Says he knows how Waste Management runs a landfill

Dear Editor:

Having worked in the trash hauling industry for four years (1999-2003) with a company that contracted hauling for Waste Management in Wellford, S.C. I have working knowledge of how Waste Management runs a landfill.

When a semi-truck load of garbage comes into a landfill, it is backed onto a tipper. The trailer is unhooked from the truck, then the tipper lifts the trailer, with the door open, to a near-vertical position. The garbage falls out and bulldozers and compactors push it away.

You know what a common plastic bag does when caught by the wind? Multiply that by how many bags will be in a 25-ton load. Multiply that by the increased wind from the increased height of the landfill and you have a sky full of wind-driven debris. I personally have watched untold amounts of this debris float out of the site. With our prevailing winds, this trash will go into the Broad River and western York County. I don't think the folks downwind will enjoy that.

Speaking of downwind, the odor coming from a landfill is pretty bad. At Palmetto, they ran plastic pipe around one side that misted with a fine "chemical perfume" into the air to try and offset this smell. The rare times it actually sprayed, no change was evident.

For you bird lovers, you will no longer have to go to the coast to see seagulls. All the landfills I have seen (quite a few) have had about a "zillion" seagulls around. Nice birds. I've actually seen Waste Management employees shoot bottle rockets at flocks sitting on the trash pile. They think it's funny to do that.

Recycling is good. But 300 trucks a day represents approximately 7,500 tons of trash. The loose screws that think all that trash is going to be sorted through by 42 employees, half of which will be positions held by people who would not touch a 2-day-old Aunt Em's chicken box with a 10-foot pole, much less pick the plastic fork out of the bones, need to have their heads examined. And if these same loose screws say that very little of the trash will actually go in the pile, then someone needs to tell Waste Management that 1,550 acres is a little overkill.

There has to be landfills. There has to be a way to dispose of our waste. But the mule feed that is being fed to us and the resulting proponents' rhetoric makes one wonder what has happened to kindergarten education.

McKowns Mountain is already looking at a nuclear plant. Don't put a landfill in their laps too.

For more insightful information about landfills and Waste Management from someone whose office was inside the Waste Management's Palmetto Landfill for two years, come see me at Sadie Mae's Cafe in beautiful downtown Wilkinsville, S.C. Tom Wheeler Gaffney, S.C.