Avenal Landfill

There is one detail to clear out. Landfills and dumps sound the same but are not. A landfill is engineered to maximally reduce the effect on the environment of the waste. The advantages of landfills over dumps are that landfills are managed with more care and landfills can even recycle the waste to produce other compounds or to even produce energy. Dumps are almost nonexistent today as they do not manage the waste and just leave things in the open.

There is a lot of waste generated in the USA. In 2018, there were 292 million tons of waste generated. Averagely that is 4.9 Lb. of waste per person. The waste from municipalities is recycled the most. The data says that in 2018, there was a recycling rate of 32%. Some of the waste is reprocessed not other means such as bio-chemical management.The largest categories of waste pertain to paper, food plastics, yard trims, and metals. Food, plastics, and paper make are the main resources for energy production from waste.

The schedule of each landfill differs and they different hours of operation. To find the opening hours regarding a specific landfill, you use the above site. After you have located the desired landfill to use, the operating hours can be seen on current page of site after clicking into the “Opening hours” section. There you will be able to locate the opening hours and any other facts about the business services of the landfill.

When waste arrives in a landfill it needs to be sorted out first. Therefore, we have waste sorting stations. These are specialized for municipal waste and not for other types of landfills. Garbage trucks dump their municipal waste. Then the waste is separated into recyclable waste and non-recyclable materials. The non-recyclable garbage is then separated into hazardous waste, energy recyclable waste, landfill waste, or incinerator waste. Afterward that it has been sorted out, it is then loaded onto garbage trucks, and this deposits the waste onto their designated places.

Sanitary landfills offer a more advanced waste management approach that further reduces the chances of environmental contamination. The basic unit of a sanitary landfill is still the cell. The idea is to create soil tranches. The garbage is deposited onto layers 1 to 3 meters high and then compacted by bulldozers to reduce the volume. Then the garbage is covered by a layer of dirt. Multiple of these layers are piled together until they reach maximum capacity and thus, we form a cell. The cell is then reinforced on all sides to prevent leakage to the soil.