Landfill Power
How Waste Management keeps your trash out of sight (and smell) and turns garbage into clean energy.
By Tim McNellie

The first thing you notice while standing at the foot of Southwestern Pennsylvania’s second-largest landfills is that there’s not a garbage bag in sight. There are no piles of rubbish, no stacks of used tires, not even a plastic grocery bag blowing around. And then it hits you.

There’s no smell either.

If you didn’t know in advance that this spot in the City of Washington was the place where nearly every bit of nonrecyclable trash picked up from nearly every community in a 20 mile radius was buried, you would assume it was simply a large hill, a mountain of dirt, really, a few hundred feet high. It could pass for a construction site, or some kind of mining operation.

But underneath that dirt, buried away from sight and smell, is the trash that you and your neighbors, and your parents and their neighbors, and maybe even your grandparents and their neighbors, have disposed of during the past 100 years. The landfill is just off Route 18, not far from the Washington city limits. It is owned by Waste Management, the refuse company that serves Peters Township and countless other regional communities.

Rising out of the ground like a great earthen monolith, the landfill’s base is surrounded by low-lying buildings, parking lots, weigh-in stations, and even a future electrical power plant fueled by the landfill itself. In that sense, it’s fitting that the dirt mountain is at the physical center of Waste Management’s site, because in the trash business, picking up the garbage is only part of the battle.

“The Department of Environment Protection regulates all aspects of our operations and limits us to dumping 2,800 tons per day at this site,” says Jon Dufalla, operations manager of what’s known as the Arden landfill. “On average we do around 1,500 tons per day, but depending on the day it can fluctuate between 900 and 2,700.”

If Waste Management gets too close to the limit, they have to stop dumping for the day. Exceeding the daily dumping quota can bring severe fines from the state. Summer time can be the most problematic, as construction season brings plenty of orders for heavy-duty trash pickups, which must be carefully managed to stay within regulations. The days after Christmas also bring sidewalks full of packed garbage bags.

Maneuvering his four-wheel truck up the landfill’s roads on an overcast winter afternoon, Dufalla explains how your garbage gets from your house to the dumping site atop this slope (which, if it isn’t already the highest point in Washington County, soon will be):

Every week or so, one of Waste Management’s fleet of 75 garbage trucks (operated by one of the company’s 130 drivers) makes its way down your street and picks up your trash. That much you already know. When the truck has made all its pick-ups, it heads back to Washington, and pulls into Waste Management’s back entrance, which contains a weigh-in station that gauges the truck’s load. If it’s hauling more than the maximum 73,280 pounds, the risk of fines rises again. Only municipal solid waste is accepted. They do not accept hazardous waste.

If the truck passes its weight and radiation checks, it makes the climb up the dirt mountain. At the peak, hidden from view, is the current dumping site. This is part of a cell.

Each cell is constructed to include a protective liner system and a wastewater system to collect water that passes through the trash.

On a busy day there can be a minitraffic jam of trucks coming and going on these roads. This afternoon is relatively slow, however. Off to the right, a bulldozer is pushing around piles of garbage to one central spot. Once the trash-pile is big enough, another, even bigger, machine called a compactor (sticker price: $800,000) will drive back and forth over the heap, flattening it down into the earth. At the end of each day, the trash is covered to minimize odors and provide protection from animals and birds.

As a cell reaches its designed capacity and elevation, it is capped, covered with soil, and landscaped to a natural contour. With more than 500 acres currently approved for dumping, Dufalla estimates that there’s enough space for at least another 50 years – probably even more.

For most of the 20th century, when this landfill was publically owned, and later managed by other private companies, the garbage dump was strictly that – a place for storing trash. Waste Management, however, which has owned the site since 1991, has found a way to turn the area into a relatively eco-friendly source of electricity.

When ordinary garbage is piled up – buried or not – it creates methane, a gas said to be one of the prime culprits behind global warming. Methane is also extremely flammable. To prevent landfill fires, Waste Management installs an ever-growing network of pipes underneath the piles of trash, which allows gas to escape to a central location, where it’s harmlessly burned off by a furnace constantly set to 1,500° Fahrenheit (burning the methane also gets rid of the odor problems that plague landfills).

Beginning later this year, Waste Management, in partnership with West Penn Power, will begin converting methane gas to electricity. Waste Management’s renewable energy projects create enough electricity to power nearly 1 million homes and save the equivalent of more than 14 million barrels of oil per year. Even current projects supply sufficient landfill gas to power 400,000 homes, replacing 7 million barrels of oil per year.

In this way, Waste Management is finding out what environmentalists have been saying for years. Trash has value beyond its haulage price. Using garbage to produce clean energy is the equivalent of the alchemist’s dream – turning dross into gold.