Did you know your trashed dinner scraps end up in a landfill, slowly decaying into greenhouse gas? Garbage disposals solve this concern.
They do double duty, meeting the often competing demands of convenience and conservation. Disposals grind spoiled meats, corn cobs, fish bones, ice, and all those veggies kids reject, discharging them down the drain to a wastewater plant (unless you have a septic system). When food waste is processed at a wastewater plant, it’s even more eco-friendly than composting. Plus, garbage disposals immediately rid your home of waste, odors, and any critters they might attract.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), solid waste landfills release harmful gases, composed of roughly 50 percent carbon dioxide and 50 percent methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere—a key contributor to climate change. In , methane emissions from municipal solid waste were almost equivalent to greenhouse gas emissions from more than 21.6 million passenger vehicles driven for one year.
Garbage disposals efficiently eliminate waste and dispatch it for environmentally friendly processing. Many major U.S. wastewater plants use what’s called anaerobic digestion to turn the gas generated from food waste into biofuel. The remaining solids are turned into fertilizer for farms. So if you’re considering installing or replacing a disposal but are concerned about the environmental impact, find out how your local sewage treatment plant processes the town’s wastewater.
A February nationally representative CR survey of 1,000 U.S. adults shows that just over half of Americans live in homes with a garbage disposal, and of those who do have one, more than 60 percent said their disposal was already installed when they moved in. According to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, these appliances last about 11 years, so if yours came with the place, depending on how long you’ve lived there, it could soon be time to look for a new one.
Your disposal might be kaput if you notice it leaking, taking longer to grind, making louder-than-usual noises, or requiring a reset often. (The reset button is like a circuit breaker that needs to be reset after the disposal shuts off, typically because of a strain on the motor.) In fact, before you call the plumber—or throw down hundreds of dollars on a new grinder—simply reset the disposal by pressing the small (usually red) button on the bottom or lower backside of the unit. If this doesn’t work, check the circuit breaker or fuse to make sure it is not tripped. If that doesn’t work? It may be time to go shopping.
At its core, a municipal solid waste (MSW) transfer station is about convenience. It is meant to be a better location to dispose of end-of-life material than the landfill. There are always commercial customers, haulers, residential customers, and others looking for a convenient and cost-effective place to empty trucks.
The key to having an optimal operation is based on many factors. The six top factors to consider when thinking about building and running a successful transfer station are location, efficiency, durability, flexibility, cost, and safety.
The location of the facility needs to be right for you and for your customers. If you own your own hauling company, your transfer station needs to be located so that your vehicles can easily get to it in terms of access roads and expressways. It also needs to be located within an area of the market that is as centrally located as possible to maximize fuel efficiency, routes, and drive time. If your own fleet of trucks is the priority, access and markets should be the primary factors in making the location decision, and third-party customers would be a secondary consideration.
Another factor could be the towns or municipalities that you are dealing with. Each one has its own way of dealing with waste disposal and recycling and will have very different ideas on what a host agreement could look like. It is very important that you have these discussions with them individually, to see who wants you there and who doesn't, how that impacts your ability to get a permit, and how it impacts you financially.
When it comes to your customers, they want a facility that is easy to get in and out of, has a quick turnaround time on-site, is cost-effective to tip at, and is safe. You should work hard to identify who your potential third-party customers are before finalizing your location so you can work with them to establish agreements early in the process, and so that they can help increase your volumes and potential revenues. This applies to your larger customers. All the smaller "one-off" contractors and residential customers will be a bonus.
This is as simple as "get them in and get them out." Whether it's your vehicles, your third-party customers, or trucks for hauling out material, the key is to have a site designed so that you can get the vehicles in and out in 15 minutes or less. Questions to ask when designing your transfer station include:
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It's important to take all of these factors into account and gather all of the information you can prior to designing or redesigning. It is important to work with your design/build firm to make sure you right-size your facility to properly manage all of these factors, both for the short term and to handle potential growth in the future.
The last thing you need to deal with when you are operating a transfer station is constant shutdowns for repairs and maintenance. There are many ways to make sure your facility is designed to handle the daily "torture" a transfer station endures, and an experienced firm that has a proven track record designing and building transfer stations can guide you through all the means and methods.
With respect to building durability into a transfer station, the top seven factors to consider include:
Flexibility is all about being able to adjust your operations, building, and equipment to accommodate changes in your marketplace based on the evolving material stream, customer base, and increased tonnage. You want to design a transfer facility so that you can make future changes in a way that impacts your daily operations as little as possible. These modifications could mean building additions or changes, adding scales, or many other things.
Being cognizant of the fact that the market will change, you can design your facility for this by planning the structure with expandable steel frames, and by having space on-site set aside for future expansion. You will not likely know what your future changes or growth may be, but you can come up with potential options for how the facility could grow and change over time. Be forward-thinking based on what you know today and what you have seen in the past, and use a design/build partner who has been around for a long time and is aware of the upcoming changes in regulations to help guide you through the process.
A construction budget must be stuck to and an operational budget must be hit to make a transfer station a feasible long-term solution. It's important to be transparent with your design/build partner on what these budgets are so you can work together to stay within the parameters, while also accomplishing as much as possible with respect to the efficiency, durability, and flexibility of the facility.
Many factors drive construction costs that are outside of your control, such as the area where you are located, site conditions, permit requirements, type of building construction, and aesthetic requirements from local municipalities. On the flip side, many costs are controllable, and you can explore many options with the help of your contractor. It's important to do this early in the design phase so that you don't have to make changes during the design process. An experienced transfer station contractor can present many different options and costs for you to make educated decisions and help maintain your budget.
Operational costs can also be worked through during the design phase as you cover how many pieces of equipment you want to operate, how many employees you need to have, annual maintenance costs for the facility, and other such items. Make sure you put together a comprehensive list of everything you want to work through with your design/build team so you can help design the facility within these parameters.
While we have touched on five of the most important factors above, the highest overall priority should be designing a facility that is safe to operate and safe for those who pass through it each day. Safety must be at the forefront of all the decisions made above. This doesn't just cover traffic patterns, signage, parking, and employee walking paths, it also must deal with how to handle emergencies such as fires.
These plans are important to implement during the design process so you can incorporate them into your facility and have ways of dealing with events that can save your employees and your building from damage.
Utilizing the right team to walk you through the transfer station design/build process every step of the way is key in having a successful project that will serve you, your customers and employees from day one and for many years into the future.
This article was originally published in the October edition of Recycling Product News,Volume 29, Number 7. It was updated on December 4, .
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