California’s 2021 and 2022 budgets provide $500 million to the Department of Toxic Substances Control to support community revitalization. The funds are available over four years to accelerate the investigation and cleanup of contaminated properties in environmental justice communities. This funding is referred to as the Cleanup in Vulnerable Communities Initiative. A portion of this funding is for establishing the Equitable Community Revitalization Grant (ECRG)—a grant program to incentivize cleanup and investment in disadvantaged areas of California.
Equitable Community Revitalization Grant – Learn more about the program and how to use this funding to advance your communities brownfields and remediation projects.
Brownfields and Voluntary Remediation – Brownfield and voluntary remediation projects protect human health and the environment while restoring beneficial use to properties. SCS Engineers is a pioneer in supporting the public-private partnerships for these types of redevelopment. SCS helped redevelop environmentally impaired real estate more than 25 years before the term Brownfield was coined. Learn more about the possibilities for your community and how to select a brownfields remediation professional for timely and compliant delivery of the benefits.
ECRG Flyer – Provides the basics on this new and important funding along with a timetable.
Progressive energy companies are rushing to corner the growing hydrogen market, excited as they see this renewable fuel’s cost steadily drop and as they prioritize decarbonization.
As they work to stay ahead of the pack, they need to put time and thought into building out and implementing these projects. There are complex technical and regulatory considerations; safety is also priority one at every step when managing this flammable, compressed gas.
As the market takes off, there is a need for scaled development along the whole supply chain, and some developers are rising to the occasion for more control and more opportunity. Rather than only build fueling stations, they buy into vertically integrated hydrogen networks to produce, transport and distribute hydrogen. But these multifaceted projects present even more complexity— calling for a team with highly specialized, comprehensive skill sets.
SCS Engineers supports energy companies and contractors looking to diversify their hydrogen services portfolio to include building production plants, including moving the gas via pipeline or truck to offload at fueling stations, ultimately selling to consumers.
“We enter these strategic partnerships to give our clients what they are looking for: a full spectrum of competencies and services; and a proven history of working on hydrogen to deliver turnkey projects. The idea is to take the environmental burden off clients as they pursue these major undertakings,” says Nathan Eady, an SCS vice president, and project manager.
SCS makes site selection; performs environmental due diligence and remediation; feasibility analysis; design and construction of environmental controls; land use, air, and water quality permitting.
The contractors’ specializations are detailed design, engineering, and construction management–from civil to structural to mechanical and fire protection.
This team meets all environmental and regulatory design requirements and develops process safety management and risk management plans with their combined expertise. They also take on the role of community educator, explaining the unique attributes of hydrogen and easing any concerns.
“We take science and engineering and translate that for neighbors and city councils. It’s important to show communities, as well as regulators, that these facilities are designed and operated with the utmost safety,” Eady says.
Requirements vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. But with a national reach, SCS sails through processes and regulations by region.
“That matters to our clients; they want to get through the detailed permitting steps and launch as soon as they can to maintain their competitive edge. And when they plan to expand into other regions, they like to know they already have a vetted team in place who knows the territory and can do the work there,” he says.
Permitting and technical considerations vary by location and production method, whether via steam methane reforming (SMR) or electrolysis.
Some operators are taken off-guard by the air quality permitting requirements associated with SMR facilities − or the stringent wildlife and water quality regulations encountered with the larger footprint photovoltaic systems requiring open space to support electrolysis. SCS has the expertise to address the issues, whether state-specific cap and trade regulations for carbon emissions or air basin specific criteria pollutants. SCS also has the unique talent of finding brownfield sites or closed landfill properties, making excellent receiver sites for electrolysis and solar facilities near existing infrastructure.
Building hydrogen projects on these idle properties can save developers significant time and money in the overall project outcome.
“We do a lot of brownfield work helping to clean and redevelop these properties. These sites have special permitting considerations, especially since they typically have a history of industrial use,” Eady says.
SCS performs Phase I Assessments to research records on previous use, and if the team finds a potential problem, they move to Phase II, which entails groundwater and soil testing.
