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Any non-feathered critters run around causing problems? I imagine a landfill being a perfect home for rats and raccoons.
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Sep 9, 2014 05:27
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Tawd posted:That's a tricky one. It really depends on how much waste you take in. Typically toward the end of my tenure we'd be taking in around 1,600 metric tonnes of waste a day, and a cell might take a couple of years to fill. Of course, all these sizes vary depending on the planned layout of your site. For reference, a typical articulated lorry could carry twenty to twenty-two metric tonnes of general waste. drat, that's a lot of trash. You talked earlier about how employees of stores built on top of old landfills often exhibit health problems: have you or your coworkers experienced health problems from continuous work around landfills? Are there certain symptoms or what have you that signal you need to take some time away, or anything like that? I have to imagine you're getting exposed to quite a higher than average level of carcinogens and other nasty substances, even just by being in the general vicinity of the stuff. And that's not even counting the contaminated waste water you mentioned earlier.
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Sep 9, 2014 05:44
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Sydin posted:drat, that's a lot of trash. I think because they're open air facilities that sickness is low. At a grocery store, they probably ran their water pipes through the landfill and gases might have been leaking continuously inside the store.
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Sep 9, 2014 07:19
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Aggressive pricing posted:Ever have any on site injuries or deaths? Thankfully, not anything major. A few staff members had trouble with ongoing health problems - heart dramas - and the occasional slip/trip/fall, but on the whole we were very fortunate. The worst injury I can recall is a hydraulic hose on the back of a trailer breaking free and whacking the driver on the head but he walked away, albeit wobbly. Health and safety is important, though, because the potential for injury in a place like that is huge. whitey delenda est posted:Cool thread thanks for posting. My masters course sort of touches on landfills obliquely because they are tied into environmental health, but I just find waste processing oddly fascinating in general. Buddy of mine does permitting for landfills here in the state and he is an engineer by schooling, did you come in with any formal education? Or was it just starting as a worker like you laid out? My career really started at the ground floor. I have a BA in comparative literature so, well, it gave me something to think about while I was picking litter. That said I've got a mind that enjoys the technical aspects of things so I was interested and could pick up the ideas later on quite quickly. ookuwagata posted:E: A question: Besides the birds, any other animals hang around the dumps? Rats? Plagues of flies? Raccoons? SkiLander posted:Any non-feathered critters run around causing problems? I imagine a landfill being a perfect home for rats and raccoons. How did I not answer this before?  In the UK, you'd be unlikely to find a raccoon outside an animal park but yes, it's a haven for rats. They pretty much lay low during the day but you see the odd one. More interesting is the effect on wildlife the landfill has on the restored/capped areas - it's like a nature reserve, there were pheasants, wild birds of various kinds, a pair of hawks, foxes, rabbits and the like all over the place because the people weren't there, and pretty much left it alone.Sydin posted:drat, that's a lot of trash. Yeah, we weren't even that big as it goes. Sydin posted:You talked earlier about how employees of stores built on top of old landfills often exhibit health problems: have you or your coworkers experienced health problems from continuous work around landfills? Are there certain symptoms or what have you that signal you need to take some time away, or anything like that? I have to imagine you're getting exposed to quite a higher than average level of carcinogens and other nasty substances, even just by being in the general vicinity of the stuff. And that's not even counting the contaminated waste water you mentioned earlier. None that we could really recognise. The major health benefit was that I rarely got ill - I think in the five years I had working around landfills, I was off sick for two days (and one of them was an indulgence I didn't really need.) In the long term, it can't be as good for you as living in an alpine meadow, drinking spring water and frolicking with forest nymphs, though. You'd really need to do long term studies of landfill workers vs. the general population, it would be surprising if it didn't have some kind of negatibe effect. SlayVus posted:I think because they're open air facilities that sickness is low. At a grocery store, they probably ran their water pipes through the landfill and gases might have been leaking continuously inside the store. This is pretty much the gist of it. Presumably the supermarket's public areas were well ventilated and open, whereas the staff might have spent time in smaller/more enclosed areas, as well as being there all day.
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Sep 9, 2014 09:20
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My father in law who works at a landfill seems to be constantly sawing through bits of himself or getting nails jammed right through his hand. Do you have much of a problem with stray/feral pets? Up here the dump seems to be where lovely people take their pets they don't want any more so there's now a massive feral cat hoard living uup there. A local charity took on a project to come up, trap and neuter them but I think they ran out of funding.
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Sep 9, 2014 10:36
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How bad is machine maintenance? Do you have to spend ours cleaning out trash before you are able to do anything?
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Sep 9, 2014 11:35
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Did working at a landfill change your personal recycling/waste generating habits at all? Do you try to recycle more and throw away less stuff?
