Staff Writer
FORT FAIRFIELD — While few similarities can be found between golf club, a dog’s water dish and a toothbrush, those three items will most likely share the common fate of being just another piece of the Tri-Community Landfill in Fort Fairfield. While garbage can never really be considered eco-friendly, the trash at Tri-Community is pretty much as green as it gets.
Aroostook Republican photo/Natalie Bazinet
Limestone refuse collected by owner of Morin Sanitation Carl Morin gets deposited at Tri-Community Landfill; while there isn’t much green about garbage itself, the landfill is designed to isolate the trash from the ecosystem to minimize its environmental impact.
The average person generates a half-ton of garbage a year and Tri-Community serves about 32,000 people, which means that the landfill houses 48 thousand cubic yards of garbage every year. This mountain of junk, however, is scheduled to be sealed off completely from the world once it reaches capacity, like a permanent storage unit for the lengthy life that garbage lives.
Many of the items stored in the landfill will, more often than not, outlive the individual that threw it out by centuries in some cases; according to the Maine State Planning Office, it will take an estimated 50 to 80 years for a boot sole to break down, 80 to 100 years for a tin can and 100 to 800 years for a plastic bag to decompose.
“Really and truly, a landfill is more of a storage facility,” said Mark Draper, solid waste director of Tri-Community Landfill. “This is where we’re going to put [the refuse], this is where we’re going to make sure it stays, and we’re going to make sure that the environmental impacts of it are minimized.”
Though you can’t see it, there is an intricate system of liners in place under the heaping mound of garbage that keep garbage water and other pollutants out of the groundwater, and a myriad of monitoring programs in place to ensure that all systems are functioning properly.
While the liners and leaching systems protect the ecosystem below the surface, flares ignite green house gases emitted from the sealed portion of the landfill and prevent global warming gases methane and carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere.
This two-pronged approach to containment makes sure that the garbage stays secure and its nasty bi-products neutralized. Trash will be contained so thoroughly that should the landfill theoretically be opened up decades after being closed off, newspapers will be readable and most items easily identifiable.
The fact that discarded items will be isolated from the ecosystem should not, however, be taken as encouragement for Tri-Community users to throw out everything but the kitchen sink (even though the landfill will readily accept your kitchen sink and any other building materials that you may need to get rid of).
Reducing, reusing and recycling can yield hefty cost savings and is encouraged and even enforced to some extent at the landfill. Though it’s not mandatory, Tri-Community employees make a point not to bury corrugated cardboard, which is easy to separate and recycles well. Some sanitation companies, like Morin Sanitation in Limestone include cardboard pickup as part of their regular customer service.
While some recycling assistance exists for cardboard, choosing to be a recycler doesn’t have to be a labor intensive commitment; for someone who doesn’t recycle at all, Draper suggests starting with a small step that makes a big difference.
“The easiest thing to recycle are newspaper and magazines,” he said, “you don’t have to rinse them or sort them, they’re easy to store, and it’s pretty easy for us to find a market for them.”
Once the recycling habit has been established, including plastics and cans into the mix is pretty simple. Limestone is, however, the only community that currently has the appropriate recycling receptacle for glass. Other community members can still recycle their glass by bringing it to the Tri-Community facilities.
For those who want to take their personal waste-management to the next level, the possibilities for refuse reduction are significant.
According to Draper, “If you recycled everything that our program recycles and you did your own composting at home, it would easily take care of over half the garbage a person produces. While the ingenuity of the thrifty recycler is seemingly endless, new recyclers shouldn’t get too far ahead of themselves.
“If everyone even just recycled their newspapers and magazines, it would be huge.” Draper added. “(With few exceptions), everyone in the Tri-Community area is going to need a landfill — the key is to build and operate the landfill in such a way that you’re doing it in an environmentally sound manner. That’s our goal here, and I think that we’ve demonstrated that.”
The Tri-Community Landfill of today is far cry from the refuse-heaps most people associate with the word “landfill.” Draper and his co-workers place a large emphasis on keeping the landfill tidy and well maintained to the extent that a remarkably few people are aware of exactly where the facility is located.
