We provide affordable services for all garbage collection recycling in our
department. We have seven divisions of our 58 staff. The majority of those go
out on the residential accounts with over 29,000 separate accounts that's
collected weekly. Our last division is our household hazardous waste division
which collects materials from residents and residents in the city and residents
of Cass County that we want to keep out of the landfill. So those would be
hazardous materials such as sprays, paints, and electronics. The bulk of that
material is recycled properly. What can't be recycled is disposed of at a
proper location. The landfill brings in 220,000 tons per year. So that's
equivalent to about between six and seven hundred tons a day. So there's
multiple projects that go on at the landfill each year. Someone has to do a
cell construction which a cell is where all the garbage is placed. There are some
closure projects that we have to keep up on as well and a formal closure entails
thousands of yards of dirt to be moved, compacted, placed, and tested. So we've
been able to perform those projects as well and within the last year we've
completed two of those projects encompassing about ten total acres and
it saved the city about seven hundred thousand dollars. There's a lot of
environmental concerns that we follow every year. We're regulated by the EPA as
well as the state of North Dakota to be sure that we're being good neighbors to
everyone around us. We're keeping water clean. We're keeping our site clean and
managed well. We have our renewable energies program which is methane
capture. We pull the methane that's generated from the in-place garbage and
serves two purposes. We send the bulk of that to a partner that we have locally
who uses that for a fuel heat in their boiler system and we have an on-site
generator that uses the methane to generate electricity which we put back
on the grid. To date in that program we have captured and destroyed the
equivalent of over two million metric tons of CO2. Our park in cleanup week it
works hand-in-hand with our Public Works Department and some other contractors in
town that help us haul material. We've set aside a handful of staff who are
taken off of their daily duties and they're just 100% cleanup week and what
we do at the landfill with that material that comes in was make sure that of the
300 trucks that we do get in per day on a typical day at the landfill, the added
cleanup week trucks get to go to a different spot and be able to find an
easier time in and out easier path so we're managing essentially two disposal
sites during those two weeks. One of the helps that we've had here is in 2021 we
opened the residential transfer station. The transfer station was created I guess
in 2021 as another option for residents that might have extra household garbage
to get rid of so they don't have to hold on to that mattress or old couch until
cleanup week. We really are on a push to keep recycling out of our landfill
specifically scrap metal, cardboard are the two main focuses but in this
facility we have containers for all of those items I just mentioned. There's no
reason to bury that in the landfill it's not going to go anywhere. We can save
that room for a municipal solid waste which is what the landfill is meant for.
I actually am retired and this is a part-time job for me. I enjoy it I'm not
here for the money I'm here because I like the people that work here they're
great. I myself I'll help people unload I don't have to but I do most of the time
it's not really like work it's I enjoy it. We touch base with the public quite
frequently our drivers do get used to having their route you'll see there's
some drivers that know families now there's some children in the city that
recognize their driver and that's always cool to see and it's good to be able to
know that you're helping out a lot of people every single day.