The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency issued the following news release seems surprising. If, as seems to be being suggested in this news release the perpetrator was breaking the envirnomental law, these people are environmental criminals, so why was there an agreement when this should have gone to court? In such cases the litigant should pay all the costs and not the state, so what possible reason can these be for this?
Am I being too Machiavellian by noting that actually there was a reason for Long Prairie Packing to come to an agreement as they want to develop an AD Plant:
Long Prairie Packing Co., LLC, and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) recently reached an agreement that requires the company to pay $52,000 for alleged water quality violations. The violations occurred between fall 2009 and spring 2010 at the company's facility in Long Prairie, Minn.
According to MPCA staff inspection reports, the company improperly stockpiled and land applied industrial byproducts, and failed to maintain a required 600-foot land application setback from surface waters at seven sites. Some of the land applications occurred within farmed wetlands. The company also failed to notify the MPCA or immediately recover blood-contaminated leachate which spilled out of a dumpster and a large storage tote; improperly stored more than 500 gallons of used oil; and operated parts of the facility without a required federal and state industrial stormwater permit.
Of the $52,000 civil penalty, half will be paid to the MPCA, and half will be spent on completing a supplemental environmental project. Long Prairie Packing Co. plans to construct an industrial anaerobic digester near the plant that will reduce the amount and toxicity of pollutants entering area waters, and significantly reduce the land application of industrial byproducts. The digester will produce biogas, which will help reduce dependency on coal-powered energy sources. The company has also completed a series of required corrective actions.
The vast mountains of decaying rubbish buried beneath Norfolk's landscape may be hidden from view - but their potential environmental consequences are not so easily masked. Waste dumped by generations of families and businesses is still decomposing, oozing toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases which could threaten their natural surroundings.
But the challenge of managing our landfill legacy is being met through an innovative engineering effort, while policy-makers continue battling to find more sustainable ways to dispose of the refuse left by a growing population.
Norfolk County Council is responsible for more than 150 closed landfills, of which six are the larger "permitted" sites which were still operating by the time new environmental regulations came into force in the 1990s. Teams of technicians work to a double remit: to monitor and minimise the ecological impact of gas and leachate generated by so much buried waste, and to find ways to maximise income from its useful by-product - methane.
Turning the greenhouse gas into energy at four sites is currently worth about £280,000 per year to the county council, 22pc of the total costs for managing the authority's closed landfills.
Meanwhile, water percolates through rotting rubbish, collecting chemical contaminants as it goes, and the resulting leachate must be routinely monitored, abstracted and sent away for treatment. In all, keeping permitted sites in compliance with environmental regulations costs taxpayers about £1.4m per year.
Bill Borrett, Norfolk's cabinet member for environment and waste, said: "I think people have got to understand more about landfill, because once you understand the amount it costs, the environmental hazards and the amount of space it takes up, people become more aware of the legacy of their waste and the importance of recycling.
"It is not simply put into a hole and forgotten about - there is years of work in maintaining the land after that." The site at Mayton Wood, near Coltishall, accepted 1.5m tonnes of commercial, industrial and household waste between 1971 and 2003. The waste is grouped into huge domed "cells" contained by a liner and capping system.
The base of the landfill consists of a clay base, followed by a waterproof plastic membrane which is protected by a shingle or sand drainage layer above it. At the top, a similar set of layers encase the waste - along with the gas and liquids - in an impermeable bowl, with the angled sides draining any leachate to a collection sump at the bottom. Meanwhile, rainwater is prevented from getting into the landfill, and is instead channelled to the perimeter across the domed surface.
Hydrogeologist Tim Wilkins regularly samples, monitors and controls leachate levels with the help of a computerised system of wells and pumps. "Leachate is what you get when water percolates through the waste and picks up contaminants," he said. "Some of it comes out looking like coffee and smells quite nasty. The main constituent is ammoniacal nitrogen, and it can be quite toxic to the aquatic environment.
"We have got 11 wells on this site and each has a pump and a level sensor which sense the level of the liquid. The pumps are operated automatically when the leachate reaches a level of one metre above the base layer. "All the permitted sites are now within compliance, but when we took them over (in 2008) they generally had 14-15 metres of leachate. They were all saturated, which meant there was more chance of the leachate escaping."
