EREF releases study on landfill tipping fees

The Environmental Research & Education Foundation (EREF), Raleigh, North Carolina, has released an analysis of municipal solid waste (MSW) landfill tip fees.   

EREF says there was a 0.6 percent increase in the unweighted national average to $54.03 per ton since 2020 and a decrease of 1 percent in the ton weighted national average to $54.17.   

The 2021 results show the national unweighted average tip fee of $54.03 per ton was 0.6 percent higher than the $53.72 per ton reported in 2020. The Pacific and the Northeast have the highest fees per ton in the U.S. However, the Pacific saw a decrease in fees for the second year by 9.8 percent.  

The Northeast increased for the second year by 95 cents per ton, or 1.4 percent. Fees in the Mountains/Plains, Southeast and South-Central regions decreased by an average of $2.16 per ton in 2021.   

The six-year trend in average tip fee suggests a slight increase in the unweighted national average, though the unweighted average remained stable between 2020 and 2021. The average year-over-year increase was 0.73 percent from 2018 through 2021. The Midwest and the Northeast showed an increase between 2020 and 2021, according to the report.  

The report shows that states with active MSW waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities have higher tipping fees than those without them. The average MSW landfill tip fee was $58.42 per ton for states with WTE in 2021, while states without WTE have an average MSW tip fee of $48.14 per ton. This is a $10.28 per ton difference between states with WTE and states without WTE, making landfilling 21 percent more expensive in WTE states. In 2020, tip fees in states with WTE were 16 percent higher than in states without WTE.  

For construction and demolition (C&D) waste, tipping fees were $53.87 per ton, according to the 270 landfills that included data on the subject. Although 61 percent of these landfills set the same tip fee for MSW and C&D materials, C&D tip fees were priced lower than MSW at 20 percent of sites. At the remaining 19 percent of MSW landfills, the cost to dispose of a ton of C&D material was higher than for MSW.  

EREF says the report includes information from 378 active Subtitle D MSW in the U.S. regarding tip fee information for MSW disposal. According to the foundation, the analysis is based on two methodologies. The first is an unweighted national average by averaging fees of all observations, or the number of reporting landfills for each year. The other method is calculated by weighting fees based on the relative amount of MSW disposed of via landfilling and the tip fee at each facility to create a ton weighted average.  

For more information on the report, click here.