The future of landfill management starts now: Build smarter strategies with a 5-year plan

Planning is essential to long-term landfill operations and ensuring environmental compliance, operational efficiency and, most importantly, financial stability.

All landfills should have a five-year plan in place that gets updated every year. On a year-to-year basis, costs change and new projects and capital expenditures can arise. Those changing factors can affect operating costs, which can directly impact gate rates. Think of the five-year plan as a living document that should get periodic updates based on new data, feedback and conditions.

It’s important to plan for logistics such as waste stream, cell construction and airspace and to account for issues that inevitably come up such as capping, covering or compliance issues. A five-year plan is most important, though, for budget planning.

Budget planning is a huge effort that typically takes place in the third and fourth fiscal quarters each year. By having a strategic five-year plan in place, those budget planning meetings and negotiations with corporate offices or management tend to run more smoothly.

“Five years is really barely enough to start doing all of the things you need to do to get your designs together, to get your permits together, get all the pieces together to start submitting things for that next piece of expansion or growth or change of exterior slopes,” says Jerry Ross, a landfill consultant and instructor for the Solid Waste Association of North America, Silver Springs, Maryland, who spent more than 30 years working in the waste industry as a landfill manager. “So, you always have to have a multifaceted plan in place to be able to deal with community and regulators and finance and all of the things that have to go into your next piece of growth.”

Current status

Before planning for the future, it’s essential to assess the current state of the landfill. This involves an operational overview that considers the landfill’s waste intake, airspace consumption and estimated site life, as well as staffing levels and shift structures.

You will want to inventory infrastructure and equipment, noting age, condition and maintenance backlog, existing liner systems, leachate collection infrastructure, access roads and other factors.

It also is important to note any regulatory compliance issues associated with the site, including the status of environmental permits, a history of violations or any pertinent inspection findings.

Goals and objectives

A major aspect of making a five-year plan for a landfill is defining the landfill’s goals and objectives. These can include operational goals, such as compaction efficiency targets, alternative daily cover use, cell construction and closure targets, as well as environmental goals, which could range from reducing fugitive methane to improving leachate treatment performance to increasing postconsumer diversion and recycling rates.

Financial objectives will encompass capital planning for new cells or infrastructure upgrades, as well as the cost recovery that’s possible through tipping fees, grants or energy sales.

“The easiest one to sell to everybody is an environmental objective, especially if you’re doing anything in terms of the perimeter properties on a landfill relative to wetlands or animal wildlife habitat or any of those pieces that make your facility a lot more acceptable as an environmental structure as opposed to just a bump on the road with a bunch of trash in it,” Ross says.

Strategic planning considerations

When making long-term strategic plans for the landfill, it’s important to consider any anticipated regulatory shifts. These could include things like new landfill gas rules, regulations around leachate and per- and polyfluoroalkyls, or PFAS, and applicable recycling mandates.

Plans for adopting new technology also should be weighed. Are there plans to incorporate real-time gas and leachate monitoring, automated weigh scales, drone-based volumetric surveys or GPS compactor guidance?

A five-year plan should address insurance, contingency funding and risk management, taking into consideration slope stability, fires, natural disasters and liner integrity plans.

Data collection and analysis

The next step in the planning process is to gather and analyze all data relevant to the five-year plan. This data should include a waste stream profile that examines the types and quantities of incoming waste as well as seasonal and long-term tonnage trends and more.

Operators should examine environmental monitoring and trends, including leachate volume and quality, methane capture efficiency, emissions reports, groundwater levels and surface water monitoring results.

Evaluating the landfill’s community interface also is important. Take an honest look at the landfill’s impact on nearby residents and businesses, especially when factoring in traffic, noise and odor, and log events such as public complaints and engagement history.

“Community interface can be a major player in terms of the five-year planning because in some cases, you’re trying to get out of sight and out of mind,” Ross says. “With your operations, if they can see it, they can smell it. If they can hear it, they’re going to call and complain. How do you sequence it in a way that’s economical and efficient to try to get that wound healed as fast as possible?”

Fill sequence planning

Some states are adamant about following fill sequence. Regardless of the landfill’s location, fill sequence planning is important because it maximizes airspace, ensures safe and efficient operations and facilitates orderly closure and infrastructure rollout for gas and leachate.

“From an operational perspective, it means the difference between building yourself into a corner while you’re painting the floor,” Ross says. “It means that you’ve planned far enough in advance that you know exactly where you’re going to go when you’ve completed whatever it is you’re constructing at the time or operating on at the time and what the nuances are of building yourself up too high in one location and forcing all of the water back onto you so that you’ve got a mud hole that should have been a well-filled, well-drained operating [landfill] cell.”

