Trucks unloading trash and bulldozers covering and compacting refuse at the Central Landfill in Johnston perform a choreographed dance. The amount of garbage being disposed of in the state has dropped by about half in the last two years.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

JOHNSTON — Wherever you look at Rhode Island’s Central Landfill, everything seems super-sized — huge trucks unload inside vast buildings, acres of mulch are composting and the ever-growing mound of garbage soars above surrounding farms and forests.

Between 300 and 400 garbage trucks lumber up to the landfill face every weekday and disgorge trash collected from all 39 cities and towns. Massive bulldozers and compacting machines flatten and bury the refuse while a cloud of seagulls screeches overhead.

Another 50 or 60 trucks back into the 2-acre Materials Recycling Building and dump out the newspapers, bottles and cans Rhode Islanders collect in their green and blue boxes. More big machines lift enormous scoops onto conveyor belts that carry the recyclables past magnets and glass crushers and dozens of workers who sort and dispatch them into huge blocks of aluminum, plastic and paper for shipment all over the world.

The very top of the landfill is strangely serene. It’s carpeted with grass that attracts a neighbor’s cows. All the heavy machines working below can barely be heard. But the views are big and dramatic. You can see Narragansett Bay, the Providence skyline and a bump on the horizon formed by Fall River’s landfill in Massachusetts.

Yet few people have noticed that the state has initiated a dramatic downsizing at the landfill.

Once a cash cow that sent annual surpluses to the state’s General Fund, now there are new goals, according to Michael O’Connell, executive director of the state’s Resource Recovery Corporation. And there are no surpluses.

“Our top goal is to maximize the life of the landfill,” says O’Connell. “We need to save it for the municipalities.”

Recently, news about the landfill has focused on audits that revealed spending excesses by its last board of directors that may have cost the state as much as $75 million, and on a state police investigation of one landfill employee who was fired for not showing up for work assignments.

At the same time, many communities, in response to a new state law, are struggling to improve their recycling efforts. Some, such as Providence, are having more trouble than others, as residents complain that the “no bin-no barrel” policy stranded piles of rotting garbage on the street.

With all that going on, O’Connell says, “This is a new place. With new people.”

Because of pricing changes and downturns caused by the state’s sagging economy, the rate of refuse going into the landfill has dropped by nearly half in the last three years.

Revenues, largely from the “tipping fees” paid by municipalities and businesses, also have dropped from nearly $70 million in 2007 to $45 million this year. Thirty employees were let go.

But the budget for the state’s Resource Recovery Corporation is almost balanced.

Fees charged to communities to handle their garbage remain among the lowest in the region.

And, most important, the declining inputs of garbage are dramatically extending the life of the landfill — estimated at 14 years just 2 years ago, it now looks like it will last closer to 25 years or more.

O’Connell described the policy changes to members of the Rhode Island chapter of the Environmental Business Council of New England three weeks ago and received generally favorable responses.

Daniel Beardsley Jr., executive director of the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns, said the communities have long felt “captive” of Resource Recovery because state law mandates that they send their wastes to the Central Landfill. The former board of directors had a poor relationship with cities and towns, he said.

“Thank you, Michael O’Connell, for making changes that are positive,” Beardsley said.

Terry Gray, assistant director for the state Department of Environmental Management, noted that the landfill has been one of his agency’s biggest regulatory challenges. It committed so many environmental violations, it was difficult to track them all. But recently, both sides signed a consent decree that required the agency to clean up most of its problems and wiped the slate clean.

“To do that during their downsizing was a compliment to Mike and his staff,” said Gray.

O’Connell was hired by the old board in early 2007, after the last director, Sherry Mulhearn, left. His previous work experience was with a food distribution company.

He soon suspected conflicts of interest involving the agency’s pension fund and a board member, $24 million in questionable land deals and $2.1 million in charitable contributions.

O’Connell wrote about the problems to Governor Carcieri. Two board members, Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian and Michael Salvadore Jr., resigned.

When the board became deadlocked over the election of a new chairman, Carcieri directed his appointees to stop attending meetings. The board hasn’t met since September 2007.

Republican Carcieri submitted names of potential new board members to the Democrat-controlled state Senate. But it did not approve them. The governor has been operating the landfill since July 2008 with monthly executive orders — in effect, he serves as the agency’s board.

In his presentation to the business group, O’Connell said he would prefer to have a board. It is not a good use of the governor’s time to have him review every $20,000 purchase of welding supplies. But O’Connell said the fate of a board is an issue for the governor and the state Senate to resolve. Carcieri has not submitted new board members to the Senate for ratification.

At about the same time O’Connell was settling in, Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Paiva Weed, D-Newport, announced she was interested in a comprehensive overhaul of the state’s recycling efforts. She even sponsored a bottle bill, a topic that has fueled controversy for decades in Rhode Island. While it did not pass, several new laws now mandate higher recycling rates and other efforts to prod communities into reducing the flow of refuse to the landfill.

Resource Recovery classifies garbage in two ways: municipal and commercial.

