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PrintLandfill as tourist attraction?
The author resurrects a novel idea about the grand mountain of trash at the county dump.
Jeffry Konczal
I have been to the mountain, and I have seen the promised landfill.
Some years ago, a bunch of local musicians put together a CD called Columbus Needs a Mountain, a suggestion that the region’s lack of any notable geographic feature might have something to do with the city’s lack of any notable personality.
One song, “Ballad of Mt. Lashutka,” by Mike Rep and His Downtown Bigwig Band, pointed out that Columbus already has a mountain, namely the huge pile of trash in the landfill looming over the countryside off I-71 south of town. Why not name it after Greg Lashutka, our somewhat mountainous mayor at the time, Mr. Rep asked, and start touting it as a tourist attraction?
As far as plans for civic attention-getters go, this falls somewhere between a gruesome 400-foot statue of Christopher Columbus and a giant blue-glass snake coiling across the Broad Street Bridge (the rare great idea, sadly dismissed). Putting aside a local punk-rocker’s satiric impulse, the song’s notion wasn’t as stupid as it sounds. Columbus has trotted out soccer, hockey and an international flower show with no appreciable uptick in our national profile. Are you gonna turn your nose up at a landfill? (Hey, that’s funny. Already we have a marketing slogan.)
The idea is a testament to the fine work the landfill guys do keeping our gigantic garbage dump out of mind so Franklin Countians can lead their lives with little worry about where their refuse goes. And this landfill is full of untapped potential. I’m not talking about the-waste-stream-is-a-valuable-resource/let’s-turn-garbage-into-energy proposals championed by environmental wonks. They’re already doing that kind of stuff down there on London-Groveport Road and frankly it’s pretty boring.
Because we have a great landfill. A humdinger of a landfill. A landfill that keeps other landfill operators up envious at night, the stench of that day’s dump still ripe in their sinuses. The hygiene, efficiency and modernity of the Franklin County landfill are well-known among the international waste-management cognoscenti. They come from all corners of the globe: sanitation delegations from China, cadres of garbage experts from former Soviet republics, buses full of schoolchildren from God knows where.
They come to glean and take home what they can from observing the high-tech operation of our landfill (except for the kids on the field trips, of course). Very educational. What they have not come to see is the city off to the north, which is too bad, because there’s no better place to gaze upon Columbus than from the top of Mt. Lashutka.
The view of our city from up there shows precisely why Columbus needs a mountain. It’s a revelation, really: You’ve never seen the city like this. The Capital City panorama. It may be the best-kept secret in town. If it were, oh, an observation tower or a high bluff at a Metro Park, it would be a legitimate tourist draw, a popular spot for amateur photographers, a new vantage point for Red, White & Boom! The top of the landfill is, in fact, the second-highest point in Franklin County, 1,005 feet above sea level.
It is a testament to what man can accomplish by dumping garbage in the same spot for 25 years.
It’s a hot August day, somewhere in the low 90s, but thankfully the humid spell has broken and it’s possible to breathe normally. And it does not stink. I’ve got all the windows down as I turn west off I-71 on London-Groveport Road (Rt. 665 if you prefer). A dirt hill looms over my left and I know the landfill’s back there somewhere, but I can’t smell it.
The Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, the governmental group that runs the landfill, has offices about a mile from the highway and the entire stretch is stench-free. SWACO’s headquarters is in a tidy, new-looking building that appears as if it were designed by the same people who did the state’s spiffy highway rest areas. The lawns are manicured; there’s a pond, shade trees, decorative flora.
And there’s John Remy, still in the same fine voice I remember from his days at WTVN radio, who is now SWACO’s communications director and the guy who’s going to guide me around the landfill. Remy was never one to stand on ceremony and I’d told him earlier I hoped to just hang around, check things out on my own. No dice: “Trust me,” he says, “you don’t want to be just wandering around up there.”
We pile into a pickup and I ask if this is one of the famous SWACO vehicles that runs on compressed natural gas derived from the methane sucked out of the landfill. There are 13 of them, I’m told, including a riding lawn mower and a city of Columbus “packer” truck (the big ones that roll down your street), but this isn’t one. “No, it’s diesel,” Remy says. “A noisy diesel.”
I’ve only been to a landfill once before (it was not in Ohio). Quite the eye-opening experience. We were clearing out the house, so I rented a truck, loaded it up and headed to the county landfill. “Just take it on up the hill there,” the guy said, pointing at a steep muddy spot with a peak under siege by a raucous flock of big ugly birds. He was serious, I was horrified. There’s a guy on the hill waving at me to back up toward the edge of a cliff apparently made of trash. I get out of the air-conditioned cab and the vague odor I’d been noticing became lethal. The funk rushed up, struck me blind and lodged so deep in my brain it will be there forever. And the guy was still back there waving as if he were parking cars at the Ohio State Fair. So I start heaving stuff—a huge old desk, chairs, broken lamps—out of the back of the truck over a trash precipice down a trash hill, rolling, crashing, scattering the birds. Kind of exhilarating, really.
