Minnesota Landfill: Dem-Con Advances a New MSW Cell near Shakopee
New MSW Landfill
Dem-Con Landfill, LLC is moving ahead with plans to build a new municipal solid waste landfill at its environmental campus near Shakopee, Minnesota, after the state pollution regulator completed the project’s final environmental impact statement.
The proposal converts roughly 81 acres of already-permitted construction and demolition airspace — about 2.2 million cubic yards — into a cell engineered to accept MSW instead. The wider project area covers 108 acres once the existing C&D landfill is included.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says it would be the first MSW landfill built in the Twin Cities metro area since 1971. Public comment on the final EIS runs through late October 2026, after which a draft solid waste permit goes on public notice for 30 days. An air permit is also being developed and cannot take effect until the environmental review closes.
Why the Metro Needs the Airspace
The Twin Cities generates close to 3.5 million tons of garbage a year, and the share going to landfill keeps rising. The draft EIS put the region’s 2021 generation at about 3.3 million tons and projected growth to roughly 3.92 million tons by 2042.
The new cell would serve the metro plus Nicollet, Le Sueur and Sibley counties, and forms part of a broader state effort to expand capacity at four area landfills. Minnesota has simultaneously pushed diversion hard, with a 20-year metro plan built around food waste reduction, curbside composting and recycling upgrades.
Engineering and Timeline
Alongside the fill area, Dem-Con plans a 17.2-acre slope liner where the landfill transitions from C&D debris to MSW, plus perimeter setbacks tied into leachate collection, landfill gas control and groundwater monitoring wells. The site sits on land currently mined for limestone, less than a mile from the Minnesota River, in a mostly industrial and commercial area.
Development would proceed in phases — permit, construct, fill, cap, repeat — with construction possible as early as spring 2027 and an anticipated operating life of 35 to 40 years. Dem-Con already holds permits for the C&D landfill, issued in 2023, and for an anaerobic digestion facility approved the following year on adjacent ground.
The phased approach also means the environmental controls scale with the waste mass rather than being built out in advance, which keeps capital tied to actual airspace consumption.
That cluster matters. A landfill paired with digestion and gas control on one campus is the kind of integrated resource recovery footprint that lets an operator move progressively up the value chain rather than relying on burial alone.
Turn Landfill Airspace into Recovered Value
Every ton diverted before the tipping face is airspace a region does not have to permit, line and monitor for four decades. Klean Industries builds the recovery infrastructure that sits upstream of landfills like the one planned near Shakopee — sorting, gasification, digestion and pyrolysis systems that convert residual streams into energy, fuels and materials.
Our projects are delivered with KBR as performance-guaranteed, 100% bankable turnkey plants, so throughput, yields and emissions are contracted rather than hoped for. The reference base is commercial, not pilot scale, and includes a commercial recovered carbon black plant operating in Poland.
We work both ways: license the technology and run it yourself, or have the plant designed, built and guaranteed turnkey. Start with a feasibility study grounded in your own tonnages, gate fees and offtake options.
Contact Klean Industries » GO.
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