Cloaked below the foothills on South Taft Hill Road sits a multicolored behemoth of sun-bleached waste and busy earth movers. Most call it the dump.
It seems like a bottomless tribute to buried excess.
The future of waste in our county, however, is in seven piles on the south side of the property – discarded heaps of scrap metal, branches, tires, mattresses, and grass sitting motionless atop the sand.
This is diversion: an attempt to recycle more stuff instead of burying it.
Residential and commercial customers haul in pertinent materials to this spot, sort them, and leave them in these diversion piles, later removed and taken to a recycler.
The Larimer County Landfill itself, which opened 1963, will be full in little over a year.
County officials say it receives around 350,000 tons of waste every year, 8,000-12,000 customers a day.
To meet needs, the county has begun construction on a new 629-acre site north of Wellington.
Nearly 20 years ago Larimer County purchased the plot with the goal to balance accessibility and distance from residents.
“People don’t want to have a landfill in their backyard,” said Jeremy Groves, solid waste operations manager.
Other than the Wellington property, he said, “There is nowhere to build a landfill.”
He said development across Colorado leaves less and less space for landfills which used to be “out in the middle of nowhere.”
Because of this, he said, county officials want the property north of Wellington to be “the last landfill they ever build – ever.”
To do this, more waste must be recycled. The way forward, he said, is through diversion.
Along the dirt road that travels onto the property and up to the landfill is a detour into the diversion area, separated piles of recyclable waste:
- Tires – some shredded, some soon to be.
- Wooden pallets.
- Freon-containing scrap metal.
- Non-freon-containing scrap metal.
- Used mattresses.
- Green waste – leaves, grass, and bush.
- Wood waste – branches and tree trucks.
Even once the current landfill is full, said Groves, the diversion, along with massive green recycling bins on the north side of the landfill operation, will stay where it is — just because the location is known to residents.
“It’s already a main hub,” Groves said. “We’d like to expand and keep growing the diversion area here at this campus.”
Though, he does report complications of diversion.
Often, customers leave the wrong type of material in a pile. When metal (for example) gets left in the green waste, it must be pulled out or an “end market” (material recycler) won’t take it.
He said, “People get lazy.”
“The cleaner we can get people to bring it [material] into us, the more successful the program will be,” he said.
He said the success of the recycling and diversion programs will hinge on how clean materials are.
The big challenge, he said, is “constantly trying to police people to do the right thing. Recycling is not free.”
The material must be separated correctly, then transported to an end-market that could be over a hundred miles away. There it is processed again before any recycling begins.
For the county’s planned diversion operation to work, he said, “The end market has to be sustainable.”
He pointed to a future where 80% or 90% of all waste is recycled.
He’s worked for several commercial landfills, and he said Larimer County’s operation “does more for diversion” than any private one he’s worked at.
Nationally, enough permitted space remains for landfills to dissuade private companies from doing much diversion. He said diversion would be “off the charts” if it was harder to find places to build landfills.
