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Facts about Michigan’s Landfills
- Allowing more landfill construction in Michigan in the
80’s was supposed to be a way of creating greater economic development
including more jobs, sources of revenue and growth in general. Michigan did
not realize how out of control shipments of out of state garbage could become.
- Michigan has the lowest out-of-state tipping fee of all
the states at $0.21.
- Michigan’s trash issue affects 22 cities and townships,
622 square miles and 400,000 people. Our trash intake is about 4.3 million
tons. This equates to 10 tons of trash per year for every man, woman, and
child in the downriver community.
- Two of the largest landfills in Michigan are Carleton
Farms and Pine Tree Acres, Inc. The Florida-based Republic Services and
Houston’s Waste Management, Inc. own these landfills, respectively.
- Our state legislators can stop cloning, but not incoming
trash due to NAFTA trade policies.
- Landfill space in Canada is expected to be exhausted in
2010, meaning that there is only more to come within the state of Michigan.
- Trash poses a serious threat, especially coming in from
Canada, because toxic waste-such as the known carcinogens
*PCBs-that we would not allow to be dumped as municipal waste in Michigan
is sometimes mixed in with the trash we are taking from Canada.
- New Jersey is now railing 1,000 tons of demolition
debris from 600 miles away to Rockwood . Here, Montreal-based
Canadian National Railroad Co. cars
are unloaded by crane and than carried away by 15-20 huge 50 ton semi trucks.
- Often, the materials being dumped into the
Allied Waste landfill in Rockwood–12
miles away from the
Carleton Farms landfill-are from
older buildings that contain large amounts of lead, asbestos and PCBs.
- Carleton Farms Landfill was expanded in 1994 to become
one of the largest landfills in North America.
Robin Buckson/Detroit News
- Many counties throughout Michigan are dependent on the
revenues received by landfills.
- The debris, the latest of Downriver’s inherited junk
contains old walls and other structural material from demolished buildings.
This Type III garbage is the most hazardous to maintain.Keep in mind that its
not the disposal of trash that should concern us most but the long-term
storage of these hazardous substances that will have a significant impact on
us for generations to come.
*PCBs
(POLYCHLORINATED BIPHENYLS)
PCBs form a group of compounds, which were developed in the 1930s and were
mainly used in the electricity supply industry and mining. Due to their
accumulation in the food chain, production of PCBs was halted worldwide at the
beginning of the 1980s. PCBs are, however, still found in trace concentrations
in the sea and in the fatty tissue of marine animals.
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