By making it hard to establish new landfills, Senate Bill 172 has been effective in creating at least the appearance of a garbage crisis. But the crisis itself, the disaster that seems so imminent when Tribune headlines scream that there are only five years of landfill capacity left, looms a lot less scary when you realize that those headlines have been screaming for years.
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If you try to look behind the headlines, the “crisis” is like a grainy photograph seen close up: it gets real fuzzy. For instance, if you check out the numbers in the Illinois EPA’s third annual Available Disposal Capacity for Solid Waste in Illinois, you will find that while we have been collectively throwing away about 50 million cubic yards of garbage every year, from 1987 to 1989 the amount of unfilled landfill space in the state increased from 274 to 390 million cubic yards.
But this bit of conventional wisdom isn’t true. Three new landfills for garbage (and two for industrial or “special” waste) have started taking garbage during the 1980s, and three incinerators are being built, according to an EPA draft report. It’s also not true that local resistance to solid-waste facilities created a big bottleneck, since, according to the same report, locals approved 22 of the original 38 applications that came in during the decade.