My story leaves Remy shaking his head. That is not the way it works on London-Groveport Road. We drive through the landfill entrance, bordered by a dirt hill that looks like a tall levee, to the scale house where vehicles and their loads are weighed. Unlike my other landfill, they don’t require a deposit to make sure nobody dumps stuff and races off without paying the fee. “No, we’ll trust you,” Remy says.
The scale house serves as the screening point for the junk you can’t bring into the landfill: appliances, asbestos, ammunition(!), tires, computers, not to mention radioactive waste (they have a scanner to detect it). A sign says the dumping fee is $36.75 per ton. The sign is the kind that can be changed easily, as this one surely will. The fee is bound to rise, but SWACO people are proud it’s lower than a vast majority of private landfills and much lower than most other publicly owned ones.
Just past the scale house is the “residential drop-off,” a parking lot overlooking a trailer-size dumpster. There are three pickups out here today, guys in the back tossing what looks mainly like construction debris into the trailer. One dude in a ball cap is carefully removing broken window frames with glass shards from his truck. He’s in construction: “I come out here probably once, twice a week.” His neighbor, in a bigger pickup with more trash and two helpers, is in the same business. “Sometimes I think I might as well live out here,” he says.
Guys like this account for very little of the landfill volume, somewhere between 1 and 3 percent. They can get in and out fast, and they don’t have to drive up any hills. That’s reserved for the big boys, the packer trucks and the tractor-trailers rumbling slowly past us. And they do go slow: SWACO has even resorted to bringing in a radar gun on occasion. “We put 400 trucks a day through here,” Remy says. “That’s going to kick up a lot of dust.”
The place feels more like a construction site than a garbage dump. “Sterile” certainly doesn’t describe it, “but “orderly” and “safe” come to mind, as does, ah, “unmalodorous.” I don’t know if it’s the wind or what, but I have yet to catch a whiff of anything repulsive. The landfill doesn’t have any close neighbors (the closest is a crossroads at Rt. 62 called Pleasant Corners, and there’s a fast-food/gas station/hotel enclave across the I-71 interchange to the east), but SWACO’s not taking any chances.
To the extent that a pile of garbage 145 feet high can be unobtrusive, SWACO has achieved it. Without the benefit of a rural, distant site, it has no choice, Remy says: “We’re an urban landfill.”
A fair amount of the SWACO budget goes to mitigating a landfill’s natural noxiousness. The landfill is actually a series of 30- to 40-foot deep “cells”—compartments lined, bricked and plumbed, as in pipes carrying out the “garbage juice,” which is the liquid from leached garbage. Before a cell is full, the trash gets each night a sprayed mixture of an organic compound and cement dust. “We can’t just leave it sitting there,” Remy says.
As each cell is sealed, a layer of dirt is spread over the top (this site was chosen back in the early ’80s precisely because of heavy clay deposits in the soil), which is why the landfill appears to be made of dirt rather than garbage. There’s enough room at the landfill right now to keep constructing these cells for another 23 years, SWACO says. The massive trucks rolling on the landfill roads have their weight well-supported. “We’re riding on trash right now,” Remy says as he drives.
Every 20 yards or so, poles with spigots on top sprout from the ground emitting regular bursts of a spray that Remy says is an organic compound designed to quell the smell. They’re working well today, it seems, but “when it’s 98 percent humidity, there’s not much you can do,” he says.
The landfill even has a truck wash in its exit lane. On muddy days, workers bring long poles out to knock off stubborn debris. “That’s so all that crap off the truck doesn’t end up all over the highway,” Remy says. SWACO, in an above-and-beyond effort, even sends a crew out to pick up litter on the roads around Grove City, lest the denizens of the closest town blame the landfill. The roads of the landfill are sprayed to keep the dust down, and the water runoff is recycled.
Very impressive. But when do we see the trash? I know it’s here somewhere, even if I can’t smell it. Then, suddenly, there it is: a vast land of waste, a scene from Dante’s Inferno, a hill from hell. The Garbage of Franklin County.
The landfill receives an average of more than 3,000 tons of trash per day, Remy says, and will top 800,000 tons for the year. Virtually every bit of garbage in Franklin County comes (or is supposed to come) here. You fill your Hefty bags, put them in the cans, drag them to the curb and they end up at this spot. And I can tell you, as a fellow Franklin Countian, we are all a bunch of pigs.
