Old scalehouse and shop
Current Office and Processing Building
Old 20 foot pit scale
Current 80 foot scale
In the "good old days", this was how conventional landfilling took place - haulers and public customers had to drive through the trash and mud to get to the working face of the landfill to dump, often getting stuck. Most landfills still operate this way.
Waste was pushed and compacted with the track machine, then covered with dirt or
temporary cover (tarp).
The landfill was a mess of loose trash.
Now the haulers and the public bring their garbage inside our building and unload right onto a concrete floor.
The garbage then travels up the conveyer and goes through our baler. The bales are wrapped with wire and ejected out the bottom. Each bales measures about 4' x 5' and can weigh as much as 2000 pounds! The bales are placed on a trailer and hauled with a tractor up to the working face of the landfill.
The tractor uses the forks on the front end to remove the bales from the trailer and stack them neatly in rows. A tarp may be used for temporary daily cover or a thin layer of dirt.
This is what the road to the working face of the landfill looks like now. Problems such as blowing litter, birds, and rodents that plague all other conventional landfills, are virtually nonexistent at our facility.
Our drop-off recycling program using these green boxes has been very successful. Boxes are placed in all towns and transfered on a regular weekly schedule to the recycling center. This program is provided as a free service to the communities in Cass County.
Recyclables, such as cardboard, that come into our facility are baled using the same machine as the solid waste. The same is true for newspapers, magazines, metal, and office paper. The material is then stacked until we have a full load of about 30 bales of a particular material, at which time they are shipped out to various facilities that specialize in the recycling of that material.
Plastic is handled a little bit differently. When it comes into the facility, it is sorted by hand to discard all nonrecyclable material. It is then fed into this compactor - this is necessary to save room until there is enough material to process through our baler. A huge mountain of plastics can be condensed down to one or two bales. That is why its important to "squash" your plastics before placing them in the green recycling bins - if not, the bins fill up quickly and we are transporting mostly air.
This is the sorting area for our new expanded Household Hazardous Waste Collection Program. The program was started in 2005 and was set up in a small corner of our repair shop. Through an expansion grant we were able to add onto our current office building and be able to offer the program year round.
The best part of our HHW program is our Swap Shop! Usable materials that are brought in to our facility are placed in this area where the public can check them back out at no charge.
And last but not least...the newest addition to our staff - Bailey.
