Interstate Shipment of Municipal Solid Waste: 2007 Update
Released: 2007-06-13T00:00:00

Introduction

This report provides updated information on interstate shipment of municipal solid waste (MSW). Concerned about increased waste imports, some states have attempted to regulate this commerce, by imposing barriers or requirements specific to waste importation; federal courts, however, have declared such state restrictions unconstitutional. If states are to have such authority, these decisions say, congressional action is required.

Since the late 1980s, Congress has considered, but not enacted, numerous bills that would grant such authority. Over this period, there has been a continuing interest in knowing how much waste is being shipped across state lines for disposal, and what states might be affected by proposed legislation. This report provides data useful in addressing these questions. It updates information provided in earlier CRS reports.

The report presents information gathered through telephone contacts with solid waste officials in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the Canadian province of Ontario (which ships large quantities of waste to the United States, principally to Michigan). The data obtained from these contacts are summarized in Tables 1, 2, and 3 , and Figures 1 and 2 . Table 4 presents additional information, including the names and telephone numbers of state contacts, and in some cases links to detailed reports on solid waste management in the specific state that are available on the Web.

Not all states require reporting of waste imports, and very few track exports, so the available data are incomplete, and in some cases represent estimates rather than actual measurements. In a number of cases, faced with conflicting reports from exporters and importers or no quantitative data at all, the report provides CRS's best estimate, based on discussions with state officials or other sources.

Seven of the states provided data for a period other than calendar year 2005—either a fiscal year that included part of 2005 or a different calendar year. This adds another layer of imprecision: CRS generally combined data for whatever was the reporting period closest to 2005, even though in these seven cases, this meant combining data from somewhat different time periods. The exceptions are noted in the appropriate tables. As a result, many of the totals reported here represent a best estimate rather than precise figures.

Total Shipments

The data show that total interstate waste shipments continue to rise: imports in the current survey totaled 42.2 million tons, 17% of the 245.7 million tons of municipal solid waste generated in the United States. Of municipal waste disposed (as opposed to recycled or composted), the percentage is higher. EPA estimates that 79.0 million tons of municipal solid waste were recycled or composted in 2005, leaving 166.7 million tons to be disposed in landfills or incinerators. Of this amount, 25.3% crossed state lines for disposal.

Between CRS's year 2004 report (reporting largely 2003 data) and the current survey (reporting generally 2005 data), imports increased 3.2 million tons, or 8%. Since 1995, reported imports have risen 147%, from 17.1 million tons in 1995 to 42.2 million tons in the current survey.

Waste Import Highlights

Thirty states had increased imports of municipal waste since 2003, with the largest increases occurring in Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. These three states, along with Pennsylvania and Virginia, accounted for 56% of total municipal waste imports in 2005.

As shown in Table 1 , Pennsylvania continues to be the largest waste importer. Disposal facilities in the state received 7.9 million tons of MSW and 1.7 million tons of other nonhazardous waste from out of state in 2005. The amounts represented 39% of all solid waste disposed in the state and 19% of the national total for interstate MSW shipments. Pennsylvania has abundant landfill capacity, relatively low tipping fees, and is near two major states that have a shortage of disposal capacity: New York and New Jersey.

Despite the state's continued predominance on the list of waste importers, Pennsylvania's MSW imports actually declined for the fourth year in a row in 2005—a cumulative decrease of more than 2.7 million tons. This happened simultaneously with continued growth of interstate waste shipments along the Eastern seabord.

Several factors appear to have been at work. First, beginning in 2002, Pennsylvania imposed a new state fee of $4.00 per ton on waste disposal. Added to pre-existing fees, the state and local governments in Pennsylvania now collect $7.25 on each ton of waste disposed in the state. This may have provided sufficient economic incentive for some haulers to dispose elsewhere. Second, the state appears to be receiving less waste from New York City, whose Mayor has adopted a goal of shipping all of New York City's waste by rail, rather than truck. Pennsylvania has no landfills served by rail, so some of this waste has been diverted to large landfills in Virginia that do have rail service.

