Agenda - Council - 11/25/1980 - Laserfiche WebLink

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- 34- Table 3 displays the results of the MPCA analysis. Ail capital cost estimates are in 1978 dollars. Amortized capi%al costs are based on a seven-percent interest rate and 20-year amortization period. Capital costs in most cases include all contingency, engineering, legal and administrative costs, as well as bond acquisition, site preparation and construction costs. Generally, capital costs for high-technology systems are fairly well documented; operating costs estimates are less reliable. Construction costs have been documented for several facillties, but shakedown-related problems and long construction time lags have hampered the development of representative operating costs information. Furthermore, in many cases, existing operations data does not represent the cost of a system operating at its optimum level. There seems to be an emerging record of systems being over- designed. Anticipated solid waste streams in some cases have not materialized; therefore, operating costs are often higher than expected. 5. CONCLUSIONS Waste reduction is the least expensive of the four major cate- gories of land disposal abatement. However, some of the hidden costs for Doth voluntary and regulatory waste reduction programs are not well documented. Waste separation, and especially source separation, is the next most expensive type of program to develop, in part because of the reliance on the generator's time and labor to separate materials. Given favorable market conditions, curb- side and drop-off recycling strategies can be cost-effective when the entire system is analyzed. Backyard compostin9 is the cheapest alternative to landfilling, althoug~ higher-capital cen- tralized composting may be necessary to have a significant impact on the waste stream. Large-scale resource recovery facilities are currently the most expensive alternatives, but because of econo- mies of scale and viable energy markets, energy recovery facili- ties will compete favorably with landfilling'over the long run. Economic success of any resource recovery facility will depend on accurate analysis of local waste composition and quantity, ade- quate planning for front-end separation (incLuding both source separation and mechanical separation), appropriate system capacity and market conditions. MOSt operations are also designed with some measure of redundancy (less than 100 percent in most cases) built into the processing streams. For most of the systems studied in the 1979 MPCA plan, the unit cost range is broad. This appears to be a result of two factors: 1) the small number of facilities in operation, and 2) the site-specific nature of most solid waste disposal costs and revenues. The existing data base for ~igh-tec~nology resource recovery is generally not yet broad enough to reliably determine solid waste disposal costs. It is important to note that the values represented in Table 3 are the weighted averages of a range of data points.