Eyes on Milwaukee
Following Fire, Recycling Center May Move
Menomonee Valley riverfront site could be repurposed for private development.
Get a daily rundown of the top stories on Urban Milwaukee
Menomonee Valley riverfront site could be repurposed for private development. Back to the full article.
Photos - Page 2
Legislation Link - Urban Milwaukee members see direct links to legislation mentioned in this article. Join today
The necessity to truck rubbish out ot town (Madison in this case) reminds me that just as we need to be aware of “food miles” and its environmental effect, we should also consider “garbage miles”. This is the energy needed to simply move our trash around – regardless of whether it’s landfilled, recycled, or exported to poor countries.
In addition to solving recycling issues, we need to again acknowledge the root problem is overconsumption.
I believe the building in question was built in the 70s and operated as something called “Americology”. The idea was to extract recyclables from the general trash stream. I believe there were experiments with using the non-recyclable residue for power generation. None of this was practical, so the plant became a sorting operation – in theory with an input stream limited to mixed recyclables. Unfortunately, too much unrecyclable stuff gets mixed in, hence the fires and other technical problems.
I am surprised that Kruschke made the statement of “Why it was put there years ago is a great question.” Perhaps he is not old enough to know what the area once consisted of. When that building was built on the land there in the early 1970’s, is was literally a step above being a dump to begin with. It was city acquired land, full of railroad yards, Electric company coal storage, meat processing plants, scrap yards, and a canal that stunk to high heaven from the animal waste and runoff produced south of the canals. Even the road (Canal street) was crisscrossed by rail lines, which would tear the mufflers off of most cars that drove over them–long before the City cleaned it up. My guess is that the original company that went in there (AMERICOLOGY?) was heavily subsidized to go there. And at the time, the recycling plant was so state of the art that the newspaper and magazine articles heralded it as an amazing wonder of Milwaukee. That seriously changed though, when some sort of explosion–possibly from some sort of gas or compressed canister, damaged it even back then.
45 years…I was typing at the same time ( and some of the same thoughts), and didn’t see your comment until I posted.