Last night, the Peoria County Board voted 12-6 to deny Peoria Disposal Company’s (PDC) hazardous waste landfill expansion application.  Opponents cheered, proponents were disappointed (if not a little bitter), PDC is planning to appeal to the Illinois Pollution Control Board.

But I think regardless of how the appeals come out, it’s time we all got on the same team and started seriously researching alternatives to burying hazardous waste.  It can be done.  I found this interesting piece of information (PDF) on Caterpillar’s website.  On page 11 of this document, it says:

We can set the example for others to follow.  In 1997, an employee team at our Sumter, South Carolina, facility set out to develop a process that would, for the first time ever, recycle 100 percent of hazardous waste and totally eliminate landfill. They succeeded. It cost half-a-million dollars to do it, but the new process also saves Caterpillar more than $400,000 every year. It was the right thing for the environment. It saved Caterpillar money as well.

The first thing that struck me was the fact that this happened in 1997 — that’s almost ten years ago.  Has this process been refined/improved?  Marketed?  Is this something that PDC and other hazardous waste landfills could employ?  Or that Keystone could employ?

The second thing that struck me is that it cost “half-a-million dollars to do it.”  Converting that to 2006 dollars, that’s still only $631,000 (approx.).  It doesn’t sound like it takes a tremendous amount of money to find these solutions, does it?  Compare that to the million dollars PDC spent just on their expansion application — let alone how much it’s going to cost to appeal the board’s decision.

I don’t think one has to be a rabid environmentalist to see the value of recycling this waste versus encasing it in concrete and burying it in the ground.  Even if you’re a proponent of the landfill expansion, wouldn’t you still rather live in a world where there’s no need for such landfills?