News Photo by Julie Riddle Bill Lakies, of PAC Sanitation, picks up garbage in Presque Isle County on Friday.

ALPENA — With extra time on their hands and projects on their minds, Alpena County residents created more trash in 2021 than in any year in at least a decade, the state reported this week.

In the last fiscal year, Alpena residents sent up to 10% more household and commercial waste to the Montmorency-Oscoda-Alpena Solid Waste Management Authority in Atlanta over the previous year.

Numerous truckloads of trash meant residents were hard at work on projects long postponed, said landfill administrator Connie Gerrie.

Waste levels have dropped to pre-pandemic levels in the first months of 2022, and a change in reporting methods during 2021 could account for some of the dramatic increase shown by state reports, Gerrie said.

During the last two years, though, garbage truck drivers raced to haul away the piles of discarded items residents left on their curbs, said Bill Lakies, collecting garbage in Presque Isle County on behalf of PAC Sanitation on Friday.

“It’s just been go, go, go, go,” Lakies said. “It’s a lot of trash.”

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The Montmorency County landfill in fiscal year 2021 took in nearly 80,000 cubic yards from Alpena County, more than in any year since at least 2011, according to an annual report on solid waste released this week by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy’s Materials Management Division.

The Montmorency County landfill accepts solid waste from other parts of Northeast Michigan and from other counties in the state as well as from Alpena County.

With new customers added regularly and the quantity of garbage noticeably increased in the past two years, sanitation companies haven’t been able to keep up with routine maintenance on their vehicles, Lakies reported.

“We’re beating the snot out of these trucks,” he said, describing his company’s creative efforts to keep up with collection, including, in a pinch, the use of trailers pulled behind pickup trucks.

During pandemic lockdowns and restrictions that kept some people home, many garbage truck drivers reported garbage heaped on curbs in place of the usual bag or can, Gerrie said.

Residents kept busy cleaning out basements and garages and remodeling portions of their homes at a record pace, based on the types of trash that showed up at the landfill, she said.

“We could hardly keep up,” she said. “It was just non-stop.”

Discarded building materials and the remains of torn-down buildings indicated the pandemic didn’t slow down development in the region, Gerrie observed.

Construction and demolition waste discarded by Alpena County residents and businesses nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021, according to the state report.

Residents may have eased up on their flurry of cleaning and construction, as first-quarter landfill intake numbers have dropped back to those of 2018, when the landfill took in 11% less solid waste for the year than in 2021.

At the GFL Environmental landfill near Onaway, which accepts solid waste from Presque Isle County as well as other counties and Canada, Presque Isle County residents added 15,500 cubic yards of household waste in 2021, compared to about 13,800 cubic yards in 2020.

EGLE estimates the Montmorency County landfill has about 14 years of life left, the same estimate it gave in its 2020 solid waste report. The Onaway landfill should last another five years if present conditions continue, the state said.

Statewide, Michiganders decreased their landfill use by a little more than 1% in 2021 compared to the previous year.

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693 or jriddle@thealpenanews.com. Follow her on Twitter @jriddleX.