Call them high-tech, state-of-the-art or whatever, it doesn’t change Joanna Hoelscher’s mind about landfills.
“Hey, they’re all holes in the ground,” said Hoelscher, director of the Illinois Office of Citizens for a Better Environment, the key environmental public interest group working on solid waste issues in Illinois. “The only thing we’re doing different now is that we’re putting liners in them, and leachate collection systems so that they don’t start to leak within 10 to 15 years. Maybe they start to leak within 25 or 30 years. But they’re still basically holes in the ground.”
Citizens for a Better Environment, which has its regional group headquartered in Chicago and offices in Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, has joined the fight against the Bartlett balefill and the creation of new landfills and incinerators as a solution to the trash problem.
They have offered information and technical support for local groups fighting the balefill, such as Citizens Against the Balefill, an almost 500-member group that has held demonstrations and informational campaigns since its founding in 1985.
Hoelscher concedes that even in the best of worlds, some trash would have to be landfilled. Her concern is where landfills are sited, the types of things thrown into them and the effect new landfills will have on recycling and composting programs.
“Building huge new landfills and incinerators is not the way to do it,” Hoelscher said. “If that disposal capacity is there, local public officials are going to take the easy way out.”
Money and effort put into landfills could be better used to promote recycling and especially composting, which she called the fastest growing technology in municipal waste management. She points to a study conducted by the National Audubon Society and Procter & Gamble in the Connecticut towns of Fairfield and Greenwich, where households were able to sort out 30 percent of their solid waste for composting after sorting out 35 to 50 percent for recycling.
