From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Nov. 14, 1988:

State health officials this week said that Douglas County could end up with a waste disposal problem “of crisis proportions” if restaurants and car washes couldn’t find a place to take the grime from their grease and mud pits. Illegal dumping was already suspected in ditches and fields, and state officials said the continued dumping would threaten groundwater supplies. “This could be a crisis in the near future,” said Chuck Linn, chief of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s waste management section. “Either they’re (the city and county) going to have to deal with it or the landfills are going to have to do it.” Nearly three weeks earlier, the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission had unanimously recommended denial of a Topeka man’s proposal to open a 192-acre ground-level waste disposal facility just south of Lecompton. N. R. Hamm Quarry Inc., which was serving as the Lawrence and Douglas County landfill, would take car wash mud if the liquid were drained but would not accept grease or any liquids. The city waste water treatment plant would not take grease or car-wash mud, according to Bob Leach, assistant utilities director. “It can plug a sewer up on you,” Leach said. “It costs us a lot of money to treat it. We just don’t want it around.”