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Hey all, long time lurker Tawd here, by way of an introduction and at the behest of a couple of members of the Stairmasters LinkedIn community, I'd do an A/T about my glamorous and fufilling former career at a couple of landfills in the United Kingdom. It was just a hole in the ground, wasn't it? Not at all...when I began as a lowly litter picker, this was my impression too, but in the modern age quite a lot of engineering goes into burying all your secret shame-waste. Really? Not at all like that Simpsons episode? Yes, really!* Landfills are constructed and filled in 'cells' or phases which have to be lined with a geotextile (really thick, tough plastic) membrane. The gas which is emitted has to be dealt with, originally with flares but now it's typically burnt at an on-site power generation compound. The leachate, contaminated water that percolates through the waste, is also horrible stuff and must be extracted and treated - this was my main job. * That said, old quarries often become landfills for obvious reasons. The hole in the ground has been made for you. We're fascinated, do go on! Uh, no idea where to begin, so ask away!
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Sep 3, 2014 13:28
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ever have the cops come looking for a body?
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Sep 3, 2014 14:28
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What's the weirdest thing you've seen in the pile?
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Sep 3, 2014 14:37
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How long overall did you work at landfills? Did you get crazy pickers? Ever salvage anything decent? What was the grossest thing you ever saw? Have you noticed a decrease in good stuff since gumtree and freecycle got popular?
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Sep 3, 2014 15:36
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Asking about salvaging too - is there anything good left by the time it gets to you or is it just the grossest stuff left? My father in law works at the dump, I don't think it's a landfill, they get the rubbish then sort it and store it for collection to other places as well as civic amenities. I'd estimate he makes his salary again from all the stuff he nicks from the dump and sells on at car boot sales, scrap merchants, mobile phone recycling like envirofone and the rest. He also lives like a womble - his bathroom is full of different brands of deoderant cans with just a tiny bit left in it which I am pretty sure came from the dump. Also one time the police came up with a massive bag of weed plants they had taken from someones house during a bust and asked if he could dispose of it safely (needless to say it ended up being given to family members). Have you ever had requests from the police to dispose of stuff like that?
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Sep 3, 2014 16:46
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fivethree posted:ever have the cops come looking for a body? Not in my time. You hear rumours of bodies being found, and more sinister tales of cars dropping...stuff...off in the dead of night. It might be a bit more common in landfills that directly border London or other major cities, though. That being said, the following conversation I had with a lorry driver who tipped waste with us regularly sums it up:-  I woudn't like to be around here at night! Oh, why not? * Resting place of more than one person up there, I'll warrant. * Barring the obvious. Incindentally, it is sodding eerie at night. It would be a matter of chance if a body would be seen between it being tipped out, rolled out and crushed in a machine called called a compactor.  You'd like to think that your remains would be found and your killer bough to justice, but if you already arrived bagged or you were really small...well...maybe. There are better ways to get rid of a body, I'd guess, but you could do worse.  The cops are much more likely to turn up looking for a murder weapon; again, a search will only be undertaken if they're drat sure something might be there. The cost of employing very disgruntled forensic technicians to search, meticulously and by hand, a significant area of compacted waste would be high indeed. In theory, the exact location of a single load could be recorded and pinpointed later but a bulldozer may have pushed it a hundred meters before the compactor further spread it and squashed it down. Rhymenoserous posted:What's the weirdest thing you've seen in the pile? That would have to be, without a doubt, the whales. You see, when a poor whale gets confused and ups and dies on the beach, you can't just leave it there to decompose. Neither can you tug it back out to sea, which would be the most ecologically sound idea, because it might just float back somewhere else along the shoreline a few days further on in it's decomposition. Somebody has to deal with it, right? So a whale, dolphin or porpoise would occasionally come in and an excavator would have to dig a trench to accomodate it. There can be unforseen problems, though, as whales are extremely tough (on of the larger ones couldn't be broken up with a twenty-tonne excavator) and have a habit of 'floating' up through the waste like a tyre would. The last I heard Moby was staying put...for now.  