After Pennsylvania, Virginia is the largest waste importer, with imports totaling 5.7 million tons of MSW and 1.3 million tons of other nonhazardous waste. Waste imports to Virginia have increased 45% since 2001, when they totaled 4.1 million tons of MSW and 0.7 million tons of other waste. The state has attempted to restrict imports, but has not been as successful as Pennsylvania, in part because it has chosen a variety of measures that have run afoul of the Constitution's interstate commerce clause. These included a ban on barge shipping of wastes on Virginia rivers, truck regulations that applied only to commercial solid waste transporters, and daily limits on the amount of waste that Virginia landfills could accept.

Michigan, the third-largest waste importer for the past several years, has also seen substantial growth in imports. Significant amounts of waste come to Michigan from Indiana, Illinois, and other neighboring states; but the biggest source, accounting for 69% of Michigan's out-of-state waste, is Ontario, Canada. Ontario is also Michigan's neighbor, but the fact that it lies in a foreign country and that it has large expanses of open land where landfills might be sited seems to have added additional notoriety to its waste shipments. Ontario's shipments to Michigan have grown as Toronto, Canada's largest city, awarded new contracts for waste disposal and closed its last two landfills. At the beginning of 1999, the Toronto area was generating about 2.8 million tons of waste annually, of which about 700,000 tons were shipped to Michigan. By early 2003, however, there was virtually no local disposal capacity in the Toronto area, and almost all of the waste was being shipped to Michigan, where large disposal sites offered very low cost disposal.

In August 2006, the Ontario Minister of the Environment reached an agreement with Michigan's two Senators, under which Ontario will eliminate shipments of municipally managed waste to Michigan by the end of 2010. In return, the Senators agreed not to pursue passage of legislation that would have imposed large inspection fees and other requirements on Ontario's waste shipments to the United States. On September 19, 2006, Toronto's City Council approved a letter of intent to purchase a landfill near London, Ontario, where it is expected to ship its waste as it phases out shipments to Michigan.

The agreement reached by the two Michigan Senators in their exchange of letters with Ontario's Minister of the Environment would not eliminate the majority of the waste shipped from Ontario to Michigan, however. The agreement refers to "municipally managed waste," and specifically uses a 2005 baseline amount of 1.34 million metric tons of municipal waste shipped. About two-thirds of the waste shipped from Ontario is not "municipally managed"—it is waste collected by private haulers and shipped to Michigan landfills under private contracts. These wastes are exported to Michigan either because it provides lower cost disposal options or because the landfills in Michigan are controlled by the same company that collects the waste in Canada. The provincial government and the local governments within the province have no authority to prevent these private waste shipments from leaving Ontario. (For additional information on Canadian waste import issues, see CRS Report RL33720, Imports of Canadian Waste .)

In other highlights from the CRS survey:

Eleven states reported imports exceeding 1 million tons per year, an increase from 10 in CRS's last survey. Indiana, the additional state, jumped from 11 th to 4 th on the list with an increase of 1.5 million tons. In addition to the 11 states that imported more than a million tons, another 20 states had imports exceeding 100,000 tons. Besides the three big increases discussed above (Indiana, Virginia, and Michigan), states that reported major increases in imports compared to CRS's previous survey were Wisconsin, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Tennessee, and Kansas, each of which reported an increase of at least 100,000 tons. Growth of waste imports in the Great Lakes states was particularly strong: together, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois saw an increase of 3.65 million tons in MSW imports. New Jersey remains on the list of major importers, with 1.7 million tons of MSW imports in 2005. The state is also a major exporter of waste: receiving states estimated New Jersey's exports at 5.8 million tons. The absence of flow control (local government requirements that waste within their jurisdiction be disposed at local facilities, which were overturned by the courts in the mid-1990s) has led to increased waste exports from New Jersey over the last decade. Waste-to-energy facilities in New Jersey, in turn, began importing MSW in order to replace local waste flowing elsewhere. As a result, large amounts of waste have entered New Jersey from New York in recent years. On April 30, 2007, the Supreme Court held, in the United Haulers case, that flow-control ordinances requiring delivery of local waste to a publicly-owned processing facility do not violate the Constitution's commerce clause, making it clear that some forms of flow control can survive judicial scrutiny. New Jersey officials do not expect the decision to have much impact on waste exports or imports, however. Besides Pennsylvania, only Alabama experienced a major decrease in imports in 2005. Imports to Alabama have been particularly volatile. They declined by almost 270,000 tons (65%) in 2005, compared to 2003, but rebounded 150,000 tons in 2006. Even after that increase, they were less than half the peak amount recorded in 2002. Ten other states reported declines in waste imports. The declines were generally small—in half the cases, less than 20,000 tons. Although there are no comprehensive data, imports to transfer stations have been a political issue in some locations. Transfer stations are generally located in urban areas and are subject to less stringent regulation than disposal facilities. Heavy truck traffic and odors have aroused concerns in some neighboring communities. Connecticut, Rhode Island, the District of Columbia, and South Carolina have reported significant amounts of out-of-state waste imported to transfer stations, then exported to other states for disposal. A New York City plan to export most of its waste to transfer stations in New Jersey raised substantial controversy, before being rescinded.

