San Diego borrows $40M for Miramar composting facility

The city of San Diego is borrowing $40 million from the state to help build its $77 million green waste recycling facility in Miramar, reports The San Diego Union-Tribune.

City officials say the new plant, which is expected to serve the entire region’s composting demands, will begin operations next year. It will handle all yard trimmings, food scraps and other organic materials required to be recycled under S.B. 1383.

The San Diego City Council voted unanimously on July 11 to approve the 20-year state loan at an interest rate of about 3.7 percent. It will be repaid with fees trash haulers pay to use the Miramar Landfill, according to the Union-Tribune.

The newspaper reports that city officials say the loan has “lower interest costs than selling bonds or borrowing from a bank. But the interest rate is roughly double what the city pays on state loans for water and sewer projects.”

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The loan will increase the city’s total payout for the new facility by $18 million, from $77.2 million to $95.3 million.

San Diego already operates the region’s largest composting facility, the Miramar Greenery. However, rather than expanding that facility, the city plans to tear it down and replace it with a larger version in a separate part of the landfill. This is because the existing facility is placed on significant unused capacity at the landfill worth roughly $100 million.

The new composting plant will be built farther east in the landfill in an area that has no unused capacity.

The council approved a contract to build the new facility last winter with Sukut Construction, which has built similar composting plants in Irvine and San Juan Capistrano.

The new facility will have the capacity to compost 250,000 tons of green waste per year. This is a significant increase from the current facility’s 40,000-ton capacity, which was built in the 1990s and later expanded in 2009.