BERKELEY — Berkeley’s waste transfer station — where garbage is sorted before being shipped to landfills — is due for an upgrade, and the city wants residents to weigh in on how to reconstruct it and what services they want it to provide.
The redesign of the transfer station — which opened in 1982 at Second and Gilman streets in West Berkeley — is happening amid the city’s ongoing push to reduce the amount of waste it ships to landfills. In 2005, the city had set a goal of having zero waste sent to landfills by 2020. The city currently diverts about 75 percent of its waste from landfills.
The city is unlikely to meet its 2020 goal, said Berkeley Waste and Recycling manager Greg Apa. It’s more realistic to shoot for recycling or reusing 90 percent of the waste, he said. Berkeley is one of the few cities in the state and the only one in the Bay Area that handles its own commercial and residential garbage, recycling and green waste collection, Apa said. Other Bay Area cities contract with outside companies.
The old transfer station will need to be demolished and rebuilt; it has outlived its functional life expectancy, Apa said. It was built to handle 120 tons of waste per day — the site’s volume has more than tripled since then, according to a city news release.
Before the city designs a new one, officials want to hear from residents at two community meetings: on Wednesday Nov. 28 from 6 to 9 p.m. at the South Berkeley Senior Center at 2939 Ellis St. and Dec. 1 from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Live Oak Community Center at 1301 Shattuck Ave.
“We’re really trying to solicit all the ideas out there in the waste and resource universe to try to develop a facility that will be usable for the next 30-plus years,” Apa said.
Some ideas already floating around include offering carpet recycling and making compost available for free at the site, he said. Items the transfer center currently recycles include construction and demolition debris, mattresses, tires and appliances.
Apa wants there to be an in-depth community input process now, rather than if the city were to put lots of money and staff time into the design only to have it be shot down by the public.
After the two listening sessions, the city staff will draft a design to be presented to residents in either January or February. After that, the design will be reconfigured again based on comments from those meetings and presented to the City Council in June or July, Apa said.
The presentation in July to the City Council will include the estimated cost of constructing the new facility, he said. If the design proposal gets the green light from the council in the summer, an environmental impact report will be done and the council will then be able to authorize the construction.
Apa said it’s too early to say when the project might break ground, or about how much it will cost and where that money will come from.