File Photo of Anguilla Landfill on St. Croix

The V.I. Waste Management Authority has issued a notice to proceed on a solid waste transfer-and-processing station for St. Croix, which will be the linchpin of WMA's short-term solution to trash disposal while closing the island's sole landfill, according to WMA.
Sanitas Partners V.I. won the contract to design, build and operate the facility for $7.5 million dollars, according to WMA. Sanitas Partners V.I. is a partnership between U.S.-based Sanitas Partners and several business partners in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Most of the money for the transfer station comes from $7 million in V.I. Public Finance Authority bond proceeds from 2009 Matching Fund Bonds.
The order to proceed means Sanitas has a contract in place and can move ahead with the designs and the permit process, according to WMA Communications Manager Stella Saunders. WMA will own the facility, but Sanitas will operate it, under a renewable three-year contract, she said.
WMA Executive Director May Adams Cornwall estimated during a past Senate budget hearing that the Anguilla Landfill has been in operation since around 1966 or 1967.
The Federal Aviation Administration first ordered the landfill closed in 1996 because scavenging birds and smoke from burning debris were a potential hazard to planes. Once it stops accepting trash, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires capping of the landfill, monitoring for environmental contamination, testing for levels of methane and other gases produced by buried garbage, and installation of a gas-collection system. A series of FAA deadlines have come and gone over the intervening years as the WMA and the territory have struggled to find cost-effective and environmentally sound alternatives to solid waste disposal.
“As long as we were showing constant movement toward having a closure plan in place, that was acceptable to the EPA and FAA,” Saunders said Tuesday. As of 2009, a plan was in place for Alpine Energy Group to build trash-burning power plants on St. Thomas and St. Croix. But public – and legislative – opposition to the plan's reliance on petroleum coke as a supplementary fuel forced the WMA, the V.I. Water and Power Authority and Alpine back to the drawing board to work up a smaller project without pet coke.
Alpine is expected to submit a new Coastal Zone Management permit application for the smaller trash-burning plant within the next few weeks, according to Saunders and Cornwall. Meanwhile, the transfer-and-processing station must be in place both to supply the power plant and to begin closing the landfill.
Once the transfer station is up and running, trash will be diverted from the landfill to the transfer station, where it will be shredded, baled, and wrapped. The bales will be used to help get the proper final elevation and slope of the landfill in accordance with the WMA's landfill closure plan. The closure plan was esigned by WMA's consultants, the Maguire Group. The EPA has informally given verbal approval of the closure plan, and WMA expects formal notice of approval shortly, Cornwall said.
Under the plan, Anguilla will close in roughly three years, at which point the transfer station will continue to operate, separating recyclable scrap metal, white goods, aluminum cans, and construction and demolition debris from the debris stream before baling and wrapping the rest.
Once the landfill closes, the plan is to burn the trash in a waste-to-energy plant, but should that be delayed or forestalled, the baled trash will be shipped off-island, Cornwall said.