Yesterday, a classmate's dad hosted us at his work, the Frank R. Bowerman Landfill (11.6 miles). This one isn't historic, per se, as it was established in 1990, but it is an integral part of our daily lives. "We only close 5 days per year and stayed open as an essential service all during Covid," remarked Isaac.
DH was jealous he couldn't get a peek behind the curtain because this landfill takes commercial waste haulers only. His latest landscaping debris had to be driven all the way down to Prima Deshecha in SJC (27.2 miles). A busy day for DH was two trips, the commercial haulers try to make 4, sometimes 5 drops at the FRB in a day. These are massive semi trucks that dwarf the still substantial trucks that patrol residential areas. These trucks deposit 11,500 tons of waste per day, netting FRB just short of a half million dollars per day in revenue.
I was particularly interested in this excursion because I am starting the Cleaning Up badge sequence and, having lived in Irvine, I appreciate how particular the Irvine Ranch developers are about NIMBI considerations. "We get about 5 complaints per year from the 'super smellers' who are in the new housing development on the other side of the toll road. Always in winter, when there are temperature inversions, the days you may get "no burn" alerts because a warm layer of air is being pressed close to the ground and making everything smoggy." This called to mind the introduction of The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs and Gooley's observations that during temperature inversions, you can hear train and traffic noise more loudly and even pick up on radio transmissions outside of your normal range (like behind the iron curtain during the Cold War).
Isaac went on to elaborate the numerous mitigations in place to keep the complaints to a minimum. There are hurricane fences with screens that match the landscape built to the perfect height to mask the volume of truck traffic along the roads. These also catch fly away waste and have mister heads to suppress dust. Every night, the exposed cells are covered with $30,000 of tarping to deter coyotes, birds, and smells. The 22 megwatts of methane is sequestered "to power Disneyland" in Anaheim (or 14,700 average sized homes) or burned in flares when permitted. The land run off is routed to basins and tested before any is released into the water table while leachate from landfill cells is collected in tanks for hazmat disposal. "Usually this time of year, these basins are full," Isaac remarks wistfully as we drive by an empty cement divot and we say a silent prayer for rain. Green waste is heaped in windrows to cook as compost for a quarter before being sifted and offered back to the public and public works projects at low or no cost. "Most composting facilities operate on dirt, but we put ours on an asphalt pad on a 2% grade so we don't have pooling and smells, we pump the run off back up to these towers for fire mitigation and to continue to irrigate and turn the piles to keep them at 150 degrees." They even have a biologist on site who has created a segment of the land that is kept native and introduced a wetland to protect wildlife. This biologist also works with a paleontologist to determine if there are archeological finds that need protecting as multi-million dollar earth movers carve new cells into the canyon side and cover over the filled cells. The lobby of the visitor center has a trophy case filled with mammoth and prehistoric river dolphin tusks and bones alongside Lunch at the Landfill and Dinner at the Dump gala invitations and numerous awards.
Thinking about the sink holes I had read about along the California coast which had been drilled heavily for oil, I asked about subsidence and he nodded to a newly repaved section of the road we had just driven over. "We get that. Some older landfills have enough settlement that even though they are at the max altitude allowed, they can still stay open because of some settlement."
"I come almost every week day, unless the waves are good..." quipped a deeply tanned Darryl, with Windy, a Harris Hawk perched on his glove. "The crows almost know which days are the weekends." Windy acts as a deterrent for birds which would come to pick over the trash, making it hard for dump trucks and machinery to see and operate and leaving droppings on the new housing developments full of super sniffers on the other side of the toll road. "Harris hawks are like the Labradors of the raptor family, easy to train, hard to spook. If she goes missing, she has telemetry on her ankle band and I follow it and put out her favorite toy to recapture her. My Red Tail at home would never tolerate this..." he grins as my 6 year old reaches up to touch a feathered chest.
Isaac also mentioned challenges on the horizon, even for a well-managed dump. The leachate collected from the cells is removed by a hazmat company, which is better than older dumps which do not have liners to capture leachate infiltrating their water table, but I wondered how this company went about neutralizing the liquid. He itemized materials that were pulled out for recycling like mattresses and household appliances and I wondered about how responsibly refrigerants were removed with the awkward handling of the forklifts. He talked about cameras on trash pick up trucks that could detect, notify, and eventually penalize residents for improperly sorting their trash. He noted that China no longer takes our poorly sorted recycling and that solutions have had to be cobbled together domestically, but it is hard to get them approved in California. We discussed waste haulers who were understaffed and made the decision to combine pre-sorted residential green and household waste dumpsters to be able to complete their pick up routes. "They aren't supposed to do that, but the directive is to divert 50% of green waste now, increasing to 70% in future years, so some make the decision to do it..." But he notes that when the canyons are full, we might face $100 trash disposal bills like those of NorCal. "We would have to rail-haul it inland to another state and that isn't cheap." Current projections have this 725 acre canyon on track to close in 28 years.
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