Where Does Our Garbage Go?

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Green Team of Carbon County Press Release

Where does our garbage go? It may be surprising to some that the answer is that it doesn’t go to the Carbon County Landfill. Members of the Green Team of Carbon County recently met with Wade Williams of City Sanitation to help answer the question, “where does our garbage go?”

Williams has worked at City Sanitation since the 1980s and remembers a time when our garbage was simply burned in massive bonfires.

Williams reports that currently, trash is collected from individual homes in Carbon and Emery counties, including Green River. The collection trucks then compact the trash and transport it to the East Carbon Development Company (ECDC). Trash from Emery County is taken directly to the Emery County Landfill.

In both cases, trash is dumped and then buried each day. City Sanitation also collects trash from business dumpsters, construction and demolition materials, along with some scrap metals, which are recycled, and everything is taken to ECDC.

Williams suggests residents can assist in making this process more effective by breaking down or crushing empty household containers as much as possible before putting them in the 100 gallon receptacles provided by City Sanitation. He also suggests that residents take their trash container to the curb weekly, even if they are not full. Waiting a week and overfilling them often results in trash blowing out into the street and spilling while being dumped into the trucks.

He also wants to remind residents to leave their container a foot or two out from the curb and five feet from any other obstacle, such as a parked car or mailbox, to avoid any difficulties with pickup.

Williams was one of the original members of the Green Team and he feels that reusing what we can is as important as recycling. Using yard waste for home composting or repurposing building materials can reduce the tons of waste that ends up in our landfills. The Green Team of Carbon County currently recycles paper, cardboard and aluminum cans with free drop-off locations in Price.

The Environmental Protection Agency indicates that 75% of American waste is recyclable, but that only 30% is ever recycled.

If you are interested in learning more about local recycling efforts or want to find out about where to recycle in Carbon County, please check out the Green Team of Carbon County on Facebook.

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