Durham Transfer Station

There is an interesting type of landfill, inert landfills. This type of landfill receives sand, concrete, and other waste related to construction. This type of waste does not have any biohazards nor decomposes, or it does so very slowly. These types of waste neither produce liquid waste. In this category, we mostly have asphalt, rocks, bricks, yard leaves. In this category, we do not include demolition waste.

There are many landfills and they have accepted different types of waste. To make it simpler for our readers to locate your nearest landfill, we have created a simple website that helps you to answer those questions. The website is free and very simple to use. All that you must do is input your zip code and the type of waste that you will deposit. The website generates an interactive map, where it lists all landfills near your zip code that accept your predefined type of waste. The website also generates a list of all landfills near you where you can click and get more information for each landfill.

A landfill is a location that manages our waste. In some landfills the garbage is left in piles, in some the garbage is incinerated and, in some others, the waste is decomposed onto other chemical structures and processed. In some landfills, the waste is buried.

Landfills are in specific areas, and they are away from cities and counties as there are gases that leak from the decomposition of the waste. There are various types of landfills. Some are used for municipal waste, some are used for sorting of the waste, some serve as transfer stations, and some are specialized only for recycling. Each landfill has its acceptance conditions, which means only a specific type of waste can be accepted.

When a load of waste is accepted, the garbage trucks go to the dumping point and offload the materials. During the processing of the waste, the main ideas are to confine the waste in the smallest space possible and to reduce the volume of the waste by compacting it. The garbage trucks are weighed when they enter and exit the landfill. The difference is the tons of garbage deposited and that affects the cost to use the landfill. Each landfill has its prices per ton depending on the type of waste that is deposited.

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.

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.