Lord, what have we come to? “You see people’s lives here,” Remy says as I stare, dumbstruck. “You see people’s lives and it’s not a pretty sight.”
We are at the bottom of a steep hill made entirely of garbage, and it appears to be moving, undulating, occasionally spewing forth something recognizable: a blue chair, a pumpkin (“That’s a little out of season,” Remy says), the remnants of a sign from a Mexican restaurant.
Remy recalls some of the odder items he’s seen in his eight years at SWACO: “One guy brought a boat in, a 30-foot boat.” Pets? “Yeah.” Bodies? Remy’s ready for this one: “No bodies. A couple of searches, though.” Landfill director Jack Stacy tells me later, “Almost every day I see something and I think, ‘Yeah, I guess people throw those away, too.’ ” (As Remy and I drive away, we see a guy with a flatbed holding three hot tubs.)
The place where the actual dumping occurs is called the “working face.” It moves around as one spot is filled, prepared for its cell, and the next spot on the mountain is opened up. At the top, the ledge of earth over the next pit, the big trucks unload and the trash cascades down where two or three “compactors,” 60-ton bulldozers with big steel knobs instead of treads, roll over and over the trash to begin the process of mashing and packing and reducing the garbage to something that can be covered with clay and dirt and kept out of sight.
The stars of this show are the “tippers,” giant levers that upend the trailers that carry the biggest loads. They’re at the apex of the working face and they’re truly an awesome sight as one end rises slowly to the sky and out the other end flows, well, you never know. It might just be a load of cardboard (which drives Remy crazy: “Look at that—that’s all recyclable!”) or it might be something that starts as a stream of unidentifiable liquid then turns into something altogether more sinister but still unidentifiable. Anything that doesn’t spill down the hill is shoved over by bulldozers.
There could be a body in one of these things. There could be several bodies, and they would go undetected by the time one of the compactors goes to work and then it’s too late. “Are there things in there that shouldn’t be there?” Remy says. “Who knows?”
The compactors and bulldozers (called “yellow iron” by the guys who drive them), the packers and the tractor-trailers—there might be a dozen of them coming and going at any given time and it would indeed be unwise to wander among them. They have radios in their cabs to synchronize their maneuvers, but it’s still a wonder to watch these behemoths in action. “It’s like a symphony, really,” Remy says.
Yet even the working face remains relatively odor-free. “You want stinky?” Remy asks. We go to see one load that’s just been dumped, but hasn’t been sent into the pit: a thousand shiny objects that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be tins of cat food. I wish I hadn’t inspected. The smell is indescribable. A thousand dead cats would not smell as bad.
There’s no better time for Remy to finally take me to the top of the trash mountain. It’s my way to avoid talking to them about waste-management issues. Remy and his boss, SWACO exec Ron Mills, perhaps feeling as if it’s their jobs, are eager to talk about SWACO finances, a coming rate hike and trash as renewable energy to wean us off foreign oil. I just want to stand on the second-highest point in Franklin County.
The peak itself is dirt and grass, with turkey buzzards loath to move even for a pickup truck. But the view is astonishing. It’s a clear day and I can see the outlines of the LeVeque tower and the Huntington building and everything else west to east, from the Hilltop to Reynoldsburg (at least I think it’s Reynoldsburg). If Remy weren’t here, I’d break into song, like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. “The hills are alive. . . .”
Old landfills can be reused in a number of ways. We have our own Phoenix golf course on the old Jackson Pike landfill; other places have gone with commercial use, botanical gardens, even ski slopes. But this landfill will be operating for decades, if not longer. It just seems a shame to waste it in the meantime.
Remy and Mills do not share my enthusiasm. I suggest a huge neon sign, a giant torch, fireworks—they respond politely and change the subject. Ah, well.
By the way, I decided to check out the highest point in Franklin County, which, according to Franklin County Engineer Dean Pringle, is off Rt. 62 in the northeast corner near the Licking County line. I drive north on Tippett Road from Rt. 62 with my county engineer’s map and stop my car at the county line marker to look southwest at the spot, a grand 1,132 feet above sea level. The highest point in Franklin County is farmland. Flat farmland.
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the county, we have a true marvel that stretches to the heavens. Franklin County may churn out a hell of a lot of garbage, but by God we know what to do with it. We have a majestic peak that guards the southern approaches to our city. As newcomers roll up I-71, they have to wonder, “Whoa! What is that?”
As I said before, are you gonna turn your nose up at a landfill?
Jeff Long is a freelance writer.
