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DAYTON — Packs of wild dogs do not patrol mountains of busted refrigerators, rusted cars and decaying filth at Stony Hollow Landfill on Gettysburg Avenue.

Save for controlled areas where earthmovers lumber, push and bury, there are surprisingly few signs of trash. The trash is out of sight, and for many people, out of mind.

"You come home from work and expect your trash to be gone, but a lot of work goes into picking up and getting rid of trash," said David Foster, Dayton's Waste Collection Supervisor.

Few want a rubbish graveyard in their neighborhood, and this one has had more than its share of controversy since opening in 1995, but Stony Hollow — expected to reach capacity in four years — is not like the dump grounds of yesteryear, said Frank S. Fello, Senior District Manager for Stony Hollow owner Waste Management.

"They are state-of-the-art landfills, employing state-of-the-art technology," Fello said.

On Monday, April 21, about 20 Brownies and Scouts from St. Luke Catholic Church in Beavercreek planted pin oak tree near the entrance of landfill for Earth Day.

"It's pretty cool and fun," Brownie McKenzie Garnet , 8, said of the landfill. "It looks pretty nice."

But places like Stony Hollow are just the end of the line for banana peels, water bottles and other junk we chuck.

Despite recycling programs, too many things that could have been recycled end up sealed between layered topsoil, clay, high-density polyethylene, bedrock and other materials at places like Stony Hollow.

Only about 33 percent of the nation's waste is recycled, according the Environmental Protection Agency.

"When you look at the waste stream, there is still a lot of material people are throwing in the trash that could be recycled," said Daniel Graeter, assistant manager of Montgomery County Public Works.

About 75 percent of waste can be recycled or composted, according to Earth911.com, an environmental information Web site. Other estimates say 50 percent of waste can be recycled or composted.

Magazines, cardboard boxes and beer bottles are among the trash 20-year waste collector Pete Williams and his crew put in their City of Dayton garbage truck Monday through Friday.

Williams said people throw away everything from dead pets to mannequins.

"I can't think of anything I haven't seen in a garbage truck," he said.

The garbage business isn't pretty. How could it be? It involves maggots, worms and leachate. But waste removal is complicated. And trash passes through more hands than you may expect.

The empty pop bottles you set out with the rest of your trash on Monday ends up in a landfill just days later.

If they are tossed out in Montgomery County, they would be among 1,700 tons of trash trucked daily into the county's solid waste district's two transfer facilities.

Eventually the bottles end up buried miles way in a landfill in Logan County or one in Hamilton County, Graeter said.

As for those bottles, they could have been recycled.

Graeter said recycling is not only a matter of protecting the environment, but also a practical matter of preserving resources.

"Reduce, reuse, recycle economically makes sense," he said.

Manufacturing with recycled aluminum cans, for example, uses 95 percent less energy than using virgin material, according to the National Recycling Coalition, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit.

And recycling material is generally cheaper for cities, Foster said. While it costs Dayton about $36 per ton to dispose of trash, it only costs $14 per ton to process recyclables at Rumpke Recycling on Monument Avenue.

"That's a big savings per ton," Foster said.

There will likely always be a need for landfills because some items cannot be recycled, but there have been significant signs of more companies "going green" and more residents recycling, said Beth Schmucker, a spokeswoman for Waste Management, which is America's largest recycler.

"We have to do more than just protect the environment today," she said. "We have to plan for future generations."

Related: Learn more about living green

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