As part of Santa Barbara’s Creek Week, the Tajiguas Landfill offered a guided tour of its new ReSource Center, allowing community members to actually see what happens with their trash after it’s thrown away. The ReSource Center, which includes the Materials Recovery Facility, an Anaerobic Digestor Facility, and an Education Center on the second floor of the Materials Recovery Facility, opened and began processing recyclables and organics out of trash on July 16.
While the landfill has been operating at its location since 1967, planning for the ReSource Center began in 2007, and construction for the facility took about two years, costing about $150 million. “It used to be that whatever you threw in the trash was thrown away forever, buried in a landfill. Your hand was the last hand to ever touch what you threw away,” said Sam Dickinson, program specialist at the ReSource Center. “Fortunately, that’s not the case anymore, but we still have to care what we’re doing.”
The Education Center explains the process that trash goes through when it arrives at the landfill, along with emphasizing the importance of reducing, reusing and recycling. Because of the Education Center’s location above the Materials Recovery Facility, dozens of bails of recyclables that were pulled from the trash during processing can be seen through large windows. “The waste reduction piece, I think, is really, really important, despite the fact that we’re sorting through all this material and diverting it,” Dickinson said. “We still want people to learn the right thing to do.”