New medical waste facility approved to operate in Northgate after neighborhood opposition

A new medical waste facility has gotten city approval to open in Salem’s Northgate neighborhood, processing some trash formerly burned at the Brooks incinerator which closes in June.

The new facility will dispose of medical waste like biological waste, needles and petri dishes.

In mid March, the city’s hearings officer approved a conditional permit for Salem-based Bio Clean Industries to install the machine at 1450 McDonald St. N.E. in the Northgate neighborhood.

The permit doesn’t indicate when the facility will begin operating, and Bio Clean did not answer a question from Salem Reporter about its expected timeline.

Once operating, the facility will take on waste that has been stored at the Brooks garbage incinerator. That incinerator stopped accepting new waste at the end of 2024, prompting the city and Marion County to substantially raise medical waste disposal rates.

The Reworld incinerator in Brooks was originally slated to close last December until the Marion County Board of Commissioners voted to extend operations to June for the incinerator to burn off remaining waste.

“It would fill the void left by the closing of the Reworld facility and provide a necessary use to the area,” a city of Salem staff report on the new facility said. “In doing so, staff anticipates amending the waste collection rates and charges again by reducing rates to almost a third of the cost.”

In December, the Marion County Board of Commissioners approved a 70% hike on medical waste disposal, blaming it on the incinerator’s closure.

The city also approved a 168% rate increase on hospital waste disposal in January that took effect Feb. 1 this year. Salem Health said the increase would cost them about $2 million a year.

Bio Clean’s waste facility will shred and treat medical waste from Marion and Multnomah counties and send it to a landfill. The specific landfill is not yet determined, according to the report.

Once waste arrives at the facility, it will be loaded into the machine which then shreds the waste and treats it with ozone, a gas made of oxygen. After that, the waste is not infectious and can be transported to a regular landfill.

The company chose the location because it will be cheaper to operate a waste facility in Salem and reduce carbon emissions produced from traveling out to Boise, where Salem’s medical waste is currently taken.

“The ability of Marion County and the State to locate this type of use outside of a City or on public land is limited and there is no indication that the public sector is pursuing that option at this time,” Margaret Gander-Vo, the lawyer representing Bio Clean, said in an email included in the city report. She said that using land labeled by the city as general industrial, “allows for disposal rates to remain lower than they might be if the operation was operated outside of the City of Salem.”

She did not respond to a question about how much waste the facility would process.

Neighborhood concerns

Northgate and Highland Neighborhood Associations opposed the waste facility early on in the process for a number of reasons, including health concerns, noise levels and nearby businesses and residences.

The facility is located in Northgate, near its border with Highland.

Emails from Northgate Neighborhood Association secretary Kaethe Mentrum show that members of the association worried about the machine’s safety and whether it could leak pollution into the air.

In responses to Mentrum, which are included in the city report, Gander-Vo said the machine does not pose an environmental risk to the neighborhood and the only gas that could be released is ozone, which quickly turns back to oxygen.

An email from Highland Neighborhood Association chair Leigh Tracey-Gaynair said the machine’s proposed use conflicted with Highland and Northgate’s land use visions, which lay out neighborhood goals like green spaces and mixed-use developments.

The waste facility “would negatively impact nearby residential areas,” and is “incompatible with surrounding businesses and senior center,” Tracey-Gaynair said in a January email to the city. 

Neither neighborhood association filed an appeal of the hearings officer’s approval of Bio Clean’s permit, which happened in mid-March.

Contact reporter Madeleine Moore: [email protected].

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