Once waste, metal now worth big bucks -- after it's dug up

[jpak]

http://www.pressherald.com/news/once-waste-metal-now-worth-big-bucks-after-its-dug-up_2011-12-02.html

Deep in the earth, in a 30-acre landfill in South Portland, is a half-million dollars.

Ecomaine has begun a project to dig up landfilled ash from its waste-to-energy plant and screen it for metals that can be recycled. Above, a front-end loader puts metals into a truck that will transport the material to an onsite storage pile.

Scrap metals that were buried in ecomaine's ash landfill as long as 20 years ago will be dug up by an Ohio-based company that will pay the trash disposal agency per-ton fees for reclaimed metal that can be resold.

Those fees, and the fact that the metal's removal will open up landfill space, translates into an economic benefit projected at nearly $500,000. That's good news for the 43 communities in southern Maine that are served by ecomaine, a nonprofit, municipally owned entity that was known as Regional Waste Systems until 2006.

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[GreenPartyVoter]

1. I always figured we would be mining our landfills one day.

[formercia]

2. Same here.

I'm surprised it happened so soon.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. Yup

My parents were children of “The Depression” they understood recycling. Mom always said that one day we’d be mining landfills.

The other day, I put a long-dead washing machine out by the curb… poof! it was gone! (snatched up by some metal scavenger.)

[phantom power]

4. It always seemed inevitable -- just a question of when the economics would drive it.

[Odin2005]

7. I never imagined it happening so soon.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

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[tridim]

5. Saw a show on Discovery channel where a guy was mining for gold on Manhattan sidewalks..

Outside of jewelry stores.

Apparently gold dust and tiny gems stick to the worker's clothing and get deposited outside in the cracks of sidewalks. The guy made a decent living doing this every day.