Landfill Preparation and Methane Gas Plants

Landfill Preparation

Landfills must be prepared to accept the trash. A landfill that is being prepared to collect trash is called a Cell. First, using a bulldozers and other large machines, they excavated a huge pit. A cell takes five years to prepare a landfill but only 2 to 3 years to fill it up with garbage. A landfill  can collect around 10,000 tons of trash a day, this is why recycling is so important.

Methane Gas Plants

The methane gas is produced from buried trash.  This gas is then converted to usable natural gas that helps to heat over 20,000 home. A company  process 9 million cubic

feet of gas daily. Four and a half million cubic feet of gas is used as natural gas.

The gas recovery process involves four steps:

• The gas is compressed and dried
• Pre-treatment stage: Volatile organic compounds are removed
• Pressure swing absorption:Carbon dioxide is removed
• product compression: The treated gas is compressed before entering the power plant’s substation
• The well field collection system are designed to operate the gas plants to full capacity.

       Well field collection systems

     - Wells are drilled 150 to 200 feet apart and 100 feet deep, and they are linked to the         

        plant’s header collection system

• The width of the boreholes allows methane gas to build up before entering the pipes
• Perforated holes covering 50 percent of each pipe allow gas to enter
• Stone located around and above the perforated areas acts as a gas migration point 

           filtering dirt and trash

• Two gel seals and dirt lie above the rock to prevent gas from migrating up through 

          borehole

• A wellhead system containing an orifice plate and valve measures gas flow in an out 

         the well

Reference

Rumpke Recycling- Landfill Gas Recycling At Rumpke

Sanitary Landfill Near Cincinnati

A Landfill Tour

RUMPKE RECYCLING

A 45 minutes educational tour of a landfill 10 people. The landfill make people take a different look or appreciate at their garbage man. Prior to hearing about recycling most people could care less about a garbage man’s job which was simply a waste of time. Its wasn’t important enough to be considered a real job.

The group learned that one residential garbage collector may have 500 houses on their route in one day. They also showed us their truck washing station and their wheel wash. I never realized a garbage truck had to be wash or kept clean, but not we all understand why. 

Landfill maintenance is a daily responsibility. They also use large yellow water tanks to spray water throughout the landfill. Water is sprayed to keep the dust,  produced at a minimum. Its  really hard for them keeping the dust, odors and debris at a minimum. The odors can be extremely unpleasant. 

Trash sometime escapes the landfill, to keep this at a minimum landfill operators would use large screen. They even have workers that would collect the escaping plastic bags and other trash that’s caught in the wind.

At the end of the tour we all made a promise to use recycle shopping bags and return any plastic grocery bags back to the grocery store recycling bin. 

Reference

Family Friendly Cincinnati (http://familyfriendlycincinnati.com/category/family-friendly-fyi/)