Start by reviewing current fill patterns, paying particular mind to any deviations from the approved fill plan, and considering the impact of unforeseen conditions such as settlement and wet areas. Next, develop a new fill sequence plan using topographical data, drone surveys and modeling software. Sequencing should be integrated with infrastructure buildout timelines and should incorporate milestone-based targets.

Capping systems

Landfill capping assists in controlling gas migration, managing leachate infiltration and minimizing odor, windblown litter and erosion. When the landfill is closed, capping also satisfies regulatory closure and postclosure requirements.

Several types of landfill capping systems are available:

• Intermediate caps are temporary covers, such as soil or geomembrane, used between filling phases.
• Transitional caps are longer-term covers in areas that are inactive for extended periods of time.
• Final caps are engineered permanent covers for closed cells or landfill areas.

To decide when and where to cap, operators should evaluate based on fill sequence progress and waste placement, considering site-specific needs such as landfill gas collection enhancement or stormwater control.

Capping must be integrated with the existing landfill infrastructure. It should be aligned with gas collection and leachate drainage systems, as well as surface water runoff management and erosion control.

Capping milestones should be included in the landfill’s capital improvement plan. When budgeting for capping, be sure to plan for the costs of temporary versus permanent materials. When scheduling, ensure staged capping does not interfere with future operations.

Milestones should include timelines for phased cell use and infrastructure elements like leachate lines and gas wells—all of which should be linked to a site’s fill sequencing.

Stakeholder succession

With about 1,200 active landfills in the U.S., the number of qualified landfill managers continues to dwindle.

Many companies, including WM and Republic Services, have launched training academies to recruit landfill managers as fast as possible, but a quick look at jobsites will show a dozen or so landfill manager job openings at any given time.

“Succession planning is a huge thing,” Ross says. “It’s one of those issues right now that’s a hot button.”

Succession planning for staff and management involves identifying key roles in and around the landfill, such as site manager, compliance officer, lead operators and maintenance leads, for cross-training and knowledge capture. This planning phase should involve documenting procedures, mentoring junior staff and hands-on training rotations across functional areas of the operation.

Consider creating a recruitment and retention strategy to attract skilled personnel to remote landfill sites or putting in place career pathways and continued education incentives for managers.

Emergency staffing contingencies involve backup protocols for use in the event of turnover, illness or retirement.

Drafting phase

Once objectives have been set, data are gathered and sequencing and capping plans are established, it’s time to draft the actual five-year plan document.

Key sections of the written plan should include an executive summary, operational timeline, fill sequence and capping maps, a capital improvement plan and regulatory strategy.

Also incorporated into the plan should be performance metrics, or key performance indicators, to measure factors like airspace utilization rate, compaction density, leachate generation per ton of waste, timely installation of intermediate and final caps and regulatory compliance and closure deadlines.

A five-year planning document will typically include a written plan and spreadsheets, graphs and reports.

“Depending upon what your interest is in your particular section and how badly you need to sell that section, you will probably have a lot of eye candy to make sure you get your point across,” Ross says.

This might look like aerial photos, pastel colors, magazine-style headlines and bullet points to make it easy to understand and get your point across quickly.

Stakeholder engagement and communication

While gathering everything needed for a five-year plan, it’s also critical to engage in internal and external stakeholder coordination.

Internal stakeholders will include engineers, environmental staff, finance teams and operations leadership. External stakeholders might include local government officials, applicable regulatory agencies and neighboring communities affected by the landfill’s operations.

Establishing a public engagement strategy that incorporates community meetings, transparency portals and complaint response tracking is crucial.

“Internal and external is extremely important, especially if there’s that ‘whoops’ that happens that you’re not anticipating and you need to keep those stakeholders abreast of what you’re doing and what has happened before the media,” Ross explains. “To the extent that we know who the local reporters are, we have their names and phone numbers. We have the local television networks and the key reporters for the environmental piece.”

Plan implementation

Once the five-year plan has been created, implementation can begin. Training and staff development should involve establishing new standard operating procedures to incorporate the plan. Monitoring tools and safety practices will need to be put in place to support it.

For accountability purposes, keep everyone on the same page with shared timeliness, such as Gantt charts with milestone tracking. Provide regular updates at staff and management meetings.

Because the five-year plan will be updated periodically, be sure to create the document in a format that welcomes being updated.

“This is not something that gets written and put on the shelf and forgotten,” Ross says. “That can be easily done because once you’ve gone through the effort, you think you know all the things that have happened, but the first time something changes, you’ve got to pull that off the shelf and start looking through it again.”

Mike Stepic is the owner and a senior engineer with Rubber City Engineering and Environmental LLC, an Akron, Ohio-based engineering and compliance support firm. He can be reached at mstepic@rubbercityengineering.com.