“If we find evidence of existing contamination, we reconcile it so our clients can move forward with the development of their new facilities,” Eady says.
SCS is seeing a growing interest in building hydrogen projects on closed landfills. As brownfields, they have value for their open space and often have some existing infrastructure, offsetting the cost of building new.
“We have done permitting and design work on several closed landfills, sometimes adding solar systems. Hydrogen projects leveraging electrolysis require a tremendous amount of electricity, and when we can bypass the grid enabling clients to make their own electricity, it’s a major plus,” Eady says.
Lately, large energy companies are pivoting from conventional oil and gas to hydrogen, and some smaller, young companies are also joining the clean renewables movement.
SCS has gotten interest from startups looking to obtain government grants and subsidies. Some of these firms need more process engineering support to ensure their new technology can operate at a cost and environmental efficacy equivalent to larger operations.
“We use our knowledge gained working with major conventional energy companies to support these new hydrogen firms in executing successful launches. All in all, a positive trend.”
Together, SCS and its partners play an integral role in helping to see hydrogen continue to climb the energy sector ranks, maintaining an excellent record of accomplishment supporting the planning-design-build of clean-energy plants.
Additional Resources
Accumulating liquids are problematic for landfills taking sludges and other wet wastes not traditionally part of the incoming waste stream. Add to the mix increasing precipitation, and operators could be staring down the perfect storm—especially as they work to optimize their gas extraction systems. Here’s the challenge, explains Pete Carrico, SCS Engineers Senior Vice President and national expert on liquids management:
“Trash is porous, and the soils used for daily and intermediate cover usually aren’t, so liquid gets trapped between alternating trash layers as the landfill fills. These “perched” liquids can drain into well columns and block the slotted portion of the extraction well piping that withdraws gas from waste and into the gas collection system.”
Even a robust vacuum on the wells will not pull gas once pipes fill with fluid. With no path to move it from trash into the collection infrastructure, operators work harder to stave off odor and slope stability issues, among potential resulting problems.
The good news is they have a recourse to remove the liquids, unblock well perforations, and extract more gas. They do it by installing dewatering systems: an intricate network of pneumatic pumps, air lines to power them, and conveyance lines, also known as force mains, to remove liquid.
Manufacturers have designed and redesigned their pumps to try and address problems specific to landfill gas extraction systems. And the equipment does the job but requires meticulous attention and skill to keep all the moving parts going. These liquids are rough on pumps due to their harsh nature. The suspended solids and biological material they contain are the biggest challenges, and if the landfill has high temperatures, these liquids can heat up, further taxing the system, Carrico says.
“No pump indefinitely survives the challenging conditions you have in landfills. So, where we can make the biggest difference is with these maintenance programs,” Carrico says. You’re spending O&M budget on what provides the most impact.”
SCS uses dedicated, factory-trained pump crews who focus solely on operating and maintaining gas extraction dewatering systems. These crews help ensure the infrastructure functions as it should, and gas moves through well piping slots, into the gas header piping, and to the blower/flare station for beneficial end-use.
“Operations run more smoothly with these crews in place. An SCS field crew is as unique as each landfill. Our specialists have various skill sets, i.e., gas collection system monitoring, surface emissions monitoring, or pump maintenance expertise. That’s how we produce better outcomes in terms of pump performance. If you effectively maintain and repair the pumps, you will restore them to their designed specifications, pump more liquids, and with greater ease,” Carrico says.
The teams, who work on landfills across the country, stay busy. One site can have five to 300-plus pumps, each with multiple components, and they must be removed and cleaned frequently.
Replacing worn, fouled, or damaged components is an especially tedious and complex job.
Some wells are 70 to 100 feet deep. Pulling air lines, liquid lines, and pumps out from that depth is hard and requires special equipment to do safely. SCS crews know how to take them apart and put them back together; they don’t just lower them back in the ground after working on them. But hook them up to air and water lines and watch them work at capacity before returning them to service.
It’s a value add; with a good maintenance plan and the right crew, pumps can be kept at their designed specifications and run efficiently for many years. They can typically be cleaned and reset for a fraction of their replacement cost.
