Town of Bristol - The grimy trucks loaded with Illinois' discarded eggshells and orange rinds and greasy cheeseburger wrappers come north hour after hour on Highway 45, hang a right on 60th St. and rumble past the old Kenosha County farm implement dealership with the "Going Out of Business" sign in the window.
"That is done. Done," said 66-year-old Bob Lengacher, sitting inside his nearby house with his wife, Judy, and noting that his business had pretty much become a lawn and garden equipment dealership anyway. "I had given up the farm part of it in '92."
Where there were once, many years ago, tractors on these roads, there are now lots of trucks. Some days, they start queuing up at the Pheasant Run landfill down 60th St. even before the sun rises.
According to a DNR Web site, 82% of the solid waste that is dumped there comes from Illinois. It's an unbelievable number, I think.
"I would almost guess," said Bob, "it is more."
You can see where the trucks are from by looking at the license plates as they head north, or by reading the names on the sides.
"They kind of come in spurts," he said, sitting at his kitchen table across from Judy. "The whole time we have been talking," maybe 10 minutes, "there has only been one gone by; then there will be seven, eight, nine, 10 in a row." They come in full of Illinois garbage, dump it in Kenosha County and then head back for another load.
Increasingly, we aren't just Illinois' playground, it seems. We are its garbage dump as well.
About 20% of the waste in our landfills in 2004 came from other states such as Illinois, according to DNR figures. The closer a landfill is to a border, generally, the more garbage is carted in from other states.
Nowhere is there as much being dumped as right down the road from the Lengachers.
They, in truth, have a lot of good things to say about Pheasant Run, which is operated by Waste Management.
They recall, years ago, picketing when Waste Management took over the site. But, they say, the company had them over for lunch, showed them how things work, were responsive to complaints and created jobs.
Bob says his brother-in-law quit farming, in fact, and will end up retiring from the place.
Folks who live in the Town of Paris, moreover, which is actually on the opposite side of the road from where Bob and Judy live, pay no town property tax as a result of the landfill revenue that goes to local government.
All that being said, Bob is not happy with the amount of garbage being hauled up from Illinois - and he's far from the only one. There's a movement in Madison to increase state tipping fees, an attempt to make the flatlanders pay up if they're going to soil our soil. Or better yet, find another place to defile.
Of course, there's plenty of stink about that as well.
Waste Management correctly points out that where a truck dumps its waste is dependent upon a lot more than state tipping fees - the fees paid to dump at a particular location - and that Wisconsinites using the landfills are invariably going to end up paying most of any increase.
Charlene Lemoine of the Waukesha County Environmental Action League just as correctly points out that tipping fees are used to fund recycling programs so maybe there would actually be less garbage being dumped in the first place.
Out-of-state waste being dumped in Wisconsin jumped 46% in 2004, and it's being trucked, she says, further and further into the heart of our once-pristine state.
All in all, higher tipping fees would probably help turn back some of those trucks rumbling past Bob Lengacher's old farm implement business. But you just know most of them will keep on coming because the landfills are already here and they just keep getting bigger.
I think I finally know why we call Illinoisans flatlanders.
Because, sadly, we've encouraged them to put their mountains of garbage up here.
E-mail mnichols@journalsentinel.com or call (262) 376-4374.