The best things come to those who wait. While it may be a clever slogan for selling ketchup or a profound adage extolling the virtues of patience, it certainly is not a motto subscribed to by professionals in the solid waste business.

With thousands of tons of refuse constantly infiltrating landfills, waiting to deal with it won't ever bring good things. What it will bring is a premature end to the landfill of any municipality that doesn't take steps to maximize the finite amount of air space it has available.

Ultimately, we decided to in another direction to create some space in our landfill.

Fortunately for the city of Mandan, N.D., located along the Missouri River just west of the state capital of Bismarck, public works officials refused to sit back and wait while the Mandan Inert Waste Landfill gradually filled to capacity over the next 20 years. Instead, the city took action in April 2006 by purchasing a new BOMAG BC672RB refuse compactor, an acquisition that the city estimates will add at least 15 years to the life of the landfill.

"We had been using a Cat 966 wheel loader," said Jeff Wright, Mandan's public works director since 2004. "It had performed just as expected, but ultimately we decided that we needed to go in another direction to create some more space in our landfill."

Open since the early 1980s, the Mandan Inert Waste Landfill covers just 88 acres of property three miles west of the city. About half of this acreage is available for waste storage. Although only inert waste is buried on site, the landfill also has a transfer station to haul away some of the municipal waste collected from the population of 75,000 in the greater Mandan/Bismarck area.