Only One Company Wants To Deal With Nantucket's Trash

When it comes to dealing with the island's trash, the town has been in a long-term relationship with Waste Options Nantucket LLC, the company that has operated the Madaket Road landfill for the past three decades.

But that contract is coming to an end this November, and the town had issued a request for proposals last year seeking competitive bids from companies willing to take on the immense challenge of handling solid waste 30 miles out to sea.

As it turns out, there was only one company that responded: Waste Options Nantucket. On Wednesday, the Select Board will announce that the town has selected Waste Options Nantucket as its contractor for a new waste services agreement to operate the town's solid waste disposal facility, commonly known as the dump.

"They were only respondent to the RFP - it is what it is," said Select Board chair Brooke Mohr, a member of the town's Solid Waste Planning Work Group. "The difference here is we’re negotiating from scratch. The strategy was to acquire and own the assets (at the landfill) and have more town control over how the facility is operated, setting pricing, and knowing pricing. The original contract was pretty muddled and we’ve been living with it for a long time."

At last year's Annual Town Meeting, voters endorsed Article 19, which authorized the town to spend up to $4.4 million from certified free cash to purchase the existing composting facility and the construction and demolition debris transfer station from Waste Options Nantucket at the end of the current operating agreement, which expires on Nov. 30, 2025.

While the town had actively explored the possibility of gasification and pyrolysis as potential options for Nantucket's solid waste - and even sent some of the island's plastic waste to two facilities for pilot studies to produce electricity or liquid fuels from fuel pellets - the new agreement with Waste Options will keep the status quo in terms of how the island's waste is handled, Mohr said. At least for now.

Currently, only 10 percent of the trash that comes into the municipal landfill off Madaket Road ends up getting buried in the landfill. The vast majority is sorted and transported off-island for final disposal, including recyclables, construction and demolition debris, scrap metal, mattresses, tires, old appliances, and unusable textiles.

"The theory is that we’re not going to make any significant changes to how we’re doing things now, but we'll be leaving room in the contract to change if we have better ways to do things," Mohr said. "We’re going to leave room to make changes if new technology comes along or if adaptation has to happen or is forced to happen to some extent based on state regulations. I don’t want to name anything, but I know the intention is if there’s a better way to do this that’s more efficient and cost-effective, that's what we'll be able to do."

The Nantucket landfill currently includes three processing facilities: the materials recovery facility (MRF); the composter (for processing organics and other household trash); and the transfer station, otherwise known as the construction and demolition (C&D) building. There are other areas of the landfill used for compost/soil product management, holding areas for hard-to-manage wastes, and a mixed excavation waste management area.

The contract negotiations, Mohr said, are ongoing. While the town had hoped to solicit competitive proposals through the RFP process, she emphasized that the work group was not surprised Waste Options Nantucket was the only company interested.

"It’s so complicated, it wasn’t unexpected," Mohr said. "We crafted the RFP in the hope we would get more respondents, but on some level it’s unsurprising...We have it scheduled for March 12 for a more substantial update from the solid waste team on where we’re at and what the differences will be and what will be different this time around, which is more control and more transparency."