A coffee cup tossed in the trash will either be reduced to ash in a giant fire or spend its days buried underground. So which one is it? The answer depends on where it was tossed. But assuming it can’t be recycled — about half the Twin Cities’ waste is now recycled — the chance it will end up in a landfill has grown dramatically since the early 1990s, according to state trash data.
While landfilling has been on the decline locally since a peak in 2006, the Twin Cities still sent more than twice as much trash to landfills in 2015 by weight than it did a quarter century ago, data show. That 774,000 tons weighs more than two Empire State Buildings. After being compacted, that’s still about a Metrodome-sized mass of leftover food, product packaging and other garbage entering the ground every two years. “There’s a lot more landfilling of waste than what people realize,” said Paul Kroening, supervising environmentalist at Hennepin County. “I think people think that we’ve really reduced our landfilling of waste to almost nothing, and that’s not really true.”
State regulators, who are pushing to redirect more waste from landfills to area incinerators, attribute the 1990s rise of landfilling largely to a 1994 U.S. Supreme Court decision that essentially blocked governments from mandating where waste must be hauled. Counties could therefore no longer require trash to be brought to their incinerators.
A subsequent decision in 2007 clarified that governments could require waste to be trucked to publicly operated facilities. Washington and Ramsey counties have since bought a processing plant in Newport with the intent of directing waste there, where metals are removed and the trash is ground up for incineration.
Landfilling has few advocates, but incinerating trash to make energy has also attracted ample controversy over the years due to the air pollution from local burners. The Hennepin Energy Resource Center in downtown Minneapolis is the frequent target of ire from environmental groups. Yet state law prioritizes burning over landfilling because it produces energy and the processing plants generally remove recyclable metals.
A growing Twin Cities population is another factor for additional landfilling. But trash data maintained by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency show that the overall tonnage of waste has risen by just 31 percent since the early 1990s, while landfilling has more than doubled.
Waste Management, the nation’s largest trash firm, owns three of the four primary landfills where the metro area sends its trash. Company spokeswoman Julie Ketchum highlighted that there has been a steady decline in landfilling over the last decade. And per capita, Twin Cities residents produce less overall waste than they did in the 1990s.
“We need to celebrate the success we have had in the last ten years instead of looking at a 30-year trend line that fails to reflect advances in waste management methods, new technologies, reduction in the amount of packaging and paper used and less waste generation per capita,” Ketchum wrote in an e-mail.
State data illustrate that where you live matters when it comes to where that tossed cup travels. Almost no Carver County trash is burned to make power, for example, compared to about 37 percent of all waste from Hennepin County. And some counties are doing a much better job than others at recycling. About 34 percent of Carver County’s waste is recycled, a far cry from Scott County’s 51 percent.
To read the full story, visit http://www.startribune.com/to-bury-or-burn-why-we-re-landfilling-more-than-before/412303123/.