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Sep 9, 2014 19:55
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Ever dispose of asbestos containing material? In the states the EPA regs say it has to be covered with four feet of clean material. But I'm pretty sure they just cover it with less than 4 feet of garbage at a lot of landfills.
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Sep 9, 2014 21:10
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I've worked on engineering design and permitting for landfills in the US.Tawd posted:You've got me there. If it's being incinerated, maybe the hay is surplus subsidy-grown material that's used to make a more consistent feedstock? Or if it's buried, it could be put down to generate a more consistent gas - one of the main concerns for those generating landfill gas is that less and less biodegradable material, particularly food, is going to landfill, so less gas. Maybe another goon could chip in? If it is going in the ground then it being extra organics to jump-start decay is my guess. Landfills are permitted up to a specific elevation and they get paid by the ton, so every ounce of stuff that can be made to fit in that fixed, permitted volume is more money in the bank. Waste settles and compresses, taking up less space over time as it decays, and the faster that happens the sooner you can put more garbage into that space. Mixing in hay probably doesn't take up much space, but it probably adds moisture and bacteria and organics to the mix. It isn't unusual for a landfill being closed out to be built 10-20 feet higher (or more) than allowed because they know it will settle that much over the next few years. I don't know if wanting to generate more gas is really a concern, unless they are using it to power the office or something and are worried about it running out if the landfill is older. You can do stuff like leachate recirculation where you take the awful garbage water that comes out the bottom and add it back in at the top to speed the decay process up also. There are even bioreactor landfills where they add perfectly good water at the top to speed this up even more. withak fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Sep 10, 2014 |
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Sep 10, 2014 05:32
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hookerbot 5000 posted:My father in law who works at a landfill seems to be constantly sawing through bits of himself or getting nails jammed right through his hand. If he wasn't rooting round for treasure that probably wouldn't happen.  We didn't have a feral cat hoard but I'd prefer that if it kept the seagull and rat population under control; there was one semi-wild cat that an old customer came in to feed every morning. Feka posted:How bad is machine maintenance? Do you have to spend ours cleaning out trash before you are able to do anything? Life was pretty hard on the machines - tracks would regularly have to be dug out and the maintenance routines were probably a touch more regular; the only thing worse for them was building sea defences, with sand and salt-water grinding in. BattleHamster posted:Did working at a landfill change your personal recycling/waste generating habits at all? Do you try to recycle more and throw away less stuff? It certainly made me intensely aware of waste, much more so than before. How useless is plastic packaging? Couldn't we just use paper and cardboard, which could - but probably isn't - a renewable resource? SkiLander posted:Ever dispose of asbestos containing material? In the states the EPA regs say it has to be covered with four feet of clean material. But I'm pretty sure they just cover it with less than 4 feet of garbage at a lot of landfills. You need a special permit to bury asbestos, and special measures, guys in suits and misting sprays to keep the fibres down until it's buried. Never had to deal with it myself, thankfully, but if you tell me that all the builder's waste that came in to be trommeled and seperated was 100% fibre-free I'd call you a liar. withak posted:I've worked on engineering design and permitting for landfills in the US. This makes sense, the vast majority of material that goes into the landfills I have personally seen are plastics with a thin smearing of organics for the most part. Compaction is rightly important, you wouldn't run a fifty tonne compactor guzzling hundreds and hundreds of litres of diesel a day if it wasn't worthwhile. Gas production was a big concern for us, so much so that the landfill/operations side was merged with waste to energy, with energy being on top, turning the landfill into the equivalent a vast, geoengineered anaerobic digester. Rumor had it that WtE was propping the rest of the company up (not strictly true, I'm sure.) Heard of recirculation but didn't use it on site - never heard of good water being put in - in the UK, according to the Environment Agency, puting liquids into a landfill is a strict no-no.
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Sep 13, 2014 14:45
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Do you ever get protestors bothering you?
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Sep 13, 2014 14:54
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Kuiperdolin posted:Do you ever get protestors bothering you? Hm, not really. It's an unwritten rule of the landfill industry that there has to be a small village in the direction of the prevailing wind though, so we did get infrequent odour complaints. At my last site, there was a bit of an ongoing controversy with the locals. The story went that a local wealthy guy had sold a disused quarry to a company that turned it into an unprofitable golf course, which had then sold it to our firm to become a landfill. Sadly the lord of the manor didn't appreciate the view of the tip as much as the golf course. Then again, who bought up those two houses on the main road through as soon as word got round the site was shutting? Bet they flipped for a good price soon after. One dude did write in to the local paper, stating on the record that he had never, even, smelt anything coming from the landfill and 'what was everyone going else going on about?' Truth as ever probably somewhere in between the two.
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Sep 13, 2014 15:05
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