North Carolina city to offer inert landfill tours

The city of Greensboro, North Carolina, has scheduled public tours the first week of July for an inert materials landfill it operates.

Four tours have been scheduled from July 2-8 for residents who want to find out more about the White Street Landfill. That facility accepts only construction and demolition (C&D) materials and yard waste generated within Greensboro and surrounding Guilford County, according to the Greensboro Department of Solid Waste and Recycling.

The informational tours are being offered in part because of a city plan to move contaminated soils from a Greensboro park cleanup project to the inert landfill. It is the second round of such tours following an earlier set this May.

The cleanup project is at Bingham Park, which was opened as a park in the 1970s and is situated on land that once housed a preregulatory landfill and then an incinerator that operated from 1922 to 1955.

Results of an investigation conducted earlier this decade by the city and the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) found traces of metals, including lead, determined to be not mobile and that seemed to be fixed (attached/bonded) to the soil.

The park was fully closed earlier this year as the city prepares to remove all contaminated soil.

"A critical part of the Bingham Park cleanup process will be identifying a landfill that will accept the contaminated soil," the Greensboro Department of Parks and Recreation says. "To investigate the options, the city's Office of Sustainability and Resilience researched every landfill within 75 miles of Bingham Park.”

That research determined that, according to Greensboro officials, White Street Landfill offers guaranteed availability, meets federal and state health and environmental rules, would allow for the quickest cleanup, would provide a $10 million cost savings over the next available cleanup option and would help permanently close the landfill an estimated eight years earlier.