Garbage group: Please keep WI a landfill for the rest of the Midwest
A story in the Journal Sentinel this morning might as well been a press release from the garbage lobby: ‘Plan would make Wisconsin’s garbage fees highest in nation, group says.’ Wow, that’s quite a claim! I wonder who this group is and why they care about Wisconsin?According to its website the National Solid Wastes Management Association (NSWMA) is the ‘trade association that represent the private sector companies in North America that provide’¦waste collection.’ To translate, NSWMA is the lobbying organization for private corporations that make money collecting garbage.
NSWMA’s main interest is protecting the profits of private trash collectors ‘ ‘We [NSWMA] work with people in charge of the [profit & loss) sheet for divisions and regions, or for the profitability of their stand alone private company.’ They don’t lobby or advocate for the people of Wisconsin or Wisconsin municipalities. They don’t care about Wisconsin at all; they want more profits for private garbage corporations.
NSWMA certainly doesn’t care that thanks to the low cost of dumping garbage in Wisconsin, our state is a magnet for out-of-state garbage. The greedy for-profit private garbage corporations that NSWMA represents have been shipping garbage here from Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan at an exploding rate. In 1995, about 300,000 tons of out-of-state garbage ended up in Wisconsin landfills. By 2004 more than 2.1 million tons of garbage came from other states.
And now Wisconsin leaders have proposed raising the tipping fee on garbage to reduce the amount of out-of-state garbage coming to Wisconsin. And of course, the for-profit garbage peddlers at NSWMA are throwing a fit. After all, if Wisconsin raises the fee for dumping out-of-state garbage, how are the private garbage collectors NSWMA represent going to make loads of cash dumping their garbage here for cheaper than other states in the Midwest? Give me a break.
Wisconsin shouldn’t be the landfill of the Midwest any longer, and raising the tipping will help stop private garbage collection corporations from coming to Wisconsin to dump their trash.