Valley Stream ponders trash removal options

Picking up the garbage is one of the basic services that any municipal government offers. Where that garbage goes once it leaves the curb is a mystery to most residents.

Valley Stream officials are in the midst of trying to figure out a long-term plan for trash disposal in the village, and are strongly considering continuing its relationship with Jamaica Ash, a Westbury-based refuse company.

The village has worked with Jamaica Ash for more than three decades. When Valley Stream closed its incinerator and stopped burning its own garbage in 1979, it signed a contract with the Town of Hempstead. The town used Jamaica Ash to cart the garbage from the village’s transfer station at the Arlington Avenue public works facility to American Refuel — now Covanta — in Westbury.

In 2009, a 25-year contract with the town expired, and Valley Stream signed its own deal directly with Jamaica Ash. “However they removed our waste and where ever they dumped it was up to them,” said Wayne Mastrangelo, the village’s sanitation supervisor.

Valley Stream’s garbage is compacted at Arlington yard, where it is then loaded into large containers and hauled to a transfer station in Babylon. There, the trash is bailed, wrapped and shipped to landfills in the south and west.

The five-year contract expires in August, and Jamaica Ash is seeking a commitment from the village for 15 years, which would include a price reduction beginning Jan. 1. Currently, Valley Stream pays $92.42 per ton of solid waste. Anthony Core, general counsel to Jamaica Ash, said that the company is willing to reduce that to $85 per ton.

That cost is expected to drop even further, to about $75 per ton, if and when a new transfer station opens up in the village. Officials have already committed to demolishing the abandoned incinerator over the winter, which has not been used since 1979. They are looking to replace it with a modern facility that could open in 2015.

Core said that Jamaica Ash would pay the $1.4 million cost for a bailer. That would allow garbage to be shipped directly from Valley Stream to landfills, eliminating the trips to Babylon and resulting in a savings of about $10 per ton. In 2012, the village collected 14,238 tons of trash.