Nantucket, Massachusetts, renews contract with Waste Options

The Nantucket Select Board voted unanimously to accept a bid from Waste Options Nantucket LLC, Nantucket, Massachusetts, to continue running operations at the town’s municipal landfill, the Inquirer and Mirror reports.

The company, which has managed the town’s Madaket Road landfill for the last 30 years, was the only one to submit a formal bid during the town’s open bidding process for the next 25-year contract.

While the board agreed to the general scope of the Waste Options proposal, which was not disclosed at the Jan. 29 meeting, the town manager and other members of the town’s solid waste evaluation committee will negotiate the details of the agreement in the coming months.

RELATED: Zero Waste Massachusetts issues report on diversion tactics

“I think this new agreement will add transparency,” George Aronson, a solid waste consultant and member of the solid waste evaluation committee, tells the Inquirer and Mirror. “It’s an agreement where the service fee matches the scope of services so that the town knows what it’s paying for and there’s a baseline going forward.”

Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed. The town is expecting to release the full contract this fall after the two sides come to terms, and have scheduled two public hearings.

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

While the town had actively explored the possibility of gasification and pyrolysis as potential options for Nantucket’s solid waste, the new agreement with Waste Options will maintain the status quo as to how the island’s waste is handled. Currently, according to the Current, 10 percent of the waste that comes to the municipal landfill gets buried in the landfill, while the majority is sorted and transported off-island for final disposal, including recyclables, C&D debris, scrap metal, mattresses, tires, old appliances and unusable textiles.

While a number of companies visited the landfill, only Waste Options followed through with an official proposal. The town’s current waste services agreement with Waste Options, signed in 1997, is set to expire in November.