Mount Rubbish

I had to chuckle about this headline: N.C. set to become Yankee dump.

Heck, drive through any parking lot in Cary or on Duke's campus and it will be obvious that we've been a Yankee dump for years already. Ba-dum-bum. Landfill usage is a serious concern, though, and a topic on which Froz can speak far more informedly than I can. I didn't realize that North Carolina is now a net exporter of trash, to the tune of a million tons per year. Durham will be sending its waste to Lawrenceville, VA until at least 2020. Then there's the kicker:

The largest of the four landfills would be the Black Bear Solid Waste Facility in the northeastern corner of the state. Near the town of South Mills in northern Camden County, Raleigh-based Waste Industries is seeking to bury more than 3 million tons of trash a year. That would be more than three times the volume handled by the state's largest existing landfill near Charlotte.

In a few decades, the Black Bear landfill would top out as a mountain of trash 270 feet high, visible for miles in a flat, swampy region where nothing is more than a few feet above sea level. By comparison, the Wachovia Capitol Center in downtown Raleigh is about 390 feet tall.

Black Bear's enormous capacity could theoretically take a third of all the garbage North Carolinians toss out each year. But much of the trash buried there would actually come from states such as New York and New Jersey.

I know garbage has to go somewhere, and god knows that part of the state could use the income, but building a 28-story mountain of megalopolis trash in the flat wetlands just seems unwise on so many levels.