Major Exporters

As shown in Table 2 , eleven states (New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Missouri, Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington, Minnesota, North Carolina, Indiana, and Florida) and the District of Columbia each exported more than 1 million tons of waste to facilities in other states in the latest reporting period, and 21 other states exported more than 100,000 tons. As noted above, the Canadian province of Ontario also exported a substantial amount of municipal waste (nearly 4 million tons), most of it to Michigan.

Although the reported amount of total waste exports grew by more than 4 million tons, shipments from the two largest exporting states, New York and New Jersey, did not increase. Compared to CRS's last survey, New York's exports fell more than a million tons to 7.2 million tons in 2005, according to 10 receiving states. New Jersey's estimated exports, 5.8 million tons, remained steady.

By far, the largest growth in exports came from Illinois, whose exports more than doubled, to 4.4 million tons. Most of the exports originate in Cook County (Chicago and its suburbs), which has a relative shortage of disposal capacity. Illinois as a whole has reported a more than doubling of landfill capacity since 1995, but Chicago is located near the border of both Indiana and Wisconsin; so increases in capacity elsewhere in Illinois may not affect disposal decisions in the Chicago metropolitan area.

In all, 10 states and Ontario increased waste exports by more than 100,000 tons each in the period. In addition to Illinois and Ontario, Minnesota and Florida showed the largest increases. Five states and D.C. had decreases of more than 100,000 tons. Besides New York, the others were Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Net Imports and Exports

Table 3 combines import and export data to rank the states by net amounts imported or exported. The table shows that 21 states were net importers; 24 plus the District of Columbia were net exporters. Thirty-eight of the 50 states had net imports or exports exceeding 100,000 tons in the reporting period; 22 exceeded 500,000 tons. Perhaps most interesting, given the tendency to identify states as either exporters or importers, 25 states both exported and imported in excess of 100,000 tons of municipal solid waste, an increase from 23 in CRS's last report.

Several factors are at work here. In the larger states, there are sometimes differences in available disposal capacity in different regions within the state. Areas without capacity may be closer to landfills (or may at least find cheaper disposal options) in other states. A good example is Illinois: the Chicago area, which is close to two other states, exports significant amounts of waste out of state. Downstate, however, Illinois has substantial available landfill capacity, and imported 2 million tons from St. Louis, other locations in Missouri, and Iowa.

As noted earlier, the movement of waste also represents the regionalization and consolidation of the waste industry. In 2005, the three largest firms (Waste Management, Allied Waste, and Republic Services) accounted for 66% of total revenues of the industry's 100 largest firms. These large firms offer integrated waste services, from collection to transfer station to disposal site, in many locations. Often, they ship waste to their own disposal facility across a border, rather than dispose of it at an in-state facility owned by a rival. As small landfills continue to close—the number of U.S. landfills declined 63% between 1993 and 2004, from 4,482 to 1,654 —this trend toward regionalization, consolidation, and waste shipment across state lines is likely to continue.

Additional Information

The remainder of this report consists of a table summarizing waste import and export data, by state. All 50 states and the District of Columbia are listed in alphabetical order, with data for the amount of waste exported, destination of exports, amount of waste imported, source of imports, and a state agency contact for additional information.