Wellington station saves trips to county landfill

By Steven Olson
Correspondent

Wellington's transfer station may be the town's best kept secret.

That's where the county accepts garbage destined for the Larimer County Landfill almost 20 miles to the southwest.

Lois Schwindt, who has been running the station since 2000, accepts household trash from those who don't have curbside service, or those who've spent the weekend getting after their clutter.

The station is located near the junction of Larimer County Roads 7 and 70, about five miles north of town. It's quiet there, Schwindt said, because fewer and fewer people living in town know it exists.

She works in a tiny building in the middle of the transfer station, collecting fees and answering questions. "People say they didn't even know this was out here all the time," Schwindt said about new customers. "When people go into the new subdivisions, they have to have a trash hauler, so the only time we see them out here is when they have something the trash hauler won't take."

Paint is a good example. Schwindt has what looks like the box of an old pickup truck made into a trailer, where people can put their old cans of paint instead of just dropping them into the two big compactors built into the side of the hill. She can't take chemicals like paint thinner and pesticides, however; those should go to the household hazardous waste facility at the landfill.

Prior to the mid-1980s, the transfer station site was a typical town dump. It handled trash from farms all the way north to the Red Feather Lakes area. The old dump closed in 1986, and the county installed three big dumpsters. Schwindt called them tubs. The compactors were installed in August 2001, according to the old notebooks Schwindt keeps in her office, and they have brought quieter times.

During the late '80s and '90s, farmers would back their trucks up and empty their trash just as they did when the transfer station was the town dump, Schwindt said, but they can't do that with the compactors. For starters, there is a metal wall around them to keep people from falling inside. That wall makes it physically impossible for people to simply drive a truck up to the compactor and dump their loads.

Second, the new system is cleaner than the old tubs, Schwindt said. Customers can't dump materials like tree branches, big pieces of plywood or old lumber into the compactors. That infuriated lots of long-time rural residents.

"They didn't like that at all," Schwindt said, recalling one fellow who had to climb into the bed of his truck and sort garbage. "He couldn't scoop it out of there either, because there were a lot of tree branches mixed in."

The alternative is to haul trash to the landfill south of Fort Collins, which accepts tree branches and other large items. "That's about 17 more miles," Schwindt said.

Compactors or no, it's still a truism that people throw away all kinds of things. For Schwindt, the weirdest one had to be the set of tires for a Humvee.

"A guy called me up and asked, 'Do you take tires?' I asked him a couple of questions and he brought them down," Schwindt said. "They were these brand new tires he'd gotten for his Humvee. They were still paper-wrapped. Well, he had sold the Humvee but he still had those tires around and his wife was tripping over them. She told him to get rid of them, so he brought them out here."

Schwindt is in her 70s and started working after a career with her husband pouring concrete for construction projects. "We had to bring some things out to my nephew - he's in the construction business - and we came past here and I told my husband, 'I wouldn't mind working there.' And he said, 'At the dump? Why would you want to work there?' I said, 'To get out of the house.'"

The best way to get to the transfer station is to go north of Wellington on Sixth Street until the junction with County Road 70. The station is on the left across the railroad tracks at the top of the hill. It's open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. It will also be open Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. from Memorial Day through Labor Day.

The transfer station accepts household trash only. It cannot accept large items such as sofas. The minimum fee is $6.03. More details are available at the 24-hour information number, 498-5770.

An average of 15 to 20 people a day use the transfer station - a little more in the summertime or when Christmas rolls around. "The town hall's started telling new people that we're here, so that helps a little bit," Schwindt remarked.

Then she grinned and walked out to greet someone in a pickup with a load of trash and to tell him how much the dump fee was going to cost.