“We leverage our size and resources. We have a deep bench of in-house experts and engineers willing to share information to help with problems, which is important as conditions vary at each site, as can problems and solutions. So, it’s important not to do this in a silo but rather pull from our broader knowledge base,” Carrico says.
Technology helps too, especially with tracking, maintaining, and reporting progress to clients. A geographical information system (GIS) maps each well’s location, and pump technicians upload data corresponding to each one from wireless tablets almost instantaneously.
The ability to automate tracking and display critical information right away on a dashboard has increased our program’s efficiency. Technicians spend less time tracking and look at analyses of all the landfill conditions to know where to concentrate their efforts, Carrico says.
A few landfills are working to avoid pumping liquids altogether. They are building large gabion rock structures at the landfill’s base, with piping that connects to the extraction well system, creating a conduit. Liquids automatically drain to the bottom where leachate is intended to go while effectively pulling more gas into the gas collection system.
“This is a newer trend that some of our clients are already doing. And we are involved supporting the well designs,” Carrico says.
For now, in most cases, achieving the best outcomes is about investing in pumps and a good maintenance program.
“Monitoring and regularly measuring—checking stroke-counters, which show how many times a pump cycles, and checking flow meters to know how many gallons a day a system produces are key to finding savings. It’s how you reduce or prevent catastrophic failures,” says Greg Hansen, Senior Project Manager with SCS Field Services Operations, Maintenance & Monitoring.
To execute properly, Hansen provides this advice for operators setting up a pump program:
Have pump maintenance areas with water, electricity, disposal means for waste liquids, and storage facilities for spare parts and tools. More specifically:
Operators planning on doing maintenance in-house should train their technicians on cleaning, servicing, and testing pumps. Either SCS or the pump manufacturer can provide this training.
Above all, Hansen says, “You need a comprehensive OM&M program. The better the job tuning pumps, the better they do in the field, and the longer they work before being cleaned or repaired. It’s a continual process.”
More Resources
Landfill data collection and analysis are more tactical than ever, and landfill technology provides methods to manage and use the data to create efficiencies. With the implementation of the NESHAP, NSPS/EG requirements, Landfill Operators will monitor more often and maintain more records. Data collection mechanisms will likely broaden soon to include drone and satellite data collection as acceptable for agency requirements.
Our September 23, 2021, SCS’s Client Webinar focuses on landfill gas maintenance and how Operators find efficiencies by monitoring and collecting LFG data. Using SCS eTools, the webinar includes common scenarios at landfills and answers several questions, including:
Demonstrations include:
AKD Real Estate Investments, LLC (AKD) acquired a brownfields property to build a new Mitsubishi car dealership in West Palm Beach. AKD and Mitsubishi Motors, North America, considered the site because it offered existing infrastructure and prevented additional environmental degradation from building on undeveloped property, or Greenfield, increasingly scarce in south Florida. Brownfields are often centrally located in metro areas with good connections to local infrastructure, including roadways and stormwater utilities. National and state brownfields programs also offer grants and tax credits available to businesses with environmentally-friendly goals.
The property under consideration was on the former Servico Landfill operated by the City of West Palm Beach. Before the landfill closed, the City used it for landfilling municipal incinerator waste, medical waste, and garbage from the 1920s to the 1950s.
The Florida Brownfield Redevelopment Program encourages the redevelopment of potentially contaminated properties, following a careful process that includes environmental engineers and compliance specialists. AKD reached out to SCS Engineers, an environmental engineering and consulting firm specializing in landfills and remediation, to turn this property into a business haven.
SCS Senior Project Manager Kirk Blevins and Project Professional Sanaul Khan met with the AKD to review the dealership’s construction plan. “Understanding the client’s challenges and objectives, Kirk and I worked backward from their business goals and developed a plan to achieve their environmental needs in a way that would minimize delays and conflicts with their construction schedule,” stated Khan.
The team went to work performing environmental due diligence by uncovering records to assess the state of the property. Next, they modified the existing Remedial Action Plan by proposing a cost-effective and practical strategy to address specific environmental concerns.
