Article: Bellingham at Crossroads Over Biosolids: Burn or Landfill?

By Julia Tellman Local News Reporter:

Environmentalists are urging the City of Bellingham to consider landfills as an alternative to incineration at the Post Point wastewater treatment plant, but city representatives say maintaining the incineration process is the best option while other technology emerges.

“We’re not saying we’re going to incinerate forever, but we have to invest in the incinerators,” said Post Point plant operator Steve Bradshaw. “If we want to start a project today, that’s seven to 10 years to completion.”

Bellingham found itself at a crossroads in 2022. The public works department had been working for nearly a decade on a planned transition away from incineration at the Post Point plant in Fairhaven and toward digesting the biosolids (i.e. fecal matter) and applying the end product to agricultural land. But new science showed that contaminants called PFAS, sometimes referred to as “forever chemicals,” are present in biosolids and can leach or run off into water when used as fertilizer.

That concern, combined with a staggering price tag of more than $1 billion for a new facility, prompted the city to shelve the plan and instead address years of deferred maintenance on Post Point’s incinerators; one is 30 years old and the other is 50 years old.

At the time, environmental groups, including local nonprofit RE Sources, applauded the decision.

Cost and community concerns

But now the city is tackling that deferred maintenance, with an emissions control project that is now estimated to cost $65 million and another $54 million in Post Point rehabilitation over the next decade for projects like replacement sludge tanks and backup generators, according to a utility rate study performed this year.

In 2024, construction on the emissions project was estimated at $40 million, but costs have escalated. The $65 million also includes routine maintenance, permitting and staff time on top of construction.

In 2022, one reason for pivoting away from the digester project was the prospect of seven consecutive years of 16% sewer rate increases. But this year, to cover future wastewater system improvements, the council approved a 19% sewer rate increase each in 2026 and 2027 and a 12% increase in 2028.

And some stakeholders are balking.

One community member in particular, Larry McCarter, the founder of the Recycling and Disposal Services solid waste transfer station in Ferndale, has repeatedly called for the end of incineration and the implementation, at least temporarily, of landfilling dried biosolids until a better option presents itself. McCarter says the city is at risk of environmental violations for pollution as well as greenhouse gas emissions and escalating costs, without any assurance that PFAS aren’t being pumped into the air.

RE Sources, the Whatcom Environmental Council, the Mt. Baker Group of the Sierra Club and others have jumped onboard the landfilling bandwagon.

“When the project stopped, it was like, awesome, great,” RE Sources North Sound Waterkeeper Kirsten McDade said. “The city decided to Band-Aid the incinerators, but it has become clear that this is not a little Band-Aid, and we’re not comfortable with that.”

McDade said there’s concern that Bellingham will pour ratepayer money into the incinerators and still not achieve compliance with changing clean air and water regulations. The state Department of Ecology is expected to institute stricter quality standards for wastewater treatment plants that discharge into Puget Sound; it will cost the city hundreds of millions down the road to optimize the plant, but the exact requirements aren’t yet known.

“None of us like landfilling — it’s really hard for us to recommend that,” McDade said. But she said the group had determined it is the lesser of two evils when it comes to pollutants and cost over time.

RE Sources felt there were still a lot of unanswered questions, and, after meeting with the mayor and public works staff on Oct. 15, McDade asked the city in a newsletter post to do a comprehensive analysis of landfilling.

Public works deputy director Mike Olinger said the city has already explored and analyzed every possible solution, and that the search for a viable alternative to incineration is ongoing, but for the time being, the city must upgrade its emissions control equipment to comply with regulations.

“From our perspective, the decision has been made and we are moving forward with the emissions project as directed by the council in 2022,” Olinger said. “The mayor has made it abundantly clear that the emissions project is moving forward.”

Notice of violation

In March 2024 the city received a notice of violation from the Northwest Clean Air Agency (NWCAA), the regional agency that regulates air contamination sources. NWCAA alleged that Post Point was not meeting the conditions of its permit, and the city has been negotiating with the agency to resolve the notice.

