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Trash Talk: Fight Over Scranton-Area Landfill Exposes Generational Divide

 

 

The Viewmont Mall, in Dickson City, has spectacular views of the Wyoming Valley: rolling green mountains, clusters of neat homes and Scranton's bustling downtown. But there are a few mountains that look a little different than the others.

"See the sort of messy piles up at the top?" Michele Dempsey is pointing across the valley from her car. "Where it looks, like, black? That's where the active face is, that is where they are putting garbage."

Dempsey is talking about the Keystone Sanitary Landfill, a 750-acre operation that accepts 7,250 tons of refuse in 520 heavy trucks each day, much of it from out of state. Dempsey is the founder of a group called Friends of Lackawanna that's trying to stop the expansion of KSL.

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Keystone Crossroads is a new statewide public media initiative reporting on the challenges facing Pennsylvania's cities. WPSU is a participating station.

Eleanor Klibanoff was WPSU's reporter for Keystone Crossroads, a statewide reporting collaboration that covers the problems and solutions facing Pennsylvania's cities. Previously, Eleanor was a Kroc Fellow at NPR in DC. She worked on the global health blog and Weekend Edition, reported for the National desk and spent three months at member station KCUR in Kansas City. Before that, she covered abortion politics in Nicaragua and El Salvador, two of the seven countries in the world that completely ban the procedure. She's written for Atlanta Magazine, The Nicaragua Dispatch and Radio Free Europe.