The Plan is useful to inform regulators and environmental agencies before construction begins. It helps ensure the general contractor is aware and responsible for keeping construction on track and adhering to the remedial strategy, including environmental and safety protocols.
SCS also prepared and submitted all certification documents to be reviewed, approved, and recorded before the dealership’s grand opening while preparing an application to receive Voluntary Cleanup Tax Credits.
“Brownfields remediation is a complex process, but it offers benefits to businesses, investors, and most importantly – the community,” says Blevins.
The Palm Beach Mitsubishi dealership is open for business. Shown here at the opening are Sanaul Khan (left), President and CEO of Mitsubishi Motors North America, Yoichi Yokozawa (center), and Chris Berian of AKD (right).
Resources
Popular Mechanics recently published an article entitled The Pungent History of America’s Garbage Mountains. The article starts with a little-known ferryman on Lake Michigan when a storm beached his craft on an offshore sandbar in July 1886. Thus started Chicago’s open dump on today’s Lake Shore Drive, home to landmarks such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Wrigley Building, the Chicago Tribune Tower, Northwestern University, and the Magnificent Mile – all on turn-of-the-century garbage.
Transportation centers, stadiums, and even entire neighborhoods are now built on landfills. This is a fascinating, well-written article on the history and possibilities of building on remediated properties and brownfields.
“Landfill redevelopment projects tend to be real estate projects, and you know what matters in real estate: location, location, location,” says Mike McLaughlin of SCS Engineers, who specializes in brownfields and landfill redevelopment. “A landfill in an urban area might be the only piece of open land in that area. People go to extraordinary lengths to redevelop because the property is so valuable.”
With the frequency and severity of storms on the rise, municipal solid waste landfill operators have to think differently to keep their workers and environment safe. Planning is key to safely hit the ground running in the wake of severe weather.
Federal law does not hold household hazardous waste (HHW) to the same standards as what is classified as hazardous waste (generated by businesses and received at subtitle C landfills). Yet, these materials have the same compounds and are potentially dangerous too.
“Subtitle D landfills routinely receive these wastes, but under normal conditions, it’s in much smaller quantities, and they are typically segregated. So managing them is not a big deal. But, after a storm, operators can be inundated with these oxidizers, corrosives, flammable gases, and flammable solids. It’s all coming in at once and mixed with other storm debris, posing a risk for reactions and workers’ safety,” says Mike Knox, SCS Quality Advisor. He supports landfill operators in safely managing hazardous wastes. Storm season is a busy time for him and his clients. Those unprepared find themselves pulled in multiple directions and need to act quickly and smartly.
If a structure blows down, it may generate waste that contains gallons of dangerous liquid, gas containers, propane tanks, and pesticides mixed in. It’s dangerous, especially if a waste worker does not see it.
Mike’s Planning Advice
Operators set themselves up for success when they’re ready to go with a plan before that first 80-mile-an-hour wind gust hits.
“You must know how to identify hazardous wastes ahead, train staff ahead, and look at worse-case scenarios ahead,” Knox says.
He and his team start by looking at operators’ facilities and identifying materials, workers’ roles, and available equipment and assets. They identify safety areas and set up classrooms. Important are preparing the staging areas to manage the influx, screen, and segregate by waste type.
Then they look at government rules; help operators determine what they need to do; and execute a plan.
Minimizing Risk
Operators need to secure waste, make sure it’s packaged right, and minimize it where possible to stave off mishaps.
The safety of people and equipment is part of a proactive strategy. Trucks can tip over with heavy, wet loads, so do not overload them. Space trucks in the tipping area are at least 10 feet further apart than the dump trailer is long. For a 30-foot trailer, that’s 40 feet.
Setting up this extra space can be difficult unless you’ve established a large tipping area, and don’t take chances with dump trailers; the results have proven deadly in the past, Knox advises.
Check that backup alarms and strobe lights are working. Train equipment operators to look for vehicles and pedestrians. Do not allow cell phones at the working face; a distraction that no one needs. Mandate the use of high-visibility vests and restrict people to stay within five feet of their vehicle. Strictly control scavenging. People cannot wander and pull items from the trash.
