Those of us who live in Tooele County have come to accept that part of our home is a toxic waste dump. Those are the rooms nobody goes into, remote facilities in the west desert where national companies store and process everything from simple trash to deadly chemical compounds to low-level radioactive waste. Unless we work in one of these places -- which only a small percentage of us do -- we tend to think of them rarely, if at all. When we do remember what's in those rooms, it is usually with a mixture of gratitude and shame. Gratitude because mitigation fees from these companies helped build community facilities like Deseret Peak Complex, and have left our county government relatively flush with cash. Shame because, on a human level, no man is proud to accept another's garbage.

Recent events, however, have again made us aware of our closed rooms. EnergySolutions, once a local disposal facility, has ridden atop a wave of radioactive waste to become a $2 billion, publicly-traded global conglomerate. Now the company hopes to import 20,000 tons of radioactive waste from Italy and store it in Tooele County. As that news was still filtering down last week, acrid smoke pouring into the sky from a landfill fire one valley to the east of EnergySolutions reminded us of the large-and-growing trash dump on the Goshute reservation there. That landfill, which accepts primarily garbage from the Wasatch Front, is only five acres at present, but the operator, Metro Waste, has an option to lease another 500 acres for expansion.

Clearly, neither Italians nor Wasatch Front Utahns want their waste near their homes. Tooele County first encouraged people to bring their waste here in the 1980s, and we have been cheerfully accepting it ever since. But, looking forward, most Tooele County residents would like to see an end to people bringing us their trash. That was reflected in the Tooele County Commission's 2005 decision to reduce the west desert hazardous waste corridor from 78,720 acres to 9,440 acres.

Now is the time to continue that process of constriction. We understand that waste is waste, but accepting radioactive materials from Michigan or Mississippi is philosophically much more palatable than accepting waste from Europe, since at least in accepting the former we can claim to be performing a national duty. EnergySolutions should give up on the idea of importing foreign waste, even if the practice has existed in the past.

Likewise, the Goshutes of Skull Valley should not allow the landfill on their lands to expand to anywhere near its projected capacity. Tooele County has accepted beyond its fair share of others' garbage. We should stop looking to hazardous waste as a growth industry, no matter how bright its future in financial terms. We can do better. Now is the time for us to pay attention to what's in our secret rooms, redefine our limits and envision a day when we will accept no more.