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Published September 09, 2010, 12:00 AM

A photo tour of the Dem-Con Shakopee facility, by Jana Peterson/Pine Journal

While every facility and landfill is unique, these photos give some idea of what Dem-Con's proposed landfill in Cloquet would look like.


Driving up, trucks must check in at the gatehouse and hand over or fill out any necessary paperwork before they're allowed to dump their loads. The landfill needs to document what job they're coming from, what kind of waste it is, how much it weighs (the trucks are weighed on site). The landfill gets audited for this information by the state, county and city, Dem-Con's Bill Keegan said. In Cloquet the gatehouse would likely be a single-wide-trailer-sized building.

  • Driving up, trucks must check in at the gatehouse and hand over or fill out any necessary paperwork before they're allowed to dump their loads. The landfill needs to document what job they're coming from, what kind of waste it is, how much it weighs (the trucks are weighed on site). The landfill gets audited for this information by the state, county and city, Dem-Con's Bill Keegan said. In Cloquet the gatehouse would likely be a single-wide-trailer-sized building.
  • Users drive up into the landfill, which is basically located in a huge bowl in the earth so it isn't visible from other places.
  • Once you crest the hill, the landfill lies below.
  • Landfills must apply six inches of cover to any areas that do not receive new waste for 30 days. Intermediate cover, which goes on areas that won't receive waste for 120 days is 12-inches thick. Final cover is 24-inches thick and eventually covered in grasses and other groundcover.
  • As the waste comes in, a worker pulls scrap metal out and the compactor moves the waste and breaks it down by rolling back and forth over the top with huge metal wheels.
  • Bins for scrap
  • Another view of the Dem-Con lined landfill in Shakopee from above. The proposed Cloquet site already looks similar because it's basically an old gravel pit. However, any places where the gravel pit dug too close to the water table the landfill would have to bring in fill before laying down the liner.
  • From Highway 169 in Shakopee, an old landfill site looks like a grassy hill. The active landfill isn't visible from the road.
  • Scrap wood is pulled from construction debris and later chipped to be used in landscaping mulch, things like that.
  • Wood chips
  • A pile of shingles wait to be processed.
  • After the shingles are ground up, they are sold to an asphalt plant and recycled into asphalt for our roads and highways.