Star Tribune Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:00:39 GMT
State gets ready to dig in at Washington County landfill
The three-year cleanup in Lake Elmo -- at a cost of $27.6 million -- will be the most expensive for the state remediation program. Call it the big dig. State officials have elected to clean up a Washington County landfill that's releasing toxic gases and polluting area groundwater by digging out the waste, lining the landfill and then burying the waste again. The project will start later this summer and is expected to take three years. Its cost is estimated at $27.6 million, making it the most expensive landfill cleanup in the history of Minnesota's landfill remediation program. From 1969 to 1975, Ramsey and Washington counties used the 35-acre landfill, in Lake Elmo, as a garbage disposal site. 3M Co. also used the site to legally dump materials, including the chemical PFBA, a coatings compound used in photographic films and other products. In the past year or so, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) has been weighing several options to clean up the site. Recently, agency officials chose the dig-and-line approach, over the objections of some Lake Elmo citizens and city leaders. They had lobbied for removing the waste permanently, either by hauling it away in trucks to a different landfill or by incinerating it on site using a futuristic technology called plasma-torch incineration.
[[keywords: LandUse;PublicWorks;Metro;]]
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