For too long, the debate about waste management in Yamhill County has been framed as a binary choice: either expand the Riverbend Landfill, or face a waste crisis. This framing is false, and it serves primarily the interests of the corporation seeking to expand its facility. There is a Third Way — a comprehensive approach to waste management that reduces what communities need to landfill, creates economic value from what was once considered waste, and preserves Yamhill County's agricultural land and water resources for future generations.
The Third Way is not a slogan. It is a practical program built on decades of proven experience in communities across the country and around the world. It requires investment, political will, and community participation — but so does managing an ever-expanding landfill. The difference is that the Third Way leads to better outcomes: less waste, cleaner resources, protected farmland, and a stronger foundation for Yamhill County's long-term future.
Beyond the Binary
The waste management industry has a financial interest in framing landfill expansion as inevitable. More landfill capacity means more revenue from tipping fees — the charges that governments, businesses, and haulers pay to dispose of waste. Waste Management Inc. is a publicly traded company whose shareholders expect growth. Expanding the Riverbend Landfill is a growth strategy, not just a waste management decision.
Yamhill County's interest is different. The county's interest is in managing its waste as responsibly and cost-effectively as possible while protecting the resources — farmland, water, community character — that make Yamhill County worth living in. Those interests do not automatically align with the interests of the corporation that operates the regional landfill.
The Third Way insists that Yamhill County evaluate its waste management options with its own interests in mind — and then invest in the strategies that best serve the community, not the corporation.
Pillar One: Reduce at the Source
The most effective waste management strategy is to prevent waste from being generated in the first place. Source reduction — reducing the amount and toxicity of materials that enter the waste stream — sits at the top of the waste management hierarchy for good reason. It is simultaneously the cheapest and most effective approach.
Source reduction happens through purchasing decisions: choosing products with less packaging, buying in bulk, selecting durable goods over disposables, and repairing rather than replacing items when possible. It happens through business decisions: companies that design products for durability and recyclability rather than planned obsolescence. And it happens through policy: extended producer responsibility programs that make manufacturers responsible for the end-of-life management of their products create powerful incentives to design waste out of the system.
Yamhill County can support source reduction through community education programs, business assistance for waste audits and reduction planning, and advocacy for state and federal extended producer responsibility policies. None of these initiatives requires major capital investment. All of them yield measurable results when implemented consistently over time.
Pillar Two: Expand Recycling Infrastructure
Recycling diverts materials from the landfill while recovering their economic value as feedstocks for manufacturing. Yamhill County's recycling programs, while functional, fall short of what is achievable with greater investment and commitment.
Rural areas of the county — where residents are most distant from collection services — have recycling participation rates lower than urban and suburban areas. Expanding collection infrastructure, establishing convenient drop-off locations, and improving service to underserved areas would generate significant additional diversion without requiring major changes to the materials accepted or the processing infrastructure.
Commercial and industrial recycling represents a particularly significant opportunity. Businesses, restaurants, construction projects, and institutions generate large volumes of recoverable materials that often end up in the landfill because convenient, affordable collection services are not available. Establishing commercial recycling mandates and ensuring that cost-effective collection services exist to support them would generate substantial diversion.
Construction and demolition debris deserves special attention. C&D waste typically accounts for 20 to 30 percent of the municipal solid waste stream, and much of it — wood, metal, concrete, drywall, roofing — is highly recyclable. Requiring C&D debris diversion on permitted projects and supporting the development of C&D recycling processing capacity would divert a large volume of material from the landfill.
Pillar Three: Industrial-Scale Composting
Organic waste — food scraps, food-soiled paper, yard waste, agricultural residues — typically comprises 30 to 40 percent of the municipal solid waste stream in communities without diversion programs. When this organic material goes to the landfill, it decomposes anaerobically and generates methane, a potent greenhouse gas. When it is composted, it becomes a valuable soil amendment that benefits agriculture.
Industrial composting at scale is not a new or unproven technology. It is in operation at facilities throughout Oregon and across the country, processing millions of tons of organic waste annually into compost that sells to farmers, landscapers, and municipalities. The economics are real: communities that divert organic waste to composting reduce their landfill costs while generating a revenue stream from compost product sales.
Yamhill County's agricultural context makes industrial composting particularly attractive. The farms, vineyards, and nurseries of the Willamette Valley are major potential customers for high-quality compost. A well-designed county composting program could create a genuinely closed-loop system: organic waste from urban residents and commercial food service operations becomes the compost that enriches the agricultural soils of Yamhill County's farms. That is a fundamentally different model than burying organic material in a landfill and hoping the liner holds.
Pillar Four: Waste-to-Energy as a Bridge
For materials that cannot be efficiently reduced, reused, recycled, or composted, waste-to-energy technologies offer an alternative to landfilling. Modern waste-to-energy facilities convert residual solid waste to electricity while significantly reducing the volume of material that must be landfilled. The ash residue from waste-to-energy processing typically represents 10 to 20 percent of the original waste volume — a dramatic reduction in what ultimately requires land disposal.
Waste-to-energy is not a first-choice option — it should sit below reduction, reuse, and recycling in the waste management hierarchy. But as a bridge technology for residual materials that genuinely cannot be otherwise managed, it offers a significant improvement over landfilling in terms of resource recovery, volume reduction, and long-term liability.
Regional cooperation with neighboring counties could make waste-to-energy infrastructure viable at the scale needed for economic efficiency. Yamhill County working with Polk, Marion, and Washington counties on a shared facility could spread capital costs across a larger waste stream while providing each county with access to technology that would be too expensive to justify individually.
What the Third Way Requires
The Third Way is not free, and it is not automatic. It requires three things that Yamhill County's leadership has not yet demonstrated the political will to provide: serious goal-setting, meaningful investment, and accountability for results.
Serious goal-setting means adopting measurable waste diversion targets — specific percentage improvements in diversion rates over specific time periods — and treating them as genuine commitments rather than aspirational wishes. Many Oregon communities have set zero-waste goals; Yamhill County has the capacity to do the same.
Meaningful investment means allocating the resources needed to expand recycling collection, develop composting infrastructure, and support community education programs. These investments pay for themselves over time through reduced landfill costs, but they require upfront commitment. The alternative — continuing to landfill organic waste, recyclables, and other recoverable materials — is not actually the cheaper option once long-term costs are factored in.
Accountability for results means tracking progress against diversion goals, reporting publicly on outcomes, and adjusting programs when they are not meeting targets. Too often, waste management programs are established, funded modestly, and then left to operate without rigorous evaluation. The Third Way requires the same discipline that any other major public investment requires.
A Call to Action
The Yamhill County Planning Commission voted 7-0 against the landfill expansion. The Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals rejected the county's approval of that expansion. The community has made its voice heard through hearings, testimony, and legal action.
Now is the time for Yamhill County's leadership to respond to that community voice not by finding new ways to approve the same expansion, but by embracing the Third Way as the county's actual waste management strategy. The alternatives to landfill expansion are real, they are proven, and they are available. The question is whether Yamhill County's elected officials have the political courage to pursue them.
Waste Not of Yamhill County will continue to advocate for that choice. We believe Yamhill County's residents deserve a waste management system that protects their farmland, their water, and their future — not one that simply grows the landfill until the landfill has consumed everything around it. The Third Way is the path to that better future. We invite Yamhill County's leaders to walk it with us.