Greenwashed

Here’s what was headed for the landfill in Shakopee, Minn., one morning last week when Chris showed up to recycle our asphalt shingles.

Trucks filled with solid waste line up at the Dem-Con Landfill.

Keeping our Loveless Mess out of earthen dumps continues to be a colossal undertaking, as our latest caper proved. As noted in previous entries, I looked high and low and finally found a recycler who said he’d take our moldy roof. We’d pay by the ton, he said, probably $20 to $25.

Cheaper than a dumpster, I thought, and worth the extra effort to shovel them into the truck and haul them back from northwestern Wisconsin to the Minneapolis ex-urbs.

The .pdf of the brochure he sent me heralded the upsides of recycling shingles and provided directions, which turned out to be a “waste processer” that operates the Scott County landfill.

But when our truckload of shingles weighed in at one-half ton, Chris was socked with a bill for $56 and told to dump it in the “landfill area” spot.

Not one to follow directions -- and being a recycler long before businesses got tax incentives for "sustainability" -- Chris drove around until he found the shingles pile and added ours to the mountain.

My contact at Heritage insists we should only have been charged $18 for our load. He maintains that the shingles do indeed get mixed up for road construction.

Sadly, we’ve still got another half-ton up at Loveless. (We didn't want to stress out the truck.) Chris was so frustrated by the whole experience that he has half a mind to get a dumpster. Might as well dump in Polk County, he says.

I'm willing to press the issue a bit further. We’re going to try to convince Heritage to offer us a voucher so we don’t have to pay another round. While $56 + $18 = cheaper than a dumpster, that doesn’t count labor and gas and ... ah hell.  The math really doesn’t add up when you’re trying to do the right thing.