I’m the Landfill Manager at Rumpke’s Brown County Landfill just outside of historic Georgetown,
Ohio.
Landfills are designed in sections or phases that we call cells.
Prior to the waste being placed in the cell, an area has to be excavated down to create
In order to protect the environment, we then place a series of liners in the bottom of
Protective liners are designed and installed to make sure that what we put in the landfill
Right underneath this gravel layer are those protective liners.
We start of by putting three foot of recompacted clay liner.
This acts as natural barrier between the trash that we place and the environment down below.
On top of the clay liner we install a synthetic liner.
This material is made out of high density polyethylene, or HDPE.
This material prevents liquids from reaching the top of the clay liner.
The liquid that we are collecting is called landfill leachate; some people call it garbage
We collect this material by installing a drainage layer.
Some landfills use a geo-composite drainage layer.
It's a netting that is made out of high density polyethylene and it is sandwiched between
Our landfill here uses a gravel layer to collect the leachate instead of a geo-composite.
The leachate is removed from the landfill through a series of pipes and pumps which
then allows us to transport the leachate to the local waste water treatment plant for
Now we have the liners and the leachate collection system installed, now we want to protect them.
We do that by installing a select layer of waste that does not have bulky items in it.
The fluff layer typically consists of household and commercial type waste.
Once that layer is installed, now we’re able to start filling the rest of our waste