City of Springfield Environmental Services is asking residents to join the first citywide garage sale. The event is aimed at extending the life of reusable items and keeping them out of the city’s landfill – the Noble Hill Sanitary Landfill.
Residents are encouraged to sell and buy reusable items around the community on Sept. 27. By registering for the interactive map, participants can locate where other sales are. As of last week, Environmental Services had around 66 sites registered.
Additionally, on Oct. 4 participants can donate unsold items from the sale to local organizations through the Reuse Rally. This is another initiative to encourage residents to reuse items. The rally is open to the whole community, but participants of the garage sale are encouraged to donate their unsold items as well. Area nonprofits and organizations will be at the rally, accepting a wide variety of donations. It will be held from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 4 at the Hammons Field parking lot. The Clean Green Springfield website has up-to-date donation guidelines.
Laurie Davis is the education outreach coordinator for Environmental Services. She said it can be hard to know what to do with items that don’t need to be thrown away, but also can’t be recycled.
“So this is a way for our community to come together and reuse things, repurpose things, rehome things,” Davis said. “So it keeps it out of the landfill and puts it in the hands of somebody else who could extend the life of that particular item.”
Landfills are a vital community resource that collect and manage resident’s waste. Without landfills there wouldn’t be anywhere to dump trash, and waste would build up around the city. Springfield did a trash and recycling study in April, exploring waste characterization – what kinds of items and materials are entering our landfill? Waste going into Noble Hill has doubled in the last 10 years, and the study showed that 42% of items entering the landfill could have been recycled through an existing recycling program.
Davis added that it’s important to remember that anything that goes into the trash takes up space in the landfill, and the landfill is not an unlimited resource. She said that the landfill is regional, and takes in up to 1400 tons of trash per day.
“At that rate of 1200 to 1400 tons per day, our staff estimates that we only have about 50 to 75 years of life expectancy left in our existing landfill,” said Davis.
So, she said, it's important to pay attention to what you’re putting into the trash. It can be difficult to receive more additional space from the state for a landfill site, and at this point it's not a matter of if our landfill hits capacity, but when our landfill hits capacity, Davis said. She added that the next nearest landfill is an hour and a half away, and having to haul trash such a long distance would also have significant financial impact.
“Some future generation of citizens are going to have to potentially deal with the reality of not having a landfill locally and easily accessible,” she said. “At some point we're going to hit capacity, and then what will we, as a community, do if we don't have a landfill readily available.”
