems with illegal dumping.
“It was pretty obvious that Wellington, in my opinion, was getting a black eye because of all of the illegal dumping that was going on. Regularly, we were making the newspaper and the TV news,” he said. “It wasn’t good for Wellington, it wasn’t good for the equestrian industry as a whole, and it certainly wasn’t good for our neighbors.”
O’Dell told the Town-Crier that he orchestrated the first meeting with haulers to open the lines of communication with these working in the area to educate them about the negative environmental impacts that occur with illegal dumping. That original meeting took place in 2013.
“It was something less than cordial,” O’Dell recalled. “We’re out there doing the best we can, and we don’t have a lot of places to get rid of the material. Organized disposal sites that were properly permitted were few and far between.”
Currently, there are five Florida Department of Environmental Protection-approved disposal locations: Atlas Peat & Soil, the Solid Waste Authority, Florida Crystals, McGill-Brighton and U.S. Sugar Corp.
“We started to understand from the haulers’ perspective the fact that they’re working 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week all through season, that they’re trying to keep up with it… [and] moving it outside Wellington, but the impacts outside of Wellington are also negative to our overall region,” O’Dell said.
At the time, he said, Loxahatchee Groves was having issues because some haulers were bringing waste into that community illegally. Since then, ordinances have been enacted to stop that.
“What came out of that was U.S. Sugar stepping up and opening up some of their fields,” O’Dell said. “It was a means of disposal.”
They’ve done some testing, O’Dell said, and one of the unknowns is how long it will take to compost the waste mixed in with the soil. Typically, he explained, depending on moisture content and heat, it is a 30-day to 60-day process. However, those numbers have yet to be determined.
The theory behind using the livestock manure is that less fertilizer would be needed, since the soil will be enriched, and less water will be needed. “I think that the jury is still out on that,” O’Dell said.
Since that first year, hauling to U.S. Sugar has become organized; haulers are no longer coming at all hours. The waste is put onto a field, laser-leveled, then left to bake under the sun for a few weeks. Then the field is planted.
One of the best outcomes from the meetings, O’Dell said, is that illegal dumping has been dramatically reduced, and haulers are making their businesses more sophisticated. For a few years, the haulers have been publishing rates on their web sites and standardizing fees. Loosely, they’ve begun organizing.
“We have started to see that. We started to see that the haulers are realizing that there is a true cost to this,” O’Dell said.
The difference of sending livestock waste to U.S. Sugar — they take approximately 80 percent of the waste and, by not charging tipping fees, are effectively subsidizing the industry — is advantageous to the haulers, but U.S. Sugar has yet to determine if this is a viable use of the product over the long term, O’Dell explained.
During the meeting, it was discussed that the most important part of the waste is the shavings. O’Dell explained that, at Wellington’s large horse shows, stalls are completely cleared out weekly as horses come in and out. It isn’t the same as having a horse consistently in a stall. The stalls are disinfected and new shavings are put down. The shaving use is exponentially higher through this process than through normal stall mucking.
“There’s a tremendous amount of shavings that leaves this particular area, and that’s what makes it valuable, or we think makes it valuable, for a soil amendment,” O’Dell said.
On average, he said, horses produce 50 pounds of waste a day, and 20 percent of that is thought to be shavings. However, the increase in shaving portion during the season is not consistent throughout the year — it ends when the season ends.
“Best management practices have had an impact on cleaning the water,” O’Dell said. “Best management practices have been employed throughout the nation. I’ve been studying this now for more than four years, and… anywhere you go in the nation where there are high populations of some form of animal and a waste production stream that comes from that, they’re looking to utilize it.”
In areas where the animal population is consistent, many companies have found ways to recycle the waste as fertilizer, a source of energy and all kinds of other uses. The idea isn’t new, he stressed. “The challenge here is we have so much in such a short period of time,” he said.
In the future, O’Dell would like to standardize how end-users are charged. He explained that some firms charge by weight and others by load. Haulers look at a manure bin and determine a price for the owner to empty it. Sometimes they wind up charging the same when the bin is full and fills one truckload as when it is overflowing and fills two — which costs the hauler more.
O’Dell suggested that paying by weight might be a more effective way to standardize the system.
For the haulers, having a consistent location to dispose of waste would be advantageous. They could calculate their time, how much fuel it takes to get there, the truck maintenance necessary, and any other fees associated with moving waste, and really determine their cost of doing business.
The haulers are in favor of figuring those things out, but the big wildcard is a permanent location to put it.
Through its meetings, the village learned that for the haulers, being within a 10-minute radius of Wellington would be ideal. The idea of a local collection facility has been discussed, but there’s no industrially zoned land nearby.
“I think the conversation, amongst Wellington to the haulers, and even to the haulers themselves… has been tremendous,” O’Dell said.
He was quick to thank U.S. Sugar for their help with the current solution, even if it’s not a permanent one.
“Without them, we would be fighting this problem even more,” O’Dell said. “They’ve come to the rescue, so to speak, of the industry. But… is this a viable option for the long term? My concern is the regulations. My concern is water quality requirements.”
While the jury is still out on how viable accepting waste is for U.S. Sugar, there are still many other factors to consider.
Overall, the removal and disposal of waste affects the environment. “The Everglades are in our back yard,” O’Dell said. “It’s something that we should treasure.”
Approved haulers for the 2014-15 fiscal year are: Trucking by Duques, Wellington Agricultural Services, Salmana Enterprises, Palmetto Mills, Southern Waste Systems, Garcia Brothers, Little Palm Landscaping Removal Horse Manure, T.A. Steinman and J.H. Hauling & Services.
The approved list of haulers and disposal sites for 2015-16 will be posted in October on the village’s web site.
