Hullabaloo gone; landfill quietly expands in planned, ‘state-of-the-art’ fashion on Marion’s north edge

MARION - Certain places can make a person feel smaller and the bigger things larger.

Shorelines, mountaintops, monasteries ...

The same thing just might happen, too, in the unlikeliest spot - at the bottom of the new, still-empty pit, called a “cell,” at the Cedar Rapids/Linn County Solid Waste Agency's Site 2 landfill at County Home Road near Highway 13.

The agency is holding an open house from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., Friday, with hot dogs and refreshments, to show off the brand-new, $3.3-million, 9-acre cell that in the weeks ahead will begin to take in garbage from the metro area and every corner of Linn County.

The new cell is the second phase of a five-phase landfill expansion, which has been in the plans for some time and which will extend the life of the Site 2 landfill out to 2035 or longer.

The base of the new cell is 60 feet below ground level and some 120 feet below the top of an earlier cell, now filled, closed, capped, grass-covered and towering overhead.

It will take more than five years for the 190,000 tons of garbage that come into the Site 2 landfill every year to grow, load by load, 120 feet higher and bring the life of the latest cell to conclusion.

Karmin McShane, the solid waste agency's executive director, hopes that the public's visit to the base of the landfill's newest cell will get people to see the science and engineering and care that go into a modern-day landfill.

“We want to show them that it is a state-of-the-art facility and it is a public service and here's how we do it and why we do it,” she says. “People who remember the open dump of 1972 here will be pleasantly surprised.”

McShane hopes, too, that people will come to think about trash in a new, more thoughtful light.

For this moment in time, the pit's base and sides are in pristine shape. Underneath is a layer of clay, which is covered by a liner of high-density polyethylene. Over the liner is sand on the pit's bottom and a layer of tire chips on the sides to keep the slopes stable and to improve drainage. In total, there is material from 11,000 tons of old tires, an amount equal in weight to a little more than 1 million tires, according to the agency's rough math.

Those who stand in the bottom of the new cell will be able to look to the side and see the phase-one expansion cell, which opened in 2008 and is busy at work, taking in garbage. You're apt to hear McShane and other agency employees talk about recycling, too.

 “I want them to see what they are throwing away,” she says. “When I watch loads come in, I'm like, ‘Man, we can do a better job.'”

The Site 2 landfill's history reaches back to 1972 when it opened as county landfill. The city and county and the county's small towns joined forces in 1994 to create one solid waste agency. The agency then took control of what is now called the Site 2 landfill as well as the Site 1 landfill, affectionately known as Mount Trashmore, which looms just south of downtown Cedar Rapids.

The agency closed Site 1 in July 2006 only to reopen it in 2008 as a repository for debris from the June 2008 flood.

In 2005, the city of Marion went to court to block the agency's decision to expand Site 2 on Marion's border, and then dropped the lawsuit in late 2005. In turn, the agency agreed to limit the height of new cells at the landfill and to increase the buffer from 300 feet to more than 1,000 feet between the landfill and adjoining property. The 264-acre landfill site will use 118 acres to landfill garbage. The agency also is constructing a wetland and trails and has built a 20-acre pond that will one day be a fishing venue.

In addition, the agency has reserved a spot on its nine-member board for a Marion resident, a spot held by Charlie Kress.

“I don't like landfills, and I don't like the fact that we have one out there,” says Kress. “But this is probably the best-run landfill you can find.”

Kress is a member of wastenotIOWA, an anti-landfill group that has been working to bring a new technology, called plasma arc, to Marion as an alternative to landfilling. Plasma arc zaps garbage into energy.