New cell being dug at Mitchell Regional Landfill

When a hole at the landfill is filled with garbage, it’s time to dig another hole, right?

If only it were that simple.

The hole that workers are currently digging at the Mitchell Regional Landfill is much more than that. It includes a special clay liner, a wastewater collection system, silt fencing and anti-litter fencing.

“I remember growing up, taking our trash out to the ‘dumpgrounds,’ ” Ron Olson, the city’s street, sanitation and landfill superintendent, said this week. “It’s no longer that simple. It really isn’t.”

The cost to dig and outfit the new hole — which is more properly called a “cell” — is about $600,000. Funding comes from the city’s sanitation fund, which gets its revenue from fees for garbage collection, recycling collection and landfill dumping. The work of creating the new cell is being done by winning bidder Loiseau Construction, of Flandreau.

The Mitchell Regional Landfill, located a few miles southeast of Mitchell, opened in September 2005. It replaced an old landfill on the east side of Mitchell that dated to the 1960s and is currently receiving its final cover.

The new landfill complex has room for about 12 cells, Olson said, and the first cell has the least capacity. It was expected to last 4.5 years but could end up lasting five.

The new, second cell has a life expectancy of six to seven years, and future cells will have even longer life expectancies. The entire landfill complex’s life expectancy is about 130 years.

The new cell is about 200 feet wide, 1,000 feet long and 40 feet deep. Some of the dirt from the massive hole is being used to construct a 15-to 20-feet-high berm for a new lawenforcement shooting range between the landfill and the city lagoons.

Beyond the moving of dirt, there is other, more complicated work involved in building the new cell. The bottom of the existing cell has a wastewater collection system that brings water from the cell through a layer of sand and into perforated pipes. From there, the wastewater is pumped to the city’s treatment facility. That wastewater-collection system will be extended into the new cell.

“The new landfill is a lot more environmentally friendly,” Olson said. “Any water, even if it falls from the sky, if it touches garbage it gets treated as wastewater through our city’s wastewater treatment plant.”

Another feature of the new cell is a clay liner that ensures nothing seeps out of the sidewalls. Other features of the cell and the landfill as a whole are silt fences that protect against erosion, 10-foot-high fences that protect against windblown litter, and a perimeter stormwater-collection system that brings stormwater to a holding pond.

The Mitchell Regional Landfill takes garbage from Davison, Hanson and Hutchinson counties, and some small towns in other counties. It’s estimated that the area served by the landfill has a total population of about 30,000.

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