Fuel Up
Fuel is the item most often overlooked in Knox’s experience.
“Having enough fuel to operate heavy landfill equipment and hauling fleets is essential to keep waste moving. Severe storms have impacted fuel supplies for several days to a week or more, so stock up,” he recommends. Mike typically arranges for temporary fuel storage tanks so haulers and heavy equipment operators can stay on their mark through and after the storm.
Scenarios in Preparation
Part of safety management is asking “what if” and then answering ahead of a problem. Depending on where ‘what if’ leads, you prioritize and go after the big things first. One big one is, what if floods occur? That question leads to more specifics to plan for, such as roads likely to be impacted and establishing alternate routes available. What other actions will help traffic flow?
Remember: if there’s a lot of rain or clay, trucks can slip going up hills. So alternate tipping areas that are lower and flatter may be needed to accommodate inclement weather access. “And that takes preparation. Sometimes you have to build a road to reroute to an area you are not using. It can take days,” Knox says.
Building wet weather access roads are important, as are measures like cleaning out stormwater ditches. Nevertheless, know that, depending on location, rising water may flood out areas despite these efforts. Pumping water into berms and ponds from flooded ditches can be a temporary solution if your plan and local regulations allow it. Coordinate with regulatory and permit agencies to set up such actions.
You will want to bolster protections of maintenance facilities, the scale house, and other structures that could be damaged or lose power – stock up on tarps, lumber, and power generators.
Many operators find waste screening towers to be especially useful. Knox and his team will build them in advance to prepare for what’s coming. Waste screeners at the gate radio to active face supervisors if hazardous materials are arriving so they can properly place them, ensuring they are covered with dirt before sending staff to the active face.
Knox completes quality evaluations guided by a 200-item checklist to ensure proper procedures are in place. He compliments this list with many questions to prepare.
Know Your Jurisdiction’s Rules and Storm Accommodations
Operators check local permit conditions to take advantage of possible modifications they may make. Some jurisdictions have more lenient weight restrictions for hauling vehicles or the option to set up temporary staging areas.
Knox also suggests coordinating with the local permit and regulatory agencies following the storm to take advantage of emergency relief funds and coordinate across the area’s public and emergency services.
Local government, emergency responders, regulatory and permitting agencies often have Emergency Operations Centers (EOC) to coordinate resources, information, and crisis management. Mayors, County Commissioners, fire departments, hospitals, police, environmental regulatory agencies, and other key industry leaders are typically part of this team.
These groups practice response coordination and stage tabletop exercises or mock disasters. “Take time to participate and plan with the EOC. Check for whatever else may be available in your area to help prepare, and work as a team with these local entities to respond to severe weather or other emergency events,” Knox says.
Circling Back to Planning
“Knowing what to do before the storm hits will make your recovery easier. You will keep your employees, your community, and your site safe. And be ready to go back to normal operations much faster.”
About the Author: Mike Knox has over 30 years of Ordnance and Hazardous Materials experience. He is a Regional OM&M Compliance Manager with extensive supervisory abilities in hazardous waste emergency response and large-scale clearance operations.
The recent MWEA Conference covered a wealth of other important topics on water management and safety, including this presentation with SCS Engineer’s Remote Monitoring Control specialist, Brett Heist. Brett and Jarod Stuyvesant co-presented “More Than a Pretty Map – GIS Covers Your Assets,” including demonstrations of how the City of Zeeland is using GIS to enhance the efficiency of maintenance and inspection activities and improve the reliability of physical infrastructure throughout its community, leading to increased public safety and financial savings.
Click here to view these demos!
DEMOS: There are some unique methods to plan for capital improvements and streamline data storage and access being implemented in the City of Zeeland. The City has an integrated GIS map for its storm, sanitary, water, and streets, including information about each asset within the system: material, size, inverts, condition, business risk, and even televised inspection videos for some of the storm and sanitary lines.
The GIS maps’s information is used daily by public works and to create a comprehensive capital improvement map that the City uses to plan for 5-year improvements, significantly improving planning and budgeting efficiency while ultimately providing the public with safer infrastructure.