The best bit? Technically they come in classified as street sweepings. Sometimes you get an odd slice of life that you'd never normally get to see, like the diary of a young university student who was a) fond of YouPorn b) constantly disappointed by her boyfriends mixed signals. And Julia, if I ever send you a damned Christmas card you'd better not throw it away on boxing day! Someone always finds out!  Beep Street posted:How long overall did you work at landfills? Did you get crazy pickers? Ever salvage anything decent? What was the grossest thing you ever saw? Have you noticed a decrease in good stuff since gumtree and freecycle got popular? I have worked in and around landfills for about five years. Initially through a temp agency as a litter picker. When the wind gets up it can and does carry plastic bags and light waste out of containment and to perimiter fences and beyond. Later I became the relief weighbridge operator and then full time weighbridge operator, as the former weighbridge operator had got into trouble and was suspended very rapidly. Went to work at another landfill and started working as a general operative, driving some machines and such, and apprenticed (read: bitch-assigned) to the operator of the leachate treatment plant, where we pre-treated the contaminated water before it went off to the sewer. Yeah, we did get crazy pickers. Diesel theft from the machines and theft of electrical cable was a real issue, more generally scavenging was a problem. Sometimes I'd be the last one up on site finishing some work off and I'd see these guys arrive with head torches. Never found anything worth a drat, but again you hear stories. Don't forget that by the time we saw anything, the waste has been collected by your local bin-men, probably taken to a transfer station, handled and squashed about by machine operators, re-loaded onto an artic lorry and then tipped up at the landfill. So plenty of pairs of eyes have been cast over it beforehand. Then again, jewellery, bags of cash (on more than one occasion) etc. have all turned up. The grossest thing I personally ever saw was, again, whale material. Somebody from a local council had hired some true professionals to transport this whale. It's a bit of a sensitive matter because people do get a bit  about these majestic sea creatures. And by true professionals, I mean two men with a skip lorry one level removed from your man-and-van operators, who had apparently chainsawed through this beast sans protective gear, loaded the creature up somehow (the poor lorry's deck was covered with whale remnants) and transported it, uncovered, through leafy countryside and the roads of a cathedral city secured by only one chain. To this day I have a vision in my mind of what would have happened had that chain snapped. Rumor has it that there was not only blood on the streets, and the smell was pretty bad.*On the whole, it's not as bad as you might imagine. The waste is so intermingled that there's no particularly concentrated smell, and most of the time it's not as bad as, say, a standard four-wheel bin that a resteraunt or shop might use, or you'd find in a block of flats. There are exceptions, though, such as having to work for extended periods wellie-deep in sewage screenings. * Not quite as bad for us as the dude who had done the chainsawing. Apparently there was gore under his fingernails. Wash your hands, people! Back in the day it was apparently better as recycling was far less common; at my last place we had an unofficial skip bin where we'd throw bits of scrap, profits to be divvied up amongst staff every time it went to the scrapyard, though. You still see a fair bit of pornography and dildoes though, guess they're not really Freecycle material.
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Sep 3, 2014 17:06
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hookerbot 5000 posted:My father in law works at the dump, I don't think it's a landfill, they get the rubbish then sort it and store it for collection to other places as well as civic amenities. I'd estimate he makes his salary again from all the stuff he nicks from the dump and sells on at car boot sales, scrap merchants, mobile phone recycling like envirofone and the rest. He also lives like a womble - his bathroom is full of different brands of deoderant cans with just a tiny bit left in it which I am pretty sure came from the dump. Ah, what you're on about is called a civic amentiy (CA) site, where members of the public can go and drop stuff off. (e: or maybe a transfer station?) I can't really blame him for 'salvaging' stuff, as they're not well paid and people can get really antsy if you tell them what to do with their unwanted stuff, to the point of running them over or assault. Not sure I'd do it myself though. hookerbot 5000 posted:Also one time the police came up with a massive bag of weed plants they had taken from someones house during a bust and asked if he could dispose of it safely (needless to say it ended up being given to family members). Have you ever had requests from the police to dispose of stuff like that? Woah. Are you sure? I'm pretty certain that would have to be incinerated, and whatever those cops were up to it'd have to be highly suspect. Sometimes we had waste in from pharmaceutical companies that had to be deeply buried, as did foreign food waste and medical waste (read, 99% of the time, nappies from nursing homes). Very occasionally you'd get HM Customs and Excise turn up and want to make sure, for example, that some fancy electronics had to be destroyed thoroughly as said company wanted to write off ~£60k of R&D costs against their tax bill.
