Monitoring Required : Rule Aims to Reduce Landfill Air Pollution

The South Coast Air Quality Management District moved Friday to curb polluting gas emissions from landfills by requiring operators to monitor their dumps for escaping gas and to install or upgrade gas-collection systems over the next 3 1/2 years.

Air quality officials estimated that the new regulation, adopted by a 12-1 vote of the district board, eventually will cut emissions of certain polluting gases by 7.8 tons per day. These include gases that react with sunlight to form ozone; they also include toxic gases, such as benzene and vinyl chloride, that are known to cause cancer at high levels of exposure.

Although the rule focuses on these polluting gases, it also will restrict seepage of explosive methane, which is produced in large quantities as trash decomposes and often contains small amounts of toxic gases.

Covering 54 Landfills

“By eliminating most of the methane, we’ll automatically get everything else along with it,” said Arthur Segal, a district official.

The regulation will cover an estimated 54 active public and privately owned landfills in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. District officials said about a dozen of these landfills already have gas-collection systems, but that some will have to be improved to comply with the rule. Many of these systems collect methane for sale as fuel.

Jim Birakos, chief spokesman for the district, said he hopes a companion rule to control gas emissions from an estimated 350 inactive landfills will be presented to the board later this year.

The regulation would probably not have prevented the methane gas buildup that forced Los Angeles school officials to close the gymnasium at Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley on March 28. The gas seeped several hundred feet underground and into the gym from the Sheldon-Arleta landfill, an inactive city dump.

That landfill has a gas-collection system, but a pocket of gas escaped when a dump employee apparently closed a valve by mistake, shutting off some of the gas-collection wells, according to city sanitation officials.

The only dissenting vote was cast by William Smiland, who suggested the rule would not accomplish much. “How much good is it going to do?” he asked shortly before the vote.

Under the rule, methane concentrations directly above the landfills will have to be kept under 50 parts per million parts of air. In addition, landfill operators will have to submit quarterly reports to the air district on the concentration of toxic gases in landfill emissions.

Oct. 1 Deadline for Plans

Gas-collection systems will have to be installed or expanded at landfills that do not meet the methane limits. Landfill operators will have until Oct. 1 to submit plans to the air district showing how they will comply, but will have until Jan. 1, 1989, to have new gas-collection systems constructed and operating.

Air district officials said it would cost about $600,000 to install a gas-collection system in a 50-acre landfill covered with 100 feet of trash. Such systems include wells, piping and blowers or pumps to suck out the gas, plus flares to burn the methane if it is not being recovered for fuel.

Fred Rice, a Tustin-based consultant to several landfill operators and to gas recovery firms, called the regulation “manageable in its present form. . . . The way it is right now, we think that industry will be able to comply.”

Louis Blumberg of the Santa Monica-based Coalition for Clean Air had asked board members to attach a requirement that any flaring of gases destroy at least 99 percent of their toxic components. But air district officials said they believed this would be impossible to achieve or to validate by measurement.