If you haven't viewed the recent PostBulletin.com video that was filmed at Olmsted County's Kalmar Landfill, it's worth checking out.
The feature role is played by a gargantuan piece of machinery called the Terminator 6000. (Yes, we like the name, too.) It's like a giant wood chipper — except this thing can reduce couches, mattresses, carpet rolls and other large, unwieldy items into piles of industrial mulch.
The county hasn't yet decided to buy its own Terminator (this one was a demonstrator), but the proposal currently under consideration appears to have a lot of merit.
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The plan is to begin excavating garbage from an area in the landfill that's known as Cell 6. It contains 85,000 yards of refuse that would be fed into a shredder. Scrap metal would be removed and sold, and the remaining materials would be hauled to the county's waste-to-energy incinerator in southeast Rochester, which currently isn't receiving the 400 tons of garbage it can handle every day.
The plan would have many benefits, but the biggest is that Olmsted County wouldn't need to look for a new landfill site for a very long time — perhaps a century. And we can only hope that in the next few decades, we'll continue to reduce the amount of trash we produce, increase our recycling efforts and find new, even more efficient ways to turn garbage into energy.
Granted, the jury is still out as to whether this expansion of the county's waste-to-energy effort will be cost-effective. The shredder alone would cost $650,000, and burning more trash means more transportation costs. It's possible that when all the numbers are crunched, the county would be money ahead by maintaining the status quo, at least for now.
But even if the dollars don't balance out perfectly, we see this as a pay-me-now or pay-me-later situation — and we prefer the proactive approach. After all, the shredding equipment won't get cheaper between now and 2030, when the Kalmar Landfill will reach capacity. We won't guess the price of creating a new landfill at that time, but suffice to say that it would make a shredder seem like a bargain.
Perhaps, to bring in a little extra revenue, the county could let people pay a small fee for the right to watch their 70s-era couch go through the Terminator's jaws. Just a thought.