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Sep 3, 2014 17:18
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Tawd posted:Ah, what you're on about is called a civic amentiy (CA) site, where members of the public can go and drop stuff off. (e: or maybe a transfer station?) I can't really blame him for 'salvaging' stuff, as they're not well paid and people can get really antsy if you tell them what to do with their unwanted stuff, to the point of running them over or assault. Not sure I'd do it myself though. I just googled it and apparently it is a landfill site as well - I'd always just thought it was the front bit with the civic amenities. Ah well. A charity opened to basically do the same thing he does (salvaging stuff and selling it) but legally and for charity and he got really pissed off at the competition. quote:
Well it was before my husband and I got together so I didn't see it myself but I don't really doubt it. It would have been a pretty long time ago (over 10 years) and the police up here (rural Scotland) are pretty crap.
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Sep 3, 2014 17:46
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hookerbot 5000 posted:Well it was before my husband and I got together so I didn't see it myself but I don't really doubt it. It would have been a pretty long time ago (over 10 years) and the police up here (rural Scotland) are pretty crap. That makes a bit more sense if it was a landfill. Some of them do have CA sites at the front.
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Sep 3, 2014 18:12
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I have to drop off stuff at the dump from time to time, and there are a lot of bales of hay, it looks like they're maybe being used when everything is ground up or something? Why is this?
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Sep 3, 2014 18:14
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What are the people working at the landfills like? Are they salty old eccentrics or is it just boring regular folks doing blue collar work?
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Sep 3, 2014 20:26
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What are you wearing on the job?
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Sep 3, 2014 21:04
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How bad are the birds?
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Sep 4, 2014 03:16
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Antifreeze Head posted:I have to drop off stuff at the dump from time to time, and there are a lot of bales of hay, it looks like they're maybe being used when everything is ground up or something? Why is this? 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? Kenning posted:What are the people working at the landfills like? Are they salty old eccentrics or is it just boring regular folks doing blue collar work? Hah. After a while, you begin to think that everyone's pretty normal, but consider ths cast of characters I have worked with - X, the landfill foreman who worked at my last site. Pretty brusque, took me under his wing as a charity case. Classic episodes include one conversation when a hire driver was mouthing off about how he'd been big up in his last firm, company car and such blah blah blah, which he cut short, with 'well what are you doing here then? You must have been pretty poo poo at your job.' From the mouth of babes comes truth unadorned. X, the manager of the above site, who was very fond of Lego and planned geocaching adventures around his work trips. X, the possibly alcoholic, possibly addicted to gambling weighbridge operator, most likely on the take. Bought and now runs a pub, now, somehow - probably strong-armed by... X, an irish wideboy who constantly had an angle, full of war stories of his time 'in the Lebanon' and Northern Ireland. I never knew if any of it was true. X, the former foreman of my second site, who was so diabetic that parts of him were shutting down, and had a terrible habit of falling asleep. Eveyone was worried that they'd be the one to try and wake him up on the fateful day when he woudln't. X, the second foreman of the above, expert chef, barbequeue and chilli enthusiast - originally wanted to be a silversmith, but trained as a bricklayer. X, the Portugese immigrant, beset by drink and gambling problems, on the happy pills. Had a degree level qualification in accountancy. Spent his time sifting through the waste looking for the big score, at home he was always trying to invent cheap electric bicycles, oscillated from one scheme to the next. Not at all bipolar. X, suffering from two kinds of hepatitis, convinced he had a plan to sue if 'they' tried to edge him out. He could have got it from that needle stick a few years back, sure. It was a matter of record, however, that he did not routinely wash his hands, and had boasted previously of his sexual misadventures in the eighties, and his exposure to untreated sewage during