Sabattus Transfer Station

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.

A sanitary landfill is different from a dump in the meaning that it goes above and beyond to assure that there is no environmental pollution. A sanitary landfill also reuses gases to generate electricity while eliminating the chance of liquids spillage onto fresh groundwater. The landfill is also covered, so the wind won’t fly away debris or any piece of garbage. A dump is just an open space to dump the garbage. No controlled activity, no monitoring, no expert supervision, and no environmental protection. The waste decomposes in the open air and pollutes the soil and groundwater water.

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.

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.

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.