Carroll County commissioners have approved a $3.4 million purchase of 46 acres for the Northern Landfill project, a move officials say is meant to cut annual costs and expand services at the Westminster site. The county spent $9 million shipping waste elsewhere last year alone.
The land buy, reported by the Baltimore Sun, adds to a years-long effort to keep the county's trash problem from becoming a budget crisis. The Northern Landfill sits at 1400 Baltimore Blvd. in Westminster, where it has handled the county's municipal solid waste since 1988, according to EA Engineering. Today the site, along with its Resource Recovery Park, spans 546 acres and takes in everything from household trash to yard trim, scrap metal and construction rubble.
The latest purchase follows a much larger one five years ago, when commissioners voted unanimously to spend more than $13 million on nearly 327 acres adjacent to the landfill, per the same account from the Capital Gazette. That 2021 deal bundled together 102 acres along Reese Road, 170 acres across from nearby railroad tracks and another 55 acres, all contiguous with the landfill's existing 220 acres at the time. Officials said then that the extra land could eventually support relocating the transfer station and resident drop-off site, along with studying a new entrance, on-site composting and expanded recycling.
A Years-Long Push to Avoid Running Out of Room
The urgency behind the land buys traces back to warnings that space at the Northern Landfill is finite. County officials said in 2022 that the landfill would reach capacity in 12 years or less if Carroll County dumped all of its own trash there instead of hauling a chunk of it to Pennsylvania, the Baltimore Sun reported at the time. That same year, commissioners approved burying 27,000 tons of trash at the landfill in fiscal 2023, more than double the 12,500 tons planned for the prior fiscal year.
Hauling waste out of the county has never been cheap. Solid-waste bureau chief Cliff Engle told the Baltimore Sun in 2022 that the county was spending between $4 million and $5 million a year to transfer roughly 90,000 tons of trash elsewhere. Even as officials tried to shift more waste into the Northern Landfill itself, they expected to spend about $1.6 million more to truck additional trash to an out-of-state transfer station while capacity was still being built out.
Bigger Plans, Bigger Price Tag
Those near-term costs are part of a larger calculation driving the expansion. According to Citizen Portal, the broader landfill expansion is designed to reduce or eliminate out-of-county waste transfers that now run about $7 million to $7.5 million annually. County staff have estimated the expansion itself would require roughly $25 million to $30 million in upfront spending, with the full build-out potentially topping $100 million.
Some of that groundwork is already under contract. The Northeast Maryland Waste Disposal Authority awarded EA Engineering, Science, and Technology a $4.1 million contract in 2023 to develop a master plan for expanding the landfill and building out the Resource Recovery Park, EA Engineering has said. The scope covers facility planning, conceptual and final design, permitting, procurement support, construction management and quality assurance. EA has also said the work will include research into waste-minimization and diversion technologies meant to reduce the county's reliance on the landfill over time, with officials describing potential future landfill cells as part of a 10- to 20-year development plan, according to the Capital Gazette.
Permit Application Still Pending
Any physical expansion still needs regulatory sign-off. The Maryland Department of the Environment's solid-waste program records show that the Carroll County Bureau of Solid Waste Operations has submitted a refuse-disposal permit application for a proposed horizontal and vertical expansion of the Northern Municipal Landfill at the Baltimore Boulevard site. Whether that permit has been approved, or when a decision might come, is not addressed in the available records.
