Fiftieth anniversaries are often a reason to celebrate. Usually there’s punch and coffee with cookies, maybe cupcakes.
I’m not sure that will happen in this case: The Brown County Sanitary Landfill opened for “business” the summer of 1972. Happy birthday landfill!
I’ve made a couple trips there this summer, as my wife and I are cleaning out some stuff. Pam went along the last time; she had never been there.
I told someone that’s our idea of a date now.
In the past, I took a kid or two along, and that was a great adventure. I’m sure we weren’t supposed to be doing this, but if there were no other trucks dumping, we’d look around at the pile.
Once, we found a perfectly good toy horse in the rubble. It came home with us, forever to be named “Landfill Pony.”
The staff out there is always friendly and funny. A sense of humor may come from spending your working hours seeing the discards from every farm, business and home of Brown County. It’s kind of the seamy underside of a modern society. Or at least its junky underside.
Going back half a century, I’m sure the Legislature had in mind some level of consistency in handling of waste across the state by mandating counties to have a landfill. Before then, I suspect things were getting thrown, buried, or piled up in all sorts of random and haphazard settings.
I recall Sleepy Eye’s city dump being on the edge of town out the direction of our farm. I remember hearing my dad talking about what the rats would do that summer. We were close enough to have visitors from that rodent community.
I remember hearing as a kid that sometimes they migrated in large packs. Rat packs. I had a couple nightmares with that image in my head.
I can’t say our family’s efforts at waste management were especially enlightened, either. When I was young, we piled garbage on the edge of the grove. Every so often my dad would load it on the truck. We’d haul it somewhere south of here, where we shoveled it down a ravine along the Cottonwood River. Looking down there, we weren’t the only ones using that method of disposal.
When I was older, we had a pit that doubled as a morgue for dead chickens and refuse site for our house garbage. I guess that was an improvement. The good news is that was glass and metal back then. Paper went in the burn barrel. Plastics weren’t as omnipresent as they were to become.
Now when I look into the giant pit at the landfill, plastic-this and plastic-that make up the majority of the stuff in there. As wonderful as plastic is to store food, package things to ship, and a million other uses, we know what an environmental nightmare it has become. Long after our species has become extinct or moved to another solar system, the pop bottle I forgot to recycle will be buried there in Stark Township, leaching toxic crud for millennia.
Speaking of space, the only thing to compare the landfill to is a bizarre gaping lunar landscape. But it’s not a barren, colorless one. When you drive out to the spot where you dump, you look down into a great canyon with mountainsides of garbage. It’s a weird collage of our stuff with all sorts of colors, drab and bright.
It’s another matter when you get close enough to offload your own contribution to the pile. Up close, the collage becomes individual items. A mattress, an empty toy box, a broken hose, a cereal box. It all has a story. Born in a factory, shipped to a store, bought, and used by one of us, now it’s here to be buried. No funeral or visitation planned.
For most of us, it’s buried and forgotten as we move on to filling our next dumpster. For Mathiowetz Construction Company and county staff in charge out there, they don’t have the luxury of “out of sight, out of mind.” It is extremely regulated and monitored with test wells around it.
I’m glad for that. I know there is a popular attitude among some that opposes regulations and government oversight in general. I don’t want to live in their world, and I don’t really think they would, either. I like the idea that someone cares what might be leaching from the landfill and getting into the water my grandchild will drink.
I have to admit, it can be depressing going out there. This incredible giant pile is just from 25,000 of us who live in Brown County.
What in the world does the landfill for Chicago look like?
Or Mexico City?
There are environmental challenges every where we look. Disposing of our crap isn’t even at the top of the list. Safe water and healthy soils are more immediate concerns, since we need those to live every day.
Global warming overwhelms all others as we look to the future. Climate change is the existential threat to Earth and every species upon it. We are fools to ignore that.
We need, each of us, to do our little piece. While we need to keep our eye on the big issues, there is value in trying to starve the landfill. Reducing our contribution to that is part of treading lightly on this planet. After all, as we hurdle toward nine billion of us sharing this place, that should be our goal. To do as little damage as we can and leave as little behind as possible.
Creation is after all the Creator’s. We borrow it for a short time.
What if each of us used one less plastic bag a week?
Reuse a bag or bundle things together. Or take two trips to the car. Maybe you’ve got a bigger, better idea to send less stuff to the Brown County Sanitary Landfill.
Let’s do it. Consider it a 50th birthday present to the old girl.
Randy Krzmarzick farms on the home place west of Sleepy Eye where he lives with his wife, Pam.
