Without its new $10 million raincoat, the old landfill was found to leach harmful contaminants into the groundwater.
SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): Teton County has trucked its trash since 1989 to a landfill near Idaho Falls. But when it comes to cleaning up the four decades of trash dumped before that, the county only recently has completed a decade of highly coordinated work between local, state and federal government to get the final stamp of approval on cleaning up the old landfill. While a subterranean collection of midcentury magazines wasn’t the goal of the “Taming the Wild Waste” project, which formally finished this March, high water quality depended on it.
Without its new $10 million raincoat, the old landfill was found to leach harmful contaminants into the groundwater. Inevitably, it still will. The landfill is now lined only on the top, not the bottom, said Brenda Ashworth, Teton County superintendent of solid waste and recycling. “Zero isn’t really an option for us,” she said. Since the completion of the landfill cap, however, the level and number of contaminants are expected to hover safely below standards set by the state.
Ashworth is expecting it to stay that way indefinitely. Even in an earthquake, the worst that could happen is the garbage mound might slump — not crash in a wet slurry onto Highway 89 below. Why capping the landfill took more than a decade was a function of the weather, sensitivity and scale. Excavating 315,000 pickup trucks worth of waste alone from the old Horsethief Canyon landfill and trucking it to an adjacent U.S. Forest Service site with the proper grade took three years, broken into frenzied summer construction seasons.
Courtesy: www.wasteadvantagemag.com
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