Dive summary:
- In the past, Wyoming landfills didn’t have liners because it was thought that the dry climate would prevent leachate; years later, officials found out that all these landfills were indeed leaking, creating huge problems for the state.
- In the past few years, the Wyoming legislature allocated millions of dollars to cap the landfills and treat the contaminated groundwater.
- Last December, a priority list was released with the 11 most important landfills to clean at an estimated cost around $30.79 million; cleaning all of the contamination from all of the state's landfills would cost about $200 million.
From the article:
The program has made significant inroads into the list of necessary projects.
“We’ve just about got the low-hanging fruit, the high-hanging fruit and now we can consider taking some of the money for landfills,” Bebout said.
An earlier Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality estimate pegged the cost of cleaning and treating all of the state’s leaking landfills at approximately $200 million. ...