his time working for a drainage company in London. Numerous children by multiple women indicate his attitude toward protected sex. There's more, but this gives you a good idea. The industry has an odd tendency to attract eccentrics...everyone had a story. Kuiperdolin posted:What are you wearing on the job? Typically, steel-toe, steel-plate boots, work trousers, high-viz gear and hard hat. Typically my pockets were loaded with tools/widgets, and a gas alarm. Presentability really wasn't an issue. Aggressive pricing posted:How bad are the birds? Real bad. We employed a falconer full time to scare the seagulls off. Pretty contemplative job, but he seemed quite happy. The owl looked real mean, though, like it would poke your eyes out. Any time he was away or off on tea break, this would happen -   Apparently the best strategy to get rid of them was to wait until two of them were fighting over a scrap of something and squash them with the bucket of the digger.
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Sep 4, 2014 10:12
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Tawd posted:less and less biodegradable material, particularly food, is going to landfill Sorry? I'm not doubting you, but if the food waste isn't going to landfill, where's it going? 
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Sep 4, 2014 12:29
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CrowsNestMutineer posted:Sorry? I'm not doubting you, but if the food waste isn't going to landfill, where's it going? In Ontario, we use green bins that take our food stuff to composting.
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Sep 4, 2014 13:25
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CrowsNestMutineer posted:Sorry? I'm not doubting you, but if the food waste isn't going to landfill, where's it going? They feed it to the horses, from which the most delicious burgers are made. Aggressive pricing posted:In Ontario, we use green bins that take our food stuff to composting.  There's generally a move amongst local authorities to subdivide waste collections in to some of the following - recyclables, non-recyclables, green waste (i.e. garden waste), which goes for composting, and food waste. This would generally end up in an anaerobic digester. Bacteria break down your unwanted food in an airless hell crafted by science, the products of which are burnt as gas to generate electricity and the remaining muck spread on the fields to grow more food. That you can cook using electricity and not eat, so it can go back to the anaerobic digester. 
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Sep 4, 2014 14:50
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Tawd posted:The leachate, contaminated water that percolates through the waste, is also horrible stuff and must be extracted and treated - this was my main job.
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Sep 4, 2014 15:17
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Tawd posted:Real bad. We employed a falconer full time to scare the seagulls off. My calling... I have found it.
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Sep 4, 2014 15:52
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CrowsNestMutineer posted:Sorry? I'm not doubting you, but if the food waste isn't going to landfill, where's it going? lots of places find other uses. Out by Vegas the big all u can eat oink fest bars send their scraps to local farms to slop the animals. Some send their stuff to compost. Others sell off bits for recycling such as oils from fryers and grease traps to be processed into new oils like motor oils and such. Or in the case of certain fast food chains, send their fryer oil off to be recycled into new fryer oil.
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Sep 4, 2014 20:08
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SocketWrench posted:lots of places find other uses. Out by Vegas the big all u can eat oink fest bars send their scraps to local farms to slop the animals. Some send their stuff to compost. Others sell off bits for recycling such as oils from fryers and grease traps to be processed into new oils like motor oils and such. Or in the case of certain fast food chains, send their fryer oil off to be recycled into new fryer oil. Fryer oil is also used in various cosmetics according to a place i used to work.
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Sep 5, 2014 00:19
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I'm learning!
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Sep 5, 2014 01:57
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There's a hotel near my cousin's place in Costa Rica that does this on it's own. Their sewage is piped to a rigged verison of this thing that fills a big plastic bag with methane. There's a sandbag hanging from a pulley above the bag, and they lower it to send gas through a pipe to a bbq. Anything left over from the bacteria is used to fertilze their banana plants, which they feed to the guests.
