Your local landfill maintenance company has a great deal of responsibility when it comes to helping operate and manage a landfill. After all, these sites have a huge impact on public health and safety. Maintenance can help reduce pests, emissions, and leakage. Here are some things typical landfill maintenance entails.

Cover Application

Once a landfill reaches its capacity to hold trash, there's a layer of soil and vegetation placed over it. This cover helps stabilize the soil and prevent rain from penetrating the waste. Maintenance workers monitor the area to check for holes, cracks, or settlements that can affect the integrity of the cover.

Water Protection

Landfills can contaminate groundwater, sediment, and surface water with leachate. Such contamination forms when rainwater mixes with the waste, so a cover is essential to preventing rainwater from penetrating it. Several pathogens, pollutants, and other organic matter are part of leachate. If it's allowed to seep into the municipal water supply, it's a major risk to the health of wildlife and humans. A landfill maintenance company monitors the quality of groundwater, sediment, and surface water around the landfill and collects samples for laboratory analysis.

Drainage System Upkeep

Landfill professionals have an organized training system that includes pipes, swales, ponds, basins, and ditches. The system will collect and convey stormwater runoff away from the area. As a result, it prevents flooding and erosion on the site.

Gas Monitoring

Methane and carbon dioxide are greenhouse gases that can result from trash in a landfill. They result from when organic waste begins to decompose over time. According to Swiftpak, a PLA plastic bottle could take up to 1,000 years to decompose and produces gas while doing so. These gases are known for being hazardous to the environment and are one of the leading causes of environmental climate change. Other gases such as ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), can also be produced from such matter. They monitor any landfill gas production and composition through a system that includes blowers, flares, engines, and pipes that capture, burn, or use the landfill gas as needed.

As you can see, there's more that goes into a landfill than just dumping trash. A professional maintenance company must create various systems and processes to ensure the environment, public health, and safety aren't affected. For a landfill maintenance company that can handle such a concern, call Bluffton Aeration today.