Achievement worth celebrating (8/29/05)

If you’ve been around long enough and your memory’s still intact, you probably remember when officials in local government started kicking around the new-fangled idea of something called a “sanitary landfill.”

That was only about 35 years ago.

Up until then, every community had its own dump, an unregulated place where everything from old refrigerators to dead cats accumulated. Every farm had its own spot for dumping, preferably out of sight of the farmhouse. Household trash was simply burned in a barrel out back.

The notion that there might be a better way came along in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the environmental movement was born.

There were skeptics, of course. There always are; environmentalists still have to deal with them today.

But it turns out they were right on this one. There was a better way.

Some of those same early environmentalists also used to call for collecting methane gas generated by decomposing garbage and using it for fuel.

Those folks were largely ridiculed at the time.

But, again, it turns out they were right.

Who could have imagined back in the early 1970s — when the town dump was the height of local environmental public policy — that the day would come when methane captured from the Jay County Landfill would be used to generate electricity for the Jay County REMC?

If you’d made that suggestion back in, say, 1971, you would have been laughed out of town.

Last week’s dedication of a power generating plant at the landfill, developed by the Wabash Valley Power Association and Waste Management of Indiana, was a historic milestone.

It’s a significant measure of how far we’ve come in terms public policy and environmental vision.

As always, there’s plenty more to be done. Reducing the waste stream continues to be an enormous challenge.

But last week’s milestone is one to be proud of. It’s a moment worth savoring. — J.R.

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