The disposal of municipal garbage is mandated by state law, with prices set by the legislature. The rate had been $32 per ton for decades.

O’Connell said the flow of garbage from cities and towns started to decline in 2007. It dropped nearly 6 percent that year, another 13.6 percent in 2008 and 9.8 percent more in 2009. In 2006, 474,338 tons of municipal garbage reached the landfill. By 2009, the total was 347,989.

O’Connell attributed the decline to the economy.

“People are buying less and throwing out less,” he said. There’s less waste paper coming to the landfill, too, he said, because newspapers have lost circulation and shrunk in size.

To reduce the flow of commercial waste, O’Connell imposed price increases:

•In 2007, 694,220 tons of commercial waste were shipped to the landfill even though O’Connell raised the price 50 cents to $48 a ton.

•In 2008, he raised the price another $1.50 and the volume of incoming garbage dropped by nearly 17 percent.

•This year, he imposed a significant price hike, to $58 a ton, and business dropped by 50 percent, to just 287,434 tons.

O’Connell admits he priced the commercial rate too high and his timing was bad — recession was sweeping the country.

The economy lowered the volume of garbage throughout New England. At the same time, he said, Connecticut and Massachusetts operate a total of 13 waste-to-energy plants that burn 65 percent and 34 percent of their garbage, respectively. Both states need garbage to keep the incinerators running, and they were willing to lower prices to maintain their volume.

O’Connell said he needed to increase commercial volume back to between 300,000 and 400,000 tons to improve revenues, so he lowered the price to $46 per ton. He predicts that will increase the flow of wastes by 26 percent next year.

As the flow of wastes declined, so did revenue. The biggest drop — $67 million to $45 million — was between 2008 and 2009.

O’Connell responded with the 30 layoffs. He cut all grants and donations and delayed capital investments.

“We took 30 percent of the cost out in one year — that was phenomenal,” O’Connell said. “But it’s a delicate balance between pricing the commercial side to give us the volume we need to pay our bills and not filling up the landfill too quickly.”

Recently, the Carcieri administration announced it wanted to hear from private companies interested in buying the landfill and operating the state’s garbage disposal services.

O’Connell said the announcement is just a request for ideas. “Is there any money to be wrung out of all this?”

He also said he has stopped studying waste-to-energy proposals similar to those in use throughout New England. He ignored the debate about pollution problems and concluded it simply costs too much to operate such plants — $80 a ton, nearly triple what cities and towns now pay.

He continues to work with Ridgewood Renewable Power, a firm that generates electricity by burning methane at the landfill. The company is scheduled to start work this spring on a $100-million project to move and expand its generating plant.

The landfill used to generate $3 million to $5 million a year in surpluses for the General Fund, O’Connell said. But if it gives up those surpluses and adds 10 years of life to the landfill, with a value of $25 million annually, that amounts to a quarter of a billion dollars the communities save.

O’Connell says his top priority is simple: The communities will always come first.

TIMELINE Resource Recovery developments

Jan. 8, 2008: Governor Carcieri asks the state Bureau of Audits to do a 45-day audit of Resource Recovery to look into allegations of conflicts of interest and mismanagement.

Feb. 8, 2008: Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian and Michael A. Salvadore Jr. resign from Resource Recovery board, leaving it without the quorum needed to legally do business.

March 13, 2008: A preliminary audit of Resource Recovery finds mismanagement, questionable land deals, cronyism and possible corruption.

March 17, 2008: Carcieri announces six nominees to resurrect the moribund Resource Recovery board. The Senate does not act on them.

July 22, 2008: Michael O’Connell fires five longtime landfill employees in effort to reorganize and cut budget.

Nov. 4, 2008: O’Connell announces that the recession is causing Rhode Islanders to throw out 20 percent less trash than two years earlier.

May 27, 2009: Top state officials say they are considering reversing a 15-year ban on incinerating Rhode Island’s garbage.

Sept. 22, 2009: State releases $1-million audit that finds that $75 million was wasted at the landfill between 1999 and 2007 on unnecessary land deals, excessive building costs and other forms of mismanagement and fraud.

Sept. 23, 2009: Col. Brendan P. Doherty, head of the Rhode Island State Police, says he believes crimes were committed at Resource Recovery but his detectives are having trouble making a case.

Oct. 22, 2009: General Treasurer Frank T. Caprio says state should explore filing insurance claims to compensate the state for losses at the landfill.

Oct. 25, 2009: Providence Journal reports that Resource Recovery employee Nathan Hannon repeatedly failed to make school recycling presentations that he was paid to attend, and after he was fired, state officials intervened to protect his unemployment benefits.

Oct. 27, 2009: Rhode Island State Police announce investigation of Hannon.

Nov. 2, 2009: Carcieri administration announces it is considering selling or leasing the state Central Landfill.

Nov. 10, 2009: O’Connell says he is no longer considering burning garbage at the landfill because it would dramatically increase disposal costs for Rhode Island’s cities and towns.As trash flow drops, landfill’s life grows

plord@projo.com