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Sep 5, 2014 15:59
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I'd like to know a bit more about the long-term planning for landfills, if you world be so kind. What's the burial and storage process look like? Do landfills fill up? Do they eventually become land that can be used for something else in a few hundred years? How do we find places for new ones? If you don't wanna answer any of those questions, I'd love to hear about water extraction and treatment. Octatonic fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Sep 5, 2014 |
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Sep 5, 2014 17:32
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Gona have to explain foreign food waste to me and why.
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Sep 6, 2014 08:28
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Wait, so medical waste just goes to a normal landfill? I always thought they disposed of it in a special place because that poo poo can carry some terrifying diseases.evil_cheese posted:Fryer oil is also used in various cosmetics according to a place i used to work. Where I currently work we just sell fryer oil to a guy who makes it into biodiesel. The boss thinks he's crazy, but doesn't complain because it's more money from something he'd just toss out.
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Sep 6, 2014 18:13
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Don Gato posted:Wait, so medical waste just goes to a normal landfill? I always thought they disposed of it in a special place because that poo poo can carry some terrifying diseases. Not to derail, but I know a couple of restaurant owners who say they have to lock up their used oil storage tanks because people will try to steal it at night. Apparently there's money in everything.
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Sep 6, 2014 19:26
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Slowpoke! posted:Not to derail, but I know a couple of restaurant owners who say they have to lock up their used oil storage tanks because people will try to steal it at night. Apparently there's money in everything. Bio diesel is good money, if you can get a good enough supply of acid and waste oil to make it Does the smell stick to you? I find that no matter how much I wash after a decontamination shift, that burnt blood smell is still tickling my nose
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Sep 6, 2014 20:07
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Slowpoke! posted:Not to derail, but I know a couple of restaurant owners who say they have to lock up their used oil storage tanks because people will try to steal it at night. Apparently there's money in everything. There's been a very interesting shift in what happens with leftover fryer oil over the years. You used to have to pay to have somebody truck it away or it would just pile up and smell bad. Then when biodiesel started but wasn't all that popular some lucky places got people offering to just take it, which restaurants loved because, well, that was one less expense, you know? Now the poo poo is actually valuable because of how high gas prices have gotten and how popular biodiesel is getting. Like really, there was a time when you couldn't even give the crap away. It was a gigantic pain too because Americans loving love deep fried everything.
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Sep 6, 2014 20:44
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The Macaroni posted:Tell us more about this process. How do you extract and treat it? Is it safe for you, or is it dangerous? Alrighty! Well, water in the landfill - which has percolated down from rain and been squashed out of the waste mass itelf - is heavily contaminated. Not only with heavy metals such as mercury, lead, chromium, etc. and a sea of various chemical substances, but because it's an anaerobic environment (just like the AD plant), all sorts of proteins are broken down by bacterial action to produce, amongst other things, ammonia. This is the primary contaminant. This brew is called leachate.  You'll notice that although nothing more complex than bacteria (and even then I'd imagine a limited set) live in the leachate, that tree is doing very well next to it - leachate tends to contain phosphates, so inexplicably lush green grass growing anywhere is a sign you might have a problem. It would make an excellent fertilizer...if not for the heavy metals and hydrocarbons in it. This leachate is extracted via boreholes from each cell and piped to some kind of treatment works. Activated bacterial sludge - like in a normal sewer works - is normally used to break down the ammonia and hydrocarbons in the leachate. My plant did pre-treatment, which then went to the sewer for further treatment - other sites treat it further and might discharge to a river or the sea.  