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McCook Gazette
Letter to the Editor

Trash mountains!

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Dear Editor,

As one draws near the Denver International Airport, there appears a huge pile of earthlike substances, crawling with trucks, dozers and compactors. It is a "trash mountain," resulting from garbage and trash collected in Denver and surrounds.

We in McCook have our trash mountain, about 150 feet high at the moment, located 10 miles north and four miles west of Grant, Nebraska, in Perkins County, or about 112 miles from McCook! Hauling our garbage way up there costs our citizenry many thousands of dollars, year after year!

Why not acquire some of the rough pastureland canyons, plentiful and relatively close to McCook, and fill them with garbage? Once filled and leveled, they could be converted to productive cropland.

Byproducts of this venture could be the sale of grain, forage, trees or other appropriate agricultural products from those filled in and leveled canyons!

Another byproduct could be the collection of methane gas from the garbage pile, and use it to power municipal utilities, or sell it on the open market.

Lyle Wilcox,

professional

agriculturalist,

retired.

McCook, Nebraska

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  • The city had considered building a regional facility with other local communities due to the high cost of starting and operating a landfill but nothing ever came of it. It would be extremely expensive to build and operate, courtesy of the many state and federal regulations, but could potentially save everybody in the long run if done correctly. Then again, it might be more expensive than what everybody's doing now. Unfortunately, we haven't advanced far enough on the issue to get much of an idea what the pros and cons would be if we did build our own landfill facility.

    -- Posted by Aaron Kircher on Thu, Sep 19, 2013, at 4:27 PM
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