LCAC visits Grady Road Landfill
Polk County’s new Landfill Citizens Advisory Committee got their first tour of the Grady Road Landfill from it’s man in charge and got to ask a whole heapful of questions along the way in a meeting that took up the afternoon for the members.
Waste Industries’ George Gibbons, the manager of the landfill for the company, explained operations from the preparations put in place before a single bag of trash can be put into a cell at the facility, to the various ways operations are made as safe as they possibly can.
Following a tour around the site on Saturday, committee members spent classroom time going over every step of the operation, interrupting Gibbons along the way to interject their own questions about the process.
Among the many questions the committee wanted answers on: what is Waste Industries doing about the smell?
This longstanding problem with trash, the odor emitted from rotting waste makes life difficult for landfill operators and those living around the facilities all across the world.
Here at the Grady Road Landfill, Gibbons said he’s working on the issue in three seperate areas of attack: in treating leachate with the correct enzymes, by collecting and burning off gases created by the waste with a flare, and doing his best to treat the work face, or the current open hole of trash at the landfill, with a variety of products to knock the odor out of the air.
“We’ve got different things dealing with different odors,” he said.
The gas collection system, he reported, isn’t a 24-hour a day, 365 day a year operation though either since it requires downtime for maintenance on pumps and anytime new wells are drilled and connected into the system. Whenever the flare is also blown out for a variety of reasons, the smell from gas at the landfill can come back.
However odiferous gases that give off the typical rotten smell only account for 10 percent of the overall gas emissions from the landfill, Gibbons said.
Gibbons added mister systems are being tested that put out a constant spray including an oil that is supposed to help remove the smell from trash already biodegrading on the working face as it is compacted by machinery and trucks as they drive over.
Committee member Glenn Campbell, who has been outspoken in his questions about the landfill to the Polk County Commission in the past, took the time to also ask about runoff coming from the property and ending up elsewhere.
Gibbons explained that in his defense, the runoff coming from the landfill is most of the time contained using a variety of silt weirs and runoff ponds to keep any stormwater draining into local tributaries, and usually contains dirt contaminants from where they dug out materials to prepare new cells.
But like with all major rain events, ones where several inches of rain fall at one time, even he can’t control all of mother nature.
He pointed out too that while he has collection ponds and weirs in place to ensure that the water is contained as best as possible, stormwater in cities coming off of streets is full of all kinds of contaminants, and reminding the committee that not everything can be controlled.
However, the committee was informed that Waste Industries does have to go through a process of testing water spilling out of runoff ponds during major events within 30 minutes of an overflow, but that can only be done during times when the landfill has people on site to test.
Essentially, if it rains hard overnight or the weekend while the landfill is closed, no one is around to test to ensure there’s no sediment contamination coming off.
Gibbons also got into a history of how the landfill came to be today, and explained a variety of areas of operations from the materials used to prepare cells, to going over potential new covers that can be utilized when the landfill is capped off and eventually fully closed.
This new material, an improved covering called Coverturf that has been created after several years of development, could provide Gibbons and landfill operators around the country a new way to cap off landfills without having to rely on the costs of mowing grass for several decades.
Currently, the landfill is capped off with the second half of the liner used on the bottom, welded together to create a tight seal and then covered with material to bury it and contain the waste in place. All of that is then covered in grass and kept up for 30 years.
Along the way the landfill is designed to have slight ridges, terraced to help protect from soil runoff.
Instead, it combines the top liner material and an Astroturf- like material which has better UV pro- tection expected to last upward of 50 years, he said. Though expensive, he said it’s an option he is hoping Waste Industries will invest infor the future at the landfill on Grady Road.
Gibbons said a landfill in Georgia is already using the Coverturf for their capping.