“The process we’re going through in our NOV is standard,” said Bradshaw. “They issue us a violation and it’s up to us to respond to the violation, and it becomes a back-and-forth. Just because they issue a notice of violation, it isn’t the end-all.”

He said the conversations have been “productive” and he believes the two parties might be nearing resolution.

RE Sources and its partners feel there hasn’t been adequate public input in the process.

But, Olinger said, “We don’t usually seek public comment on maintenance projects.” The real opportunity for community input, he added, will come with the wastewater comprehensive planning process, set to begin soon. That plan will lay out the future of the entire system, in anticipation of the wastewater treatment plant reaching its solids capacity around 2040.

McDade believes there is a “nugget of hope” that the city can still “change course” and stop incinerating — the emission upgrade project is under initial design and won’t be put out to bid until late 2026 at earliest.

The question of landfilling

RE Sources and its partners point to examples of local plants that have moved from incineration to temporarily to landfilling their waste: the cities of Lynnwood and Edmonds.

But Bradshaw says those aren’t apples to apples comparisons.

For instance, Lynnwood had to pay multiple EPA pollution penalties and was ordered to shut off its incinerator in 2024, according to the Lynnwood Times. Lynnwood’s new plant, which is estimated to cost $250 million, will have much less capacity than Bellingham’s, and Lynnwood’s eventual plan is to create a biosolid for land application, the process Bellingham pivoted away from in 2022.

“Contrary to a lot of people’s belief that we can just flip a valve and move to trucking tomorrow, we’re not under an emergency declaration, we’re not under something that gives us the authority to just change our process, so the permitting process would take multiple years. It would not alleviate the notice of violation issue,” Olinger said.

An analysis by city consultants Brown and Caldwell found landfilling could cost the city up to $70 million over ten years, with no infrastructure upgrades to show for it, and would involve on average three trucks full of sludge leaving the plant per day, seven days a week, and heading over mountain passes to landfills in eastern Washington.

McCarter, with his experience in solid waste handling, has questioned those numbers, but Olinger said he’s very confident in the analysis.

The state Department of Ecology wrote in a 2025 factsheet about PFAS that “landfilling biosolids contradicts state laws implemented to limit organics in the landfill and leads to increased production of greenhouse gases,” and that the state doesn’t have the landfill capacity to dispose of all the waste generated each year.

That said, Ecology adds, the possibility that incineration can destroy PFAS requires further investigation, and PFAS byproducts may be generated by incineration.

Revelations about PFAS have pushed the industry in a more risk-adverse direction, and when Olinger and Bradshaw attend waste conferences, they’re being told, “If you have an incinerator, keep it. Make sure you don’t let it go away.”

Olinger said that Bellingham is hesitant to “make risky decisions with ratepayer dollars” by pursuing untested technology the way other cities have, like Edmonds, which is working to implement a new process, gasification, that virtually eliminates PFAS. According to the Everett Herald, the city started a six-month trial run in April.

A spokesperson for the City of Edmonds told Cascadia Daily News in late October that while the city is continuing to work with the state Department of Enterprise Services and Ameresco, the project engineer, to “ensure the delivery of a fully functional gasification system,” the plant has “not yet met that milestone.”

Olinger said Bellingham’s public works staff feels it would be “extremely irresponsible” to take the functioning system offline and put the plant under a state-mandated timeline to come up with a new solution.

In another wrinkle, Whatcom County Health & Community Services has joined the conversation because it believes state law requires Bellingham to operate under a county incineration permit, which it does not currently hold. Olinger said the city disagrees with that interpretation, because NWCAA and the Department of Ecology are in charge of regulating Post Point.

“Our goal is always to work cooperatively with our solid waste facility partners, and we look forward to working with the City on this,” a health department spokesperson wrote in an email to CDN.

Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com.