Garbage in Paradise

Naples Daily News Staff

As the population of Naples continues to mushroom, local officials are starting to grapple with what to do with the ever-increasing pile of garbage that comes with growth.

The community's trash dump has been moved several times over the last 50 years as people moved in, got offended and demanded it disappear from their neighborhood. Naples is at one of those crossroads now, with officials trying to address the odor complaints of neighbors of the landfill by moving it.

Naples' home for trash has evolved from an informal pit in the woods near what is now the Coastland Center mall to the high-tech landfill now sitting at the gateway to the community at the corner of Interstate 75 and County Road 951.

Local garbage experts are now preparing for the next stage - a state-of-the-art, super-high-tech landfill that is to serve the community for the next 50 years. They are engaging the public in a detailed process hoping to ensure the next site does not draw the wrath of neighbors and become another political nightmare.

But the task of choosing the next site has only just begun and many of the landowners in the favored area are powerful agricultural interests.

Not only will the next landfill not have a nasty odor, experts promise, but it also could be home to new technologies such as mass composting, expanded recycling to further reduce the amount that has to be buried and a system that turns the landfill gas emissions into electricity to cut local government power bills or bring in revenue from the outside.

It is a far cry from the garbage dump old-time local residents remember.

The original defacto community garbage dump was off a sand slope in the woods in the area now built out as the upscale Coquina Sands, recalls Naples native Duke Turner, whose family has lived in the area for generations.

"You would always take a rifle with you, go hunting in the woods on the way there," Turner said.

"There was quail, turkey and the woods went all the way up to Vanderbilt beach park."

At the same time, residents would also dig a pit in their back y ard and pile the garbage up and burn it.

"When the hole got filled, you'd plant a tree on it and you'd have fertilizer," Turner said.But that was before the days of plastic and other modern chemicals that pollute the ground, Turner recalls.

And glass didn't go in the dump either, Turner said, recalling how Borden would deliver milk in the town and soft-drink bottles had a deposit on them.

"We kids would go around and gather the bottles round the neighborhood, get the deposit and you'd have enough to go to a move, 9 cents," Turner said.

But in the 1950s, building in Naples spread with the development of Aqualane Shores and the community garbage dump was moved to the site north of the Naples Airport, Turner recalled.

John Van Arsdale, who worked for the airport when the landfill was there, recollects unpleasant memories of having the garbage dump next to the airport. By 1976, the landfill was too offensive and filling up too quickly for it to remain at that site, Van Arsdale remembers.

Also, landfills and airports do not make good neighbors. The garbage attracts flocks of scavenger birds, a hazard at airports because they can get sucked into the engines of planes.

At the time the landfill moved to its current location at the corner of Interstate 75 and County Road 951, that site was vacant natural land. The site next to the airport is still used for garbage, but only as a transfer location for trucks to unload before the garbage is sent to the landfill.

In the early days at the current landfill site, the garbage was put in piles on top of the land because Florida's environment is too sensitive to bury the garbage underground.

The first two mounds at the landfill were made without plastic liners to prevent decomposed garbage liquid from leaking into the ground and nearby waterways.

It wasn't until the mid 1980s that the first lined garbage cells were develped at the Naples landfill. Then in 1990, double liners of heavy-duty plastic on the bottom and on the top became the norm.

More recently than that, experts poked holes in the liners to vent the methane gas that was forming and trapped inside the closed mounds.

But the venting of the gas has released an odor that at times can be smelled for miles away in the coastal area.

It is largely that odor that has prompted officials to promise landfill neighbors they will move from the site in 10 years. Also, a garbage company is now building a system to collect that gas before it is released and burn it to eliminate the odor.

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