Is your landfill losing money?
Proper airspace management can help you cut costs and find additional revenue.
Landfill Airspace Management & Planning
You already know that running a landfill is very expensive. And taking time out of the day-to-day to plan for the long-term can seem overwhelming and just not possible.
But did you know that most landfills can drastically improve their efficiency and decrease costs by implementing both short-term and long-term sequencing plans? Managing your short-term soil usage and cell construction as well as long-term airspace can extend the life of your landfill by years and help you cut costs and work more efficiently.
When it comes to spending money at landfills, we often focus on two of the most significant short-term expenses: construction of new lined cells and final closure. Yet, when you look at the lifetime costs of a site, most of the costs are related to the daily operational tasks of waste placement. With this being truly the largest cost, it makes sense to plan out and optimize these tasks to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible.
In order to do this, site-specific Fill Sequence Plans (FSP) should be a part of every landfill’s budget. FSP drawings, when properly prepared, cover approximately 18 to 24 months of fill activity and consider the following:
- Primary environmental conditions that impact operations
- Snow/Wet Weather or high winds
- Traffic flows, which improve safety
- Surface water runoff which reduces site maintenance of slopes and decks
- Daily and Intermediate cover soil stockpile locations
- Short and intermediate-term haul roads
When fill plans are optimized based on operational issues like the fill sequence plans that Blue Ridge Services offers, the cost savings and improvement in efficiency is often substantial.
A flat piece of paper with a sequencing plan on it might make a lot of sense to an engineer, but how does your crew translate a 2D plan to a 3D world? Enter Virtual Reality for Landfill Fill Sequence Planning!
This is an innovative tool that combines the power of planning and sequencing with the interactivity of virtual reality.
Using data from your topographic map, we create a 3D version of your landfill that can be viewed through VR goggles. Using just a mobile phone, your crew can immerse themselves into a real-life demo of your site and future phases of filling.
Interested in learning more? Want to try a free sample of VR goggles? Go here!
Any landfill manager or director knows that the largest short-term expenditures of a landfill is the construction of lined cells and then the closure of areas that have reached permitted design grades. These massive cost events can put a strain on budgets and if not planned correctly, seriously impact the efficiency of a site.
The problem is that when sites are first designed, the sequencing of these events is often done arbitrarily with little analysis of the financial impact of the timing.
To solve this, Blue Ridge Services offers Airspace Management & Planning (AMP). These site-specific analysis, modeling, and drawings take the original sequencing and converts it to a financially-optimized long-term development plan. This is accomplished by identifying the specific airspace consumption sequence that produces the lowest cost based on Net Present Value (NPV). When complete, the landfill will have an airspace utilization plan that will maximize the existing on-site soil usage, minimize double-handling, and push future capital costs (i.e., liner construction, closure, etc.) as far into the future as is practically possible.
AMP drawings provide an optimized road map for getting the site to full closure that not only look at the financial impact of events but also incorporate:
- Permitted excavation and final closure grades
- Haul roads for both waste hauling vehicles but also excavation and other construction activities
- Surface water drainage
- Wind/Litter mitigation
- Long-term soil stockpile locations