Features include televised inspection videos attached to a respective asset after uploading and accessible with the click of a mouse. Access entire buildings in the same manner as horizontal assets using a 3D online viewer.
The Zeeland Clean Water Plant RAS Building: Using AutoCAD data, the City created a 3D GIS viewer of this building and its assets. Asset information, such as blower and pump sizes and operation and maintenance tasks, are accessible without having to sort through shop drawings and as-builts.
Another example of implementing 3D GIS data like this is for MobileGR who uses a 3D GIS model to store asset data and maintenance tasks for every one of their nine parking ramps in downtown Grand Rapids.
The engineer in Ryan Duckett tends to want to build the biggest, most top-of-the-line waste and recycling facilities whenever he can, but always what is practical for his clients. SCS’s mission states that employees adopt our clients’ environmental challenges as our own, and that includes their budgets and social goals as well.
“I appreciate that the waste management enterprises I work with are businesses and care about more than the engineering of a project. They care about the economics, and they look for guidance in both realms to get maximum value and efficiency,” says Duckett, who came to SCS Engineers as a new environmental engineering graduate. Then he went back to school for his MBA. He wanted to join both the technical and financial puzzle pieces.
“Everyone, especially local governments, is constrained by tight budgets. You have to think about the interplay between design and construction and financial feasibility,” he says.
That’s his job – to plan technically sound programs and facilities, whether new builds, upgrades, or changes in operations or services. Or it can be developing protocols for clients to tap into low-carbon fuel credits.
He’s learned to look through both developers’ and operators’ eyes to help clients accomplish what they want at budget levels they set while maximizing what they get from their programs, facilities, and systems.
“You need to make assessments and quantify details to answer questions like, what would an operator have to charge for a given service to break even? Is this service fee reasonable given market conditions? What are estimated operational costs and capital costs for an expansion? Financial analysts vet these questions, but very few of them are intimately involved in solid waste practices or engineering,” Duckett says.
A holistic approach in play
He calls the work he does integrated solid waste management, which involves understanding the entire operation and how one component affects the other, whether routing and collections, materials recovery facilities (MRFs), transfer stations, landfill gas systems, or others.
Duckett shows this holistic approach in play by explaining how grasping the way collections work helps design transfer stations. These major builds can run up to multimillions, even when project managers have the skill set and foresight to plan for efficiency and sustainability.
“You can better estimate how to design queuing space, how to design surge capacity, how to size facilities,” he explains.
“Adding, for example, an extra day’s storage capacity at a transfer station or MRF provides extra flexibility in the event of a disruption farther down the line. In an emergency, owners could potentially save significantly by having more time to identify or negotiate more economical alternatives.”
Some of the solutions he finds are simple but require thinking out of the box—literally in one situation where cardboard boxes were stockpiling at a convenience center because they didn’t fit through the slot in a single-stream receptacle. Simply creating an acceptance area only for boxes diverts multiple truckloads a week from landfills and generates thousands a year in revenue.
Then there are the major construction projects where Duckett digs deeper, such as one plan to site, design, and build a MRF. He conducted a feasibility study looking at different sites and calculated estimated operational costs and upfront capital costs for each identified site.
“We ultimately determined that by co-locating a facility at the existing landfill, the client would save over $200,000 in operating costs, with savings from scales/scale house reuse, the reduced distance of residual stream hauling, labor efficiencies, and other areas.”
In this same scenario, adding robotics for additional processing comes with anticipated savings of about $300,000 in manual sorting costs annually.
When do you recommend spending more upfront?
This question often comes up in Duckett’s world.
He finds that sometimes spending more upfront and on what’s built to last translates to substantial savings in the long run. He reflects on when a client had to replace a transfer station floor every couple of years.
“These floors take so much impact, so this is not an uncommon problem. But you can provide a huge ROI by reducing floor replacement frequency. They can run over half a million to replace properly, even for relatively small facilities,” Duckett says.
He ran budget numbers for different approaches and found in this scenario the higher-end approach, cement with additives such as fly ash, was the better deal.
