Trash trend: Cities sell garbage to rural areas

New police cars, fire trucks
A similar flow of cash has certainly helped places like Fox Township.

“We’re rich,” Keller said, noting the township has bought new police cars and fire trucks with trash tipping fees. “We have less than 4,000 people living here, and we have millions of dollars in the bank.”

Despite the concerns of environmentalists, the risks for these communities are also few, said Mickey Flood, chief executive and founder of IESI Corp., a Fort Worth, Texas company that owns landfills throughout the eastern part of the country.

Standard landfills don’t accept hazardous materials, although keeping every hypodermic needle or can of oil out continues to be a challenge. Waste is also transported in sealed containers that are designed to be leak-proof. All water that touches garbage is required to be treated for pollutants, Flood said.

“Landfills in the United States are not environmental issues,” he said. “They are strictly political.”

'Where is their incentive' to dump less?
Still, problems occasionally arise.

In December 2003, two schools near a landfill in northeastern Pennsylvania temporarily shut down when an overwhelming stink made it impossible for students to concentrate in class. Investigators blamed the stench on decaying gypsum board and made adjustments to a system that extracts vapors from the trash and burns them off.

And the Sierra Club's Town raises this point: “Transporting all of this garbage so far away means that the people that generate it don’t have to deal with its consequences. And if that’s the case, where is their incentive to create less of it?”

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