Abstract
Waste collection in the United States is structured around large landfill capacity. The US has not yet reached capacity, and so there is not intense pressure to divert waste streams from landfills out of necessity. However, this will not remain the case forever. As the US continues to develop, the race for buildable land will intensify, and we will need to be more strict about what developments are allowed to be built. This reliance on landfills is evidenced in the way transfer stations are designed and in the habits of consumers. If a waste item is not clearly paper or plastic recycling, it is assumed to be landfilled. This is reflected in the design of transfer stations, where the priority is to separate items that are hazardous in landfills from the trash going to landfills.
My technical problem was the design of a small transfer station. The transfer station will replace an outdated incinerator and will serve as an intermediate checkpoint for trash being shipped to landfills. The transfer station consists of three buildings, the main building for MSW, a secondary building for recycling, and a building to collect trash from local residents. The team learned about traffic routing for transfer stations and designed to accommodate large commercial vehicles as well as smaller residential vehicles. The team learned how “waste banned items”, items not allowed to be landfilled, are collected and handled on site, which influenced the design of the residential collection building. In addition to a site plan drawn out in Autodesk Civil3D, a building narrative describing specific design components of the site to contractors was written, and a cost estimate sheet for the project was made.
My STS problem addressed the question of how waste collection in the US should be overhauled to divert trash from landfills. Japan and South Korea were analyzed as case studies for systems that are successfully diverting trash from landfills through federal policies and initiatives. Both Japan and South Korea employ pay-as-you-throw programs, which encourage citizens to minimize either the weight or volume of their household trash, as it becomes more expensive to throw trash away as the quantity increases. South Korea in particular is implementing various technological methods to make it easier for residents to discard. Both countries separate their trash into more categories, including an organics category that is diverted to composting and /or incineration facilities, and stricter separation of plastics. Policies further restrict the types of plastic products businesses can put out or otherwise encourage products that are easy to dispose of and recycle, with new regulations eliminating plastic labels from being produced to eliminate plastic production.
I was successful in identifying policies and programs that when implemented, resulted in successful diversion of waste from landfills to recycling centers, composting centers, and incinerators. It should be noted that these initiatives were documented to have been implemented in urban environments, and their success in suburban and rural environments was not discussed. Backlash to these programs, and the costs to implement and maintain these programs was not researched. As the US contains a much higher proportion of suburban and rural neighborhoods, future research should explore the spread of these programs to suburban and rural environments. Comparison between the current US system and those of Japan and South Korea should be made to understand the required magnitude of work that would be necessary to overhaul the current waste management system in the US. A study into the current mechanics of shipping waste between states to landfills will provide insight into the roles of local governments in this overhaul.
I would like to thank the rest of my team, Sam Saks, Ashley Roa-Martinez, and Stephen Hotchkin for their contributions to our technical portion, as well as our faculty mentor Prof. Lindsay Ivey-Burden and industry mentor Sam Nickolai. Thank you to Casella Waste Systems for providing this project the University of Virginia for fourth year Capstone projects. Thank you to the Ivey transfer station and the Rivanna Water Authority for providing a tour to teach us how their transfer station operated, which greatly helped us in the design portions of our technical project. A last thank you to Prof. Bryn Seabrook and Prof. Caitlin Wylie for advising the writing of my STS portion.
