Dive Brief:

• Colorado's Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) has reached an agreement to provide financial assistance to 19 landfills in the state that accept up to 20 tons of waste per day, as reported by Colorado Public Radio.
• The agreement is between CDPHE and Colorado Counties, Inc., an organization that works with county government officials. It includes a waiver of the department's $125 an hour fee for document review and a commitment to pay for groundwater analysis at those 19 small landfills.
• The intent behind the agreement is to help the small landfills get up to code in the next five years. The Colorado legislature gave DCPHE $1.6 million in 2016, which the department will use during the five-year window. 

Dive Insight:

This partnership between the state government and smaller landfills, usually operated by municipal governments, comes after what was supposed to be a regulatory crackdown. Recent studies had shown that small landfills could make a significant impact on the environment, contrary to previous thinking at CDPHE — so officials began to rethink their strategy on small landfills in the state.

The new regulatory push created tension between the state agency and landfill owners and operators who said they couldn't afford to bring their facilities up to code. This lead to a back-and-forth between CDPHE and Colorado Counties, Inc., which worked together to come up with the financial assistance plan for the small landfills in the state. 

Between monitoring air quality, controlling leachate and constantly working to ensure safety and compliance, landfills can be a costly business. This is especially true for smaller operations, where there may not be much revenue from tipping fees or LFG generation. It is not often that state governments get directly involved with assisting local waste operations, so it will be interesting to watch how the partnership between Colorado's state government and locally-operated landfills plays out.