Raw leachate on the left, ours came out something like #3. #3 smells considerably better than #1. It won't burn your hand off or anything, but it does irritate your skin, and it's full of nasties including carcinogens. Acute exposure that you wash off won't do much harm but chronic exposure definitely will. Basically, I ran a miniature sewage works. Got soaked, totally soaked in it, a couple of times. Rhymenoserous posted:My calling... I have found it. Aside from working at the owl sanctuary, I'm not sure what other jobs falconers would do. Octatonic posted:I'd like to know a bit more about the long-term planning for landfills, if you world be so kind. What's the burial and storage process look like? Do landfills fill up? Do they eventually become land that can be used for something else in a few hundred years? How do we find places for new ones?  This I know less about, but yeah, the cells do 'fill up' - when complete, a final clay capping goes over the top, followed by topsoil. Grass blends and trees are planted. Generally a truck will back up to the open face, tip up waste, and a bulldozer will shift it to a compactor which spreads and crushes it. Because the waste tends to keep shifting at settling for a long time, there's not much you can do with the land afterwards. Maybe a public park or something like that, but your extraction infrastructure needs to stay in place for a long time too. I wouldn't build a house on it for a long, long time. You hear stories of supermarkets being built on old landfills - customers were fine, but staff kept getting headaches...or the time they didn't build a housing estate on a landfill but they did build the kiddie's play park on it. Which would have been a pretty good idea, except for the black ooze bubbling up frome one corner...  Darth Freddy posted:Gona have to explain foreign food waste to me and why. Because those foreign johnnies might not be playing cricket with the old food regulations what what, coming in from the cruise liners at the docks, and it might have BSE-laden Spanish lice or some such.  People posted:Oiltalk. Yeah, it's been a big shift...saw a documentary on YouTube about a smallish farm in Virginia that grew enough rapeseed (americas goons, you call it canola?) for biodiesel to be completely independent of external diesel supply, which was really cool. If you could close the loop it's sustainable. It's an interesting exercise to plan out making biodiesel from scratch, growing a feedstock and making lye from wood ashes etc. CrowsNestMutineer posted:I'm learning! Woohoo!
Tawd fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Sep 7, 2014 |
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Sep 7, 2014 12:13
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Here's how we deal with surplus fryer oil in good 'ol China:quote:Gutter oil is [...] illicit cooking oil which has been recycled from waste oil collected from sources such as restaurant fryers, sewer drains, grease traps and slaughterhouse waste. Reprocessing is often very rudimentary; techniques include filtration, boiling, refining and the removal of adulterants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil 
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Sep 7, 2014 15:23
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Farmland Park posted:Here's how we deal with surplus fryer oil in good 'ol China Those production camps are remarkably reminiscent of 'artisanal' gold scavenging on the edges of gold mines. White gold, that's what it is, white gold! (And individualist capitalism in its purest, blubberiest form.)
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Sep 7, 2014 16:38
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So other than diesel and electric wire, what is the weirdest thing you've ever seen anyone steal from a landfill? I mean, to me it seems like a lot of effort for not a lot of return, unless people regularly throw out tons of copper wiring or something
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Sep 8, 2014 06:54
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Where are all the heavy metals etc in the leachate coming from? Discarded electronics? Batteries? Has the ROHS thing had any impact on the level of toxic metals in the landfills, or is this stuff that's been there for decades?