“It might cost 50 percent more upfront, but the floor could last three times as long, breaking the cycle of frequent, costly replacement,” he says.
What do you recommend when budgets are so tight, there’s no cash reserve to invest?
Duckett and his team have found solutions in this scenario, too; often, the strategy is to figure out if a phased approach is possible.
“You could spend ten years waiting to generate enough funds to build infrastructure for a major project. Your citizens are missing out, so sometimes it’s best to build smaller, as soon as you need it. Then increase capacity as you can afford it.”
Expert advice from his colleagues
A very positive thing about his holistic approach is that Duckett can reach out to his colleagues who specialize in long-term financial management plans for utilities such as solid waste. This team, led by Vita Quinn, specializes in helping clients build sustainable financing models and plans.
The models help communities manage financial impacts such as COVID disruptions; make investments without burdening community budgets, and help take advantage of commodity market swings such as in the value of recycled paper. Models are useful to show community leaders and citizens the different options and what-if scenarios that make sense based on current and future conditions.
Going back to the drawing board to improve a system
Not long ago, Duckett’s team had to figure out what to do about a decal-based, pay-as-you-throw system that wasn’t working. The operator’s initial plan seemed logical and simple: residents purchase decals and place them on their bins for pick up. But some of them let their subscriptions expire. The city was losing money servicing outstanding accounts. It hired enforcement officers to check every decal for validity, which soon proved too labor-intensive.
“We found an alternative: adding fees for trash and recycling to the water and sewer bill. It’s bringing in more revenue. And the city is saving on hours spent checking thousands of decals, freeing the enforcement officers for other jobs, like bulky and yard waste enforcement,” Duckett says.
Duckett’s greatest lessons learned?
“In my seven years on the job, I have learned that the solid waste industry is complicated with a lot of intricate, moving parts that interconnect. Who would have thought trash was so complex?”
He’s also learned it’s critical to have comprehensive teams with diverse backgrounds to gather different perspectives.
“It goes back to the concept that you need more than engineering expertise to deliver that value add. That value add is important to our customers, so we strive to understand the business challenge along with the technical and social goals.”
Speaking as a young professional to other young professionals and students thinking about careers in waste management, he says: Check it out. Give it serious thought.
“I do not know of another industry that involves so many interesting disciplines: biology, hydrology, geology, engineering … even data and computer scientists.”
He shares this proposition for the young and ambitious:
“As technology advances and regulatory requirements heighten, our teams learn a lot on the job. But we appreciate our sharp graduates who bring the latest knowledge from academic settings. We depend on them to share new ways of thinking and help us solve challenging and intriguing problems.”
His motivation to get into environmental engineering evolved from his passion for the outdoors.
“I grew to appreciate conservation, which centers on doing more with less to preserve resources. Nothing is wasted in nature; everything is cyclical and gets used,” Duckett says.
“That’s what our waste system could emulate, and as a nation, we’re moving in that direction. It’s not just about reducing trash. It’s about reducing wasted effort and money spent beyond what’s necessary. It goes back to the idea of efficiency and getting the most out of something – instead of a using-disposing-buying new mentality.”
Learn more about comprehensive MRF and Transfer Station infrastructure
Media Borough, Pennsylvania’s Food Compost Program uses a witty video encouraging participation in its organic waste diversion and composting program. We had to share – not only is it fun – it works!
The Borough launched its pilot program to gauge the feasibility of adding food scrap collection to its current recycling efforts. This month the program is available to all residents. The food scrap collection program provides residents the opportunity to separate food from the rest of their household waste for collection and composting at a local compost farm.
Media Borough estimates it has 70% recycling participation in the community – that’s an impressive number. Its current recycling and yard waste programs divert close to 30% of residential solid waste from landfills and incinerators. Adding a food scrap collection program can reduce residential waste by another 30% and create compost.
The Borough’s Public Works website explains the reasons why organic matter, matters.
Thank you to this Pennsylvania community and its Public Works department for helping to sustain future generations with their reduce, reuse, and recycling actions. We hope by sharing their video and results, we’ll see greater participation in communities nationwide.
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