Landfill Manager’s Notebook:The Process of Process Improvement

Believe it or not, landfills provide the perfect opportunity to utilize a host of Process Improvement tools. These tools, such as Lean, Six Sigma, and Value Stream Mapping have been created and defined by the big boys of manufacturing. Companies like General Electric and Toyota are famous for streamlining their operations through the use of process improvement techniques. These techniques achieve astounding results, because they help lower cost, reduce wasted effort, and minimize errors for process that are expensive and repetitive.

Want to talk expensive and repetitive? Think about spending nearly a million bucks for a large tractor that goes back and forth all day long, pushing, spreading, or compacting trash. Compound the effect by considering that the effectiveness of that machine also impacts airspace that is worth millions of dollars.

You get the idea.

Landfills are ripe for this kind of evaluation, in part because they have been ignored for so long—shall we say, “forever?”

No, I’m not saying we’ve ignored the environmental aspects of landfills. Nor that we have ignored the important role they play in the protection of public health. What I’m saying is that landfills are planned, sited, and designed using some of the most sophisticated science and engineering available. But then they are handed off to “operations” without much additional thought to science or engineering.

Don’t believe me? Ask your design engineer how to optimize the geometry of your daily cell—balancing the cost of pushing, compacting and covering . . . or to explain the most cost-effective pace for your dozer(s) and compactor(s). Ask your regulator how the Theory of Constraints applies to the various production rates of you waste-handling equipment. See if your Financial Director can explain how to set up the tipping pad to maximize customer throughout while eliminating the potential risk of dozers having to work between customer vehicles.

Don’t be surprised if they don’t know: it’s not their job to know—they don’t run the landfill. But you do—you’re the Landfill Manager.

The bad news is that many landfills are not tapping into the benefits offered by Process Improvement. But, the good news is that any landfill can begin applying these tools.

Over the years, we’ve evaluated hundreds of landfill activities and seen many of them reduce equipment numbers by 20–50%, reduce soil use by up to 300% . . . and regularly cut costs by 10–20%. Your landfill can perform better: it can compete effectively.

Start by tracking various performance benchmarks such as dozer hours, compactor hours, and the quantity of soil used for cover. Look for variation from day to day . . . or between different operators. Variation almost always indicates an operational problem—and inefficiency.