Dear Editor:

The proposed Waste Management Landfill affects me as I own land adjoining Sardis Church and the proposed landfill property.

As a member of CLOUT, I had the opportunity to attend the Cherokee County Council meeting on Nov. 17 to hear members of CASE speak in support of the proposed Waste Management Landfill.

CASE speakers claimed that CLOUT members had spread false information. Actually, it is CASE who is misinformed. To be brief, I will only address two issues.

CASE stated that CLOUT is wrong to suggest waste will be brought in from other states, such as New York. According to the South Carolina Solid Waste Management Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2007, 1,758,149 tons of solid waste from other states were disposed of in South Carolina landfills in 2007. The leading state to ship waste to South Carolina was North Carolina, followed by New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware and Georgia. The Palmetto MSW Landfill in Spartanburg County received a total of 820,700 tons of trash, of which 403,465 tons (over 49 percent) came from out of state. On Jan. 27, 2006, The Spartanburg Herald wrote concerning the then-proposed landfill at Enoree, "Eighty-five percent of the waste that would be brought to the proposed landfill would come from out of state…" Although we do not know where the trash would originate, we know that most of it would come from out of state.

CASE stated that CLOUT is wrong to be concerned about liner leaks (and other forms of pollution). The very best landfill liners today are made of a 1/10-inch thick plastic called HDPE. Plastics are not nonreactive. Even state-of-the-art liners will allow gases to pass through over time, become brittle, swell and breakdown.

A number of household chemicals will degrade HDPE, such as household chemicals, margarine, cooking oil, vinegar, ethyl alcohol (liquor), or shoe polish. (Solid Waste Disposal, Brooklyn College, 2002).

Liners can also be damaged by machinery, settlement, stress, or freeze/thaw cycles.

This is only a fraction of the misinformation presented.

What makes me saddest, and most concerned though, is that these apparently intelligent speakers had been duped by the Waste Management presentations.

Please do not be naive. If this mega-landfill becomes a reality and scars our little county forever with mountains of trash and wasted land, it will be too late to say to Waste Management, "No, this is not what you said. Undo it."

You can't undo it. Landfills are forever. Yes, let's be progressive; let's think of the future. Hope Humphries Alexander Kings Mountain, N.C.