Learn about landfills present and future

We don’t always like to think about them, but landfills serve a significant purpose in the lives of all Americans. According to EPA reports, Americans sent about 243 million tons of trash to landfills in 2009, and these structures must be carefully built and managed to sustain that load without significantly affecting the environment.

While most people have a cartoonish idea of what a landfill is—big, steaming piles of trash located on the outskirts of town—an actual engineered landfill is a much more complicated project. Here’s a breakdown of the basics of how a landfill is built.

• Waste is collected in the landfill and regularly compacted in order to ensure the most efficient use of space.
• A liner runs along the bottom of the landfill that prevents trash from coming into contact with soil and groundwater.
• On top of this liner, systems designed for the removal of leachate (liquids that have seeped through the solid waste) are installed so that potentially contaminated liquid does not enter the soil or ground water, and storm water drainage is built outside for the same purpose.
• Finally, because the breakdown of waste produces large amounts of methane, systems are installed for the removal of this potentially harmful gas.

Though it is not widely practiced yet, innovations in the last couple of decades have allowed for captured methane gas from landfills to be reused elsewhere as a power source. To encourage this sustainable practice, the EPA created its Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP), which works with communities to help make these projects manageable.

With our world quickly growing and changing, more solutions like the LMOP are needed to help us rethink our landfill design for the future. At Wright Brothers, we are exciting to participate in building that future!