Ian Goodwin has a long history with the Anchorage landfill. He’s worked there for 25 years.
“I got to bury both my elementary school and my junior high school here, by the way, because they demoed both of them,” Goodwin said. “There was kind of some satisfaction there, if I'm honest.”
Goodwin, the superintendent of operations, led a tour of the landfill on a recent, windy afternoon. He walked and drove on dirt paths that cover up roughly a hundred vertical feet of garbage. That’s about a 10-story building.
Since 1987, Anchorage has been dumping its garbage here, north of town near Fort Richardson. Goodwin said the average daily amount is roughly 1,000 tons, or 2 million pounds.
He provided a visual for what that looks like monthly: “We bring in the BP building every month here, smash it up with that heavy equipment, and we cover it with dirt.”
But the landfill is running out of room, and will fill up in about 50 years. Now, the city of Anchorage is moving forward with a plan to free up space. It wants to burn trash and harness that power to provide electricity for the community. The Assembly recently gave the city the go-ahead to start looking at creating a mass burn waste-to-energy facility. It’d be the first of its kind in Alaska.
It would work sort of like a natural gas plant, said Mark Spafford, deputy municipal manager.
“But instead of burning natural gas, you're burning garbage that would otherwise go into the landfill,” Spafford said. “The garbage burns, it creates steam, it turns a turbine, and then the turbine could be, you know, there for generating power.”
The result is a clean source of electricity that has no shortage of fuel.
Anchorage would be far from the first community to have a waste-to-energy project. Goodwin said cities in Europe and Asia have had them for a while, and there are dozens across the United States.
“Some of these waste-to-energy plants that are over in Europe, like, they claim zero emissions that come out of it,” Goodwin said. “Like, you can't even see… there's a stack there, and there's a little bit of a heat plume, but there's no visible signature whatsoever.”
Anchorage already does use garbage to generate electricity but at a much smaller scale than the project Goodwin and Spafford are working on. The trash at the landfill generates a kind of gas, mostly made up of methane. There’s a small power plant at the landfill that uses that gas to generate electricity that a local utility sells to the nearby military bases.
“Doyon Utilities has the contract with the Department of Defense, meaning they're like ML&P or Chugach Electric for Fort Richardson and Elmendorf,” Goodwin said.
The city started looking into a waste-to-energy facility years ago, Spafford said. Back in 2020, when he worked as Anchorage’s Solid Waste Services manager under Mayor Ethan Berkowitz, the city conducted initial feasibility studies. But the project halted during the pandemic and wasn’t picked up by Mayor Dave Bronson’s administration. Now, under Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, Spafford said there’s a focused effort to get the project moving.
“It's not only a renewable project,” Spafford said. “It extends the life of the landfill. We're helping to take care of future generations. It's taking that solid waste and beneficially utilizing it to help, you know, offset liquid natural gas that we would otherwise have to import.”
Right now, Anchorage relies heavily on natural gas for electricity, powering about 80 percent of the grid, according to Spafford. But, the region is facing a looming shortage of that natural gas, sending Southcentral Alaska leaders scrambling to find solutions.
Spafford said the potential power generated from the 1,000 tons of trash Anchorage produces daily would be significant.
“What that equates to is basically 20 to 30 megawatts of power that you could produce in a mass burn waste to energy process,” Spafford said. “And so that's anywhere, depending on who you ask, like 5-10% of the total base load of the power demands here in Anchorage.”
The landfill has a lifespan of roughly another 50 years, or about 200 more feet of garbage, Goodwin said. Not only would it be very hard to find another 300-acre parcel of land to build a new landfill, but Goodwin also pointed to some homes on a nearby hill that could be impacted.
“If it was 200 feet taller, the guys up on that hill over there, they won't be able to see the city anymore because it'll be blocking the view,” he said.
Spafford said, ideally, a waste-to-energy project would add 100 years to the landfill’s lifespan.
Spafford said the project would likely take a while to complete as the city goes through things like designing and permitting, negotiating power purchase agreements, working with contractors and figuring out how to pay for it.
“What we're estimating is, you know, from today until you know, power starts coming out of the facility, you know, anywhere between six to ten years,” Spafford said.
And at an estimated $500 million price tag, Spafford said public outreach will also be critical to getting the project up and running. If it’s successful, he said, the project could even serve as a means for cities and villages across the state to send in their trash, keeping their communities cleaner and helping keep the lights and heat on in Anchorage.
