There's a battle brewing over what to do with the two millions tons of trash managed by Miami-Dade County each year.
With local landfills running out of room, county commissioners may soon have to decide on whether they'll keep taking the trash out of town.
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WATCH HEREWhen you toss out your trash in Miami-Dade, it gets taken to a transfer station off the Palmetto Expressway and Coral Way, where crews compact everything from yard waste to cardboard to kitchen scraps.
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Some loads go to local landfills, while others head out of town to landfills in central Florida and beyond.
Trash is dumped into 23-ton capacity containers that are loaded onto a train. Right now, five county-owned rail cars make two trips a day to take 230 tons of trash out of Miami-Dade.
But the county also pays other companies to train away much of its trash, and plans on adding dozens more of its own rail containers.
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Miami-Dade's Chief Utilities and Regulatory Services Officer Roy Coley insists taking out the trash by train makes sense.
"We're transitioning all that we can to the rail because it's cheaper, more efficient and saving money," Coley said. "This is the cheapest option for Miami-Dade County for at least the next ten to twenty years."
County commissioners are searching for a long term garbage solution since Miami-Dade's incinerator in Doral caught fire two years ago, and local leaders have faced backlash at proposals to build a new one.
Coley said training away trash is already working.
"We have contracts with multiple landfills, we now have contracts with rail service, because shipping by rail is much cheaper and environmentally friendly because the rail service we're using… it's compressed natural gas. If you put it on trucks, you're using diesel fuel," Coley said.
But how cheap is it? The county's solid waste department reports spending about $45 million hauling away garbage in fiscal year 2022-2023, the same year the waste-to-energy incinerator in Doral caught fire.
The following year, the price tag went up to $62 million.
"When you say you're spending more money on hauling out than you used to, well you've gotta reconcile that against the cost of running waste-to-energy, so it doesn't net out more money," Coley said.
Coley said because of contract deals, he expects the hauling price to remain fairly stable, where South Florida families would only see an increase of a few dollars in trash fees each year over the next ten years.
But what about the sustainability of training out the trash?
"Our contracts currently at multiple contracted landfill sites is for 30 years. Those sites represent to us that they have enough space for 70 to 100 years," Coley said.
Next week, commissioners are set to decide whether the county keeps taking the trash out of town or figures out another solution.
