Dive Brief:

• Fort Smith Regional Sanitary Landfill soon will have a new scale house, two older scales will be replaced, and a new scale will be installed for the use only of commercial haulers.
• The site also will soon add a new customer care center where customers will be able to wait. In 2013, the city started the project.
• The landfill serves more than 400,000 people. With the new facilities, citizens who are dropping off items will not have to wait in line with large haulers. The city began dumping at the landfill 32 years ago, and it’s now the biggest landfill in Arkansas, and includes a public park. A police department firing range also is in the works for the site.

Dive Insight:

Landfill area that has been reclaimed for another use is a natural for all sorts of activities, as the Fort Smith landfill shows. Not only is such reclaimed acreage useful as farmland, it can serve other uses, like becoming centers for public recreation and government training activities.