Landfill and Recycling

As recycling has grown as a necessary industry, landfill continues to process its share of waste. The modern landfill operation is a business as involved and as exacting as many processing plants in industry.

As with any industrial plant type enterprise, good team management can be at the heart of success. The wellbeing and safety of employees, and full knowledge and application of environmental legal requirements, hand in hand with local expectations, can all result in a smooth running operation.

This is the foundation of a profitable business, or financial prudence, in the case of publicly owned sites.

The financial outlay at the beginning of a site’s life will undoubtedly be substantial. Plant requirements from the outset will be extensive, but wise decisions on construction equipment are essential.

From the road- using trucks which haul waste to site, to the compacting machines there, also required on site are track-type tractors, track-type loaders, wheeled loaders and excavators.

The punishing environment for vehicles on these sites mean that they work very hard indeed, and although some management policies will have their own maintenance facilities in house, others may find it expedient to employ maintenance and upkeep contracts with the plant providers, all depending on the firms’ financial structure.

Many factors contribute to the satisfactory, professional and possibly profitable landfill management.

Having in place the required fleet of vehicles is important to allow the structured development of the landfill.

Compaction is a vital part of the process and is becoming increasingly hi-tech in its application.

The weight and drive of the compactor machine plays its part in shredding the material, making it bind with other material, pushing down-wards expelling air pockets on the forward drive, and repeating it by returning over the same surface again.

Good compaction is a fundamental part of good landfill management as voids or air pockets could show only after the final landscaping soil layers have been applied.

To deal with these is technically difficult and expensive, particularly as by this stage, having completed the fill, there is no more income stream.

An aid to modern compaction and filling is the application of GPS systems within the machines.

These have the ability to tell whether each area has been suitably compacted, and can give a positioning of whether the machine, therefore the waste level is at an altitude equal to the last run across, and therefore will compact no further.

The landfill environment is a very tough one indeed on both tracked and wheeled vehicles, and only those proven hardy enough for the endurance challenge should be engaged.