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.

Cabin to go?

It’s not at all what I had in mind for the Loveless estate, but when Chris and I spotted this log cabin for sale at the side of the road a couple of weeks back, it looked like an opportunity worth exploring.

It’s listed at $10,000 (though it sounds like I could get it for $5K) and will cost about $10,000 to move it about 6 miles to Loveless Lake.

It was built in the early 1990s as an office for a company that built log cabins back in the boom times. The building later became a hair salon and most recently was a real estate office.

It has a bathroom, but no kitchen, not even a sink. It’s dark, in desperate need of more windows, and will require pulling out a lot of drywall and skanky carpet.

Yep, another rehab project.
 

Porch entrance with drywall of former office space.





One of two loft bedrooms

The roof leaked in the other bedroom. Supposedly fixed, but serious water damage.



Dusty catwalk.



 

I'm giving it serious thought. It’d certainly fit in with the neighborhood. And I could have a roof over my head for what seems like a good price.

Moving a 26’ x 30’ structure onto my land and down the hill will require major excavation. The path would cut right through those lovely river birches that I was so thrilled to discover this spring.

I’ve gotten attached  to the little footpath Chris and I created through the trees and ferns that reclaimed the former driveway. Somehow I never looked ahead and thought about the realities of rebuilding. Pretty much anything I do – digging a well, building a foundation, putting in septic – will wreck the land, if only temporarily.

Then again, moving some earth around will give us a chance to create rain gardens and add some natural vegetation to combat erosion and storm water runoff.

Damn tradeoffs.