Cleaning Up A Landfill on KFYR-TV North Dakota's NBC News Leader

Cleaning Up A Landfill |

Video

Retha Colclasure

7/1/2009

Most of our trash ends up at a landfill somewhere.

But not all of it is supposed to be there.

And when the materials that don`t belong, like old tires, sit in a dump, they can cause some pretty big problems.

Tire after tire is being loaded up and hauled away from the landfill in Sioux County.

"We had these tires here," says Marty Gipp, of Standing Rock EPA. "Eventually it came up to be an illegal dumpsite."

So the Standing Rock Environmental Protection Agency, along with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, received about $18,000 to haul tires away.

"Once those five loads were removed, we needed more funding in order to continue," says Wayne Markegard, an NRCS RCD coordinator. "The community still brought tires to these collection sites, we needed dollars to continue to haul them away."

That funding came through a $25,000 grant from the Wal-Mart Foundation.

"Hopefully we`ll get most of the tires out," says Markegard.

While the pile has been slowly disappearing, there are still plenty more tires to be found. That`s why it`s important that this cleanup project goes on.

These tires are a concern because they provide breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which can carry West Nile. But that`s not the only problem.

"They did contribute possible contaminants into the drinking water," Gipp says. "Now that the organizations that we have here have helped us get this tire project started and hopefully continue here."

About half of the old tires will be chipped for recycling, and the other half will go to an approved landfill site.

The tire cleanup project won`t continue forever.

Gipp and Markegard say they hope to come up with a plan to keep tires from accumulating in the future.

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