Most county landfills are places you visit only when you have to, and you keep the windows up on the way in. On Saturday, October 10, the Dane County Landfill is inviting everyone in for a look around on purpose. From noon to 3 p.m., the county's Department of Waste + Renewables is hosting an Open House Celebration, free and open to all ages, with tours of the working landfill, a showcase of the heavy equipment that moves the county's garbage, a do-it-yourself screenprinting station where you bring your own clothing item to print, and free food and beverages. Registration is requested through the department's Eventbrite page, but the doors — or rather, the gate on Maahic Way — are open to anyone curious enough to show up.
The event was originally scheduled for July 2026 and was postponed because of air quality concerns, which is a fittingly on-the-nose reason for a landfill's big public day to get pushed back. The new date lands in October, when the leaves are turning across the road at Yahara Hills Golf Course and the smell of a working landfill is at least tempered by autumn air.
If the idea of a landfill open house sounds like an odd civic curiosity, that is precisely the point. The department has spent years trying to make the place less invisible, and its most ambitious tool for that is the Dane County Trash Lab, a mobile exhibit that will be parked at the open house. The Trash Lab is a whole museum squeezed into a repurposed cargo trailer, designed and built in collaboration with the Madison Children's Museum. Inside, visitors walk a path through three sections that the department's deputy director, Roxanne Wienkes, described to PBS Wisconsin as a deliberate sequence: first, awareness of how our consumption affects the environment; second, a clear look at what actually happens to waste in Dane County; and third, an invitation to take action.
The exhibit doesn't flinch. It presents statistics on how much trash people generate daily and images of what unmanaged waste does in developing countries, then connects those global outcomes back to southern Wisconsin. It explores the social justice, economic, and environmental dimensions of waste, and it is built to be genuinely accessible — wheelchair accessible, with booklets available for visitors who want a Spanish translation of the exhibit materials. The department's own framing of the project is unusually candid about its ambition: it wants to move people away from a "cradle to grave" model of materials and toward a circular one, and it wants visitors to leave asking manufacturers, producers, and elected officials for the infrastructure to make that possible. The Trash Lab exists in part because not every school or community can make the trip out to the landfill, so the landfill goes to them instead.
That the Trash Lab is even necessary says something about how thoroughly modern waste disposal has been engineered out of sight. The Dane County Landfill, formally known as the Rodefeld Landfill, sits at 7102 Maahic Way, southeast of Madison and just across from the Yahara Hills Golf Course. It accepts waste from county residents and businesses, with dumpsters near the scale house for small passenger vehicles and the active filling area reserved for larger loads. It is also a place with rules that reveal a philosophy: to conserve airspace, easily recycled or composted items are banned from disposal, and hazardous materials are kept out entirely and routed to the county's Clean Sweep program. Asbestos is accepted only on the first Wednesday of each month, at a fee of $82.10 per ton — a detail that tells you how granular the business of running a landfill gets.
What makes the Rodefeld site genuinely interesting, though, is what happens to the gas beneath it. Dane County has been capturing methane from the landfill for years, and in 2011 the county began refining that biogas into vehicle fuel. The project, developed with BioCNG, LLC, Unison Solutions, ANGI, and Madison College, fueled its first natural gas vehicle in January 2011. It was originally built to produce about 100 gallons of gasoline equivalent per day, and it worked so well that it was upgraded to roughly 250. In 2011 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Landfill Methane Outreach Program named it Project of the Year. The biogas fueling station operates alongside an existing landfill gas electrical generation system, meaning the site has been turning its own decomposition into power for years.
Then, in 2019, the county went further. It invested roughly $28 million — some accounts put the figure closer to $29 million, and the plant was described at the time as the first of its kind — in a renewable natural gas facility at the landfill that converts methane from the landfill as well as biogas from farm digesters into renewable natural gas capable of fueling the county's vehicle fleet. John Welch, the director of the Department of Waste + Renewables, walked UW-Madison Extension trainees through the plant in August 2019. The facility is the reason the department's name includes the word "Renewables" at all.
There is a larger story unfolding around all of this, and the open house is a chance to see the operation before it changes. The Rodefeld landfill is expected to run out of space by 2030 and will be capped. Dane County is planning a new landfill and a roughly $36 million "sustainability campus" on part of the Yahara Hills golf course, just across Highway 12/18. The project, which has drawn opposition from some nearby residents, is expected to break ground in 2027 and would include a new landfill of more than 80 acres plus a 20,000-square-foot waste education center and a business park aimed at finding new markets for materials currently going into the ground. The first phase's cost estimate has climbed from $32 million in 2022 to about $36 million as of mid-2025. In other words, the open house arrives at a hinge moment: the county is asking the public to look closely at the landfill it has, just as it prepares to build the next one.
Which is why the lineup for the afternoon is more pointed than it first appears. The heavy equipment showcase puts the county's trucks and machines on display, the kind of thing that delights children and quietly explains the scale of the operation. The DIY screenprinting station asks visitors to bring a piece of clothing and leave with it transformed — a small, hands-on lesson in reuse. The landfill tours go where the public normally doesn't. And the Trash Lab, the museum in a trailer, does the interpretive work in between.
Parking for the event will be at Dane County Clean Sweep, 7020 Maahic Way. Drivers should pass the landfill entrance on Maahic Way and continue to the Clean Sweep entrance. The department notes its thanks to neighbors, partners, and staff for supporting the work of managing the community's materials responsibly — a line that reads like boilerplate until you remember that the neighbors in question are the people who live near a landfill, and that the department is asking them, and everyone else, to come take a closer look.
It is free, it is all ages, and it runs three hours. You can register in advance, but the invitation is a broad one. Bring a shirt you don't mind improving. Bring questions about where your garbage goes. The county would very much like you to stop treating it as out of sight and out of mind.