In the creative reuse world, all of us who run a creative reuse shop/center pretty much talk daily about “keeping creative materials out of the landfill” to anyone who asks, “What’s creative reuse all about?” But how many of us have actually been to a landfill? Last week I got the rare opportunity to take a guided public tour of the North Texas Municipal Water District’s 121 Regional Disposal Facility in Melissa,TX, the landfill that houses the trash for Richardson, Plano and several other cities.

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And my biggest takeaway? Everyone should tour their community’s landfill (it should be a required field trip for every high school student!) as everyone needs to see up front the reality/inner workings of a daily process that we’re all a part of.

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Some fun facts:

-Landfills have been regulated since the ‘70s by environmental laws that help keep the ground water and surrounding air safe (the multi-layer liner this landfill has is impressive)

-Continual improvements in technology and equipment help to increase the amount of materials that can be crushed/packed into each landfill sector

-This landfill has a compost producing section (where large amounts of food scraps and yard waste are dumped) AND the landfill extracts/processes the methane gas created by decomposing trash, contributing to the natural gas grid and powering 20-25,000 homes per year

-Landfills are vast (this one is 673 acres); they take more than 15 years to get up and going, from land purchase to permitting to creating…and…

-This one will be full in 40 years (when it does fill, it is expected to be the tallest structure in Collin County, i.e. a big grassy mountain where if you stood on top you could likely see downtown Dallas on a clear day…)

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So I kept thinking after learning all this… landfills can’t be placed too far away from cities, cuz trash transport trucks (as our guide explained) need to travel back and forth between city and landfill as efficiently as possible…Texas does have a lot of suburban land but lots of it is being eaten up by housing developments… so where will we build them in the future? And what about large cities that are already pretty much “hemmed in” by development that stretches out more than an hour’s drive from city limits?

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It’s mind boggling, and while the 1,000 or so pounds of creative materials my little enterprise helps keep out of the landfill each year seems minuscule in comparison to the big picture of trash, I think creative reuse is ultimately about awareness— if you enjoy the idea of creating something lasting out of beautiful yarn, fabric, beads and more that could have gone to waste in the trash, the hope is that you’ll also be a great reuser in many other ways, like using washable cloths in the kitchen instead of always grabbing for a paper towel, or taking reusable shopping bags and produce bags to the store, or going on a picnic with washable tableware instead of disposable plastic. The U.S. actually used to be full of resourceful reusers, but then industries popped up that made money off of creating “disposable everything” and got us used to its convenience and the devil-may-care, “Why not-this-country-is-rich?!” attitude about it all, that disposable was cool and cutting edge (I’m old enough to remember some of the transition!) and, well… we need to get back to making reuse more a part of our lives again, so that maybe it will take longer, a lot longer, for that landfill to “fill”.

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Untrash first started out as this blog, dedicated to sharing reuse ideas for many aspects of life and helping people become reusers, and this tour has inspired me to make an effort to get back to posting/sharing more often here, and to keep on teaching valuable reuse skills (like clothes mending) through our workshops! (Btw, check your city’s website to see if their Environmental division hosts landfill tours; the one I attended was hosted by the City of Plano; it was free and included round-trip transportation–they’ve got four tours scheduled during 2027!)