People are paying $7 to see Chicago's garbage and sewage sites in tour called "Down in the Dumps".

The nearly three-hour bus tour of the far South Side includes water treatment plant, recycling center and landfills. It is a chance for residents, environmentalists and visitors to learn more about what happens to garbage once it leaves their trash cans.

Resident Bill Serckie says, "We see it, we smell and we wanted to know what all this is."

The couple has lived for 18-years near the garbage-filled landfills that dot the area along Interstate 94 near the Illinois-Indiana border, but like many of the 30 other tour-goers had never driven down the potholed back roads to see them up close.

Serckie says, "The tour makes you want to be more involved in the community and know what's going on."

The tour, conducted twice this summer, will be offered again in the fall. It's organized by the Southeast Environmental Task Force, a conservation group that wants to preserve open space and make sure more landfills don't sprout up.

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency says the area already has more than a dozen landfills and hazardous waste sites.

Stan Komperda, an IEPA project manager says, "It's an area that was once a beautiful wetland and all that was trashed beginning in the 1940s and 1950s when it became a natural dump site."

The group's president and tour guide Tom Shepherd says most of the landfills on the tour no longer accept garbage because of a city moratorium that went into effect in 1984.