St. Louis County鈥檚 rural and Iron Range commissioners have introduced a long-planned vision for a new, roughly $70 million-$80 million waste management campus.聽Calling it the regional answer for a sunsetting landfill in Superior, and a treatment solution for the emerging contaminant PFAS, the four commissioners, led by Keith Nelson, of Fayal Township, met a supportive throng. They shared details for a campus on 800 acres currently home in Canyon to a much smaller Waste Management landfill for demolition and industrial waste.
The proposed facility would be larger and modeled after the county鈥檚 Virginia landfill, which serves the northern half of the county and does things such as land-apply pond-treated leachate and heat its recycling building using landfill gas.聽鈥淲e simply cannot continue to operate with one landfill, to do this and do it right we need to be able to do material recovery. We need to be able to treat leachate,鈥� Nelson said. 鈥淭he fact of the matter is we鈥檝e got 5 million gallons a year coming out of area landfills being trucked to WLSSD (Western Lake Superior Sanitary District), because it鈥檚 the only option people have.鈥�
The announcement comes at a crossroads for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, which hasn鈥檛 permitted a new municipal solid-waste landfill since 1993, but is confronting a leachate issue that has resulted in “forever-chemical” contaminants 鈥� per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances known as PFAS 鈥� being found in the tissue of Lake Superior smelt.