PENDER COUNTY — No longer will illegal burn piles or long trips to the New Hanover County landfill be the only options to dispose of vegetative debris in Pender County.
After the closure of Rocky Point’s Running Deer landfill last October, there have been no legally permitted sites for residents, tree companies, or landscapers to dump loads of tree limbs and other organic matter.
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On Tuesday night, county commissioners approved site plans for what is known as an air curtain burner — essentially a large metal dumpster that uses a fan to blow a ‘curtain’ of air over the top of the debris pile as it burns, pushing down smoke, ash, and other harmful particulate matter back into the fire.
Approval required a special use permit to operate a vegetative recycling center on four acres of land zoned a General Business district, which allows for a permit to treat and dispose of nonhazardous waste.
Too much illegal burning
Haywood Bryant, owner of the tree service company Barewood Services in Hampstead, owns the lot located on the west side of Highway 17, about two miles south of the N.C. 210 turnoff to Surf City, between the highway and a small cluster of homes on Oak Grove Drive. The disposal facility will be called Branch and Brush Debris.
The burning of the debris results in a 98-percent reduction of the material with 2 percent remaining as ash, according to Branch and Brush Debris applicant Rick Turner. The company is in discussions with Johnson Nursery in Willard, a Maple Hill blueberry farm, and farmers west of Burgaw to receive the carbon byproduct known as biochar because of its nutritional value, according to Bryant.
N.C. Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Environmental Specialist Scott Sanders told commissioners that more and more illegal burn piles were sprouting up throughout the county.
“There’s a need for permitted legal sites,” Sanders said. “We need to get one in eastern Pender County, and in Pender County in general. We’re having a lot of illegal burning; we’re having tree service people and landscapers taking stuff back to their house or place of business and burning it.”
Currently, landscapers and tree service companies are also taking debris to the New Hanover County line, he said, too far a drive for many to be convinced to dispose of their debris legally.
“There’s a lot of that going on and we just need to be able to guide them in the right direction,” Sanders said of illegal burns. “We’ve got to be able to tell people where to take [the debris].”
Chairman George Brown and Commissioner David Williams confirmed that there was a high demand for a vegetative disposal site on the eastern side of the county, where development is rapidly increasing.
“I get asked about it quite a bit,” Williams said.
The DEQ has permitted air curtain burners throughout the region, according to Sanders — three in Brunswick County, two in Columbus County, and one in Onslow County. He said the NCDOT also uses the technology at its temporary sites.
“I do tree work,” Bryant said. “When they shut down Running Deer, that left us out in the dust. We couldn’t find another place to go. That debris stacked up on my yard until we started getting rid of it by mulching and selling firewood. There is a need here — not only does it help the community itself, it can be utilized for municipalities. Say Hampstead incorporated and wanted to pick up debris, like Surf City and Burgaw does. This [company] can go get it …. Currently there is nothing.”
He said the site will also be open to the general public for anything vegetative, aside from grass and leaves which must be composted. Most removed trees in eastern Pender County are pine trees, which require more time than other species to dry out, and Bryant said that will be a challenge once they set up the business.
“It’ll be touch-and-feel at first. We’ll get our feet wet, then jump right on in. But my goal is to open this site up, and then someday quit climbing damn trees,” Bryant said to the amusement of several commissioners.
Storm debris removal?
Commissioner David Piepmeyer commended Bryant and Turner for getting the DEQ involved on the front-end and doing their due diligence on a technology that he called an effective solution.
County Manager Chad McEwen asked if the operation was scalable to be able to help the county — which has several storm debris sites — take on the huge volumes of tree debris after hurricanes and other coastal storms. Although there are no plans to take on a second burner due to the plot’s limited size, Turner said they are considering acquiring more land in the future, perhaps a year from now, to set up more burners.
Turner also wants to use trench burners, which are not as optimal as container burners because they can’t prevent all contaminants from leaching into the groundwater, but he said they are far better than open burns — and more capable of dealing with huge volumes of tree debris created by a storm. And compared to an air curtain burner that can cost $250,000 to $300,000, a trench burner can be purchased for $50,000, he said.
Before it closed operations, Running Deer was the only permitted facility to dispose of vegetative debris, according to McEwen. He said there have been no discussions about the county operating a vegetative debris facility of its own.
Ultimately, air curtain burners prevent harmful particulates from going into the air and avoid the long-term damaging impacts on soil created by large landfills, according to Turner.
“If you take the LCID [Land-Clearing and Inert Debris] at Running Deer — there’s 90 acres there that in our lifetime and your grandkids’ lifetime, we’ll never be able to use that land. It’s dead and gone because of what’s buried there,” Turner said.
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