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Sep 8, 2014 06:59
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Darth Freddy posted:Gona have to explain foreign food waste to me and why. If I may intrude to answer this one... If I recall correctly, the most recent foot and mouth outbreak in the UK, was traced eventually to someone smuggling Jinhua hams from China. Somehow, the germs from the ham found their way into the livestock, and the result was a pretty costly and ugly cull of infected animals. But the biggest motivating factor is trade. The UN has stated (and pretty much all countries have agreed) that you cannot arbitrarily declare food quarantines for the sake of protectionism. As a result, all countries that depend heavily on agriculture and livestock for the international market tend to look eagerly for excuses to declare such quarantines on other countries' ag and livestock, and tend to also enforce the most draconian and onerous policies on imports. Australia, for example, eagerly fines passengers who fail to declare a single piece of candy, and makes passengers march past detector dogs on entry to the country: unsurprisingly the Australian cattle business is one of the largest in the world. The US and Japan accuse each other of harboring Mad Cow disease, though neither have had a serious case of either in years. It's (along with US hindering entrance of Japanese autos) really a standoff over the US trying to force Japan to remove tariffs, and allow cheap American rice, wheat, meat and dairy to flood the market (which local farmers (which populate the ever dwindling countryside) have almost zero chance of competing with). E: A question: Besides the birds, any other animals hang around the dumps? Rats? Plagues of flies? Raccoons? ookuwagata fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 07:37
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Don Gato posted:So other than diesel and electric wire, what is the weirdest thing you've ever seen anyone steal from a landfill? I mean, to me it seems like a lot of effort for not a lot of return, unless people regularly throw out tons of copper wiring or something Nothing -too- weird. Aside from stealing diesel, which is very profitable - all fuel is expensive here compared to some other countries, especially fuel for road use - the lack of return really strikes you - you'd have to sneak onto site, risk the landfill in the dark, steal some cable (which could be live), strip the armouring from it. But you could do that places other than the landfill. Probably beneath minimum wage unless you got lucky and did it solo. I guess maybe everyone was looking for the big score - a jewellery box or a bag of cash. Incredibly unlikely but not unheard of. Other than that, it really is just bits of scrap you could carry away. Anything on site there is something that somebody else didn't want, and warranted not worth reselling, and nobody else nicked before it got there, after all.What really dicked you off after a while was vandalism. And as Don Gato said, regards theft, the absurd gulf between their benefit and the huge inconvenience and cost it would put you through to remedy the damage. It hasn't improved my opinion of certain sects of society very much. Base Emitter posted:Where are all the heavy metals etc in the leachate coming from? Discarded electronics? Batteries? Has the ROHS thing had any impact on the level of toxic metals in the landfills, or is this stuff that's been there for decades? It's been a while since you could legally dispose of liquids of any sort in a normal landfil - in containers or loose - i.e. full paint tins, chemical drums and the like - bulk electronics, batteries, fridges, and such, so I imagine things are getting better. No doubt the toxic metals came from being constituents in waste chemicals and electronics. And simply scrap metals, lead and chrome plated stuff which is worth recycling more these days. That said, any normal citizen can dispose of pretty much anything they like - put it in a bin bag and it gets collected and shipped off, so there will always be some carry-over. You'd generally expect heavier contamination and nasties in older cells unless someone's been sneaky. I dread to think what dwells down there, away from the light of day. ookuwagata posted:If I may intrude to answer this one... Yeah, the fear is that contaminated food (pathogens or poisons) could make it's way up through the food chain if it wasn't specifically put somewhere inaccessible. But this is only the stuff that hasn't already been fed to crew and passengers. All this being said, people are really bad about what waste goes where. For too long people haven't had to think about waste and it's pretty ingrained, I'm as bad as anyone else. For example, most of the clinical waste is indeed mostly benign, if unpleasant, incontinence nappies from care homes and hospitals. But every now and then you'll see a sharps bin poking out of the mass or a few exposed X-ray sheets flop by in the wind - definitely not 'non-specific clinical waste'. And you'd probably be surprised to know that we paid two agency staff full time to pick waste plastic out of the garden waste that came in for composting. Learn the difference, people.
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Sep 8, 2014 12:34
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How long on average does it take for a cell to fill up? Like is it something you're going through constantly, or do you only have to deal with it if you're working at the same place for years on end? And related, how much garbage can you pack into one?
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Sep 8, 2014 18:18
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Sydin posted:How long on average does it take for a cell to fill up? Like is it something you're going through constantly, or do you only have to deal with it if you're working at the same place for years on end? And related, how much garbage can you pack into one? 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.
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Sep 8, 2014 21:37
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Ever have any on site injuries or deaths?
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Sep 9, 2014 02:03
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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?
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Sep 9, 2014 03:52
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