About 70 gas wells are also sunk into the Mayton Wood waste to harness landfill emissions which are typically 45pc methane, 25pc carbon dioxide and the remainder mostly nitrogen. The gas is drawn into perforated pipes which reach 10 to 16m underground to the base of the cell, and are connected through a network of sealed pipes above ground to a powerful fan at the on-site energy plant. The generator draws in 450 cubic metres of gas per hour and converts it to electricity which is sold on to the National Grid, with the profits shared by the council and the private plant operator.
Des Holmes, the council's landfill gas project officer, said: "We're talking about the equivalent of 45 double-decker buses full of gas being sucked out of the ground every hour. The whole site is under negative suction. "The machinery is basically like a large diesel engine that has been converted to run on landfill gas.
It produces 600kW/h, enough for 500 homes, and it is constant. The only time it stops is when it breaks down, but it can keep going at that rate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "The gas will diminish over the years, but I reckon we have got about 15 years until it stops becoming economic to produce electricity here." Gas production at closed landfills is estimated to reduce by 10pc each year as the waste degrades, prompting efforts to find more innovative ways of squeezing every last pound out of the resource. The council's strategic waste manager Paul Borrett said there was a "fine balance" between preventing rainwater seeping into the site, and keeping the waste damp enough to maintain chemical reactions.
"The amount of rain water that collects on the site is more than we can cope with, but we want the waste to stay wet so it continues to produce gas," he said. "In trying to reduce the 'tail' of the gas production, we are looking into recycling some of the leachate we have collected back through the waste. Once it gets saturated or if it dried up, we have got no gas production and no income - so it is a fine balance." The generating plant at Mayton Wood also contains a gas flare, to safely burn off any potentially dangerous pressure build-ups of methane, which is estimated to be 21 times more dangerous as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Work on the landfill is continuous as the waste compacts, changing the shape of the cap and the effectiveness of the wells. But Paul Borrett said although it could take several decades for landfills to settle, there were plenty of examples of where they had been replanted as woodland, public amenities or even a pitch and putt course.
"A lot of people's view of landfill is a big pit where people throw rubbish away - an eyesore," he said. "But we have moved on from that. We manage our landfills here in Norfolk and you can absolutely get to the point where they can be turned into something that's more useable - but we do have ongoing respon-sibilities and liabilities."
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BUCHANAN - The wastewater treatment plant in Buchanan will accept up to three times the amount of leachate that it now takes in from the Southeast Berrien County Landfill.
It's a move that will save the landfill $250,000 per year and generate about $50,000 annually for the city, Buchanan City Manager William Marx said.
Leachate is water after it drains through the landfilled trash and collects at the bottom of the dump. It contains a variety of chemicals and other matter from contact with the refuse.
"This is quite a savings for the landfill. We have the ability to take this," said Buchanan Mayor Carla Cole, who's also a member of the Southeast Berrien County Landfill Authority board.
Under an agreement drafted in 1984, Marx said the city's wastewater treatment plant has taken up to 25,000 gallons of leachate per day from the landfill.
Additional leachate from the landfill has been shipped by tanker to a treatment plant in Elkhart at a much higher cost because of transportation costs.
Marx said he recently had lunch with landfill general manager Sonny Fuller and listened to his desire to reduce the expense of shipping leachate.
Marx said he began checking with operators at the wastewater plant and learned as much as 100,000 gallons of leachate per day can easily be safely treated at the plant.
The Buchanan City Commissioners unanimously voted in favor of an agreement this week that allows the landfill to transport additional leachate to the plant through an existing pipeline.
Marx said the move has been approved by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
He said the landfill will have to perform some upgrades to its lift station to increase the flows.
Commissioner Dave Hagey applauded what he said he felt was a sample of the creative solutions ordinary citizens don't realize are occurring in local government.
"These are the kind of things percolating below the surface that people don't understand," Hagey said.
Cole said transporting leachate by tanker costs the landfill $115 per hour.
"This is where our biggest savings is going to be," the mayor said.
TORONTO, ON, Canada, Apr. 26, 2011 -- Under an MOU with Hasar's Grupo Ecologico, Blue Gold Canada plans to install a wastewater treatment plant at a landfill in Guadalajara, Mexico.
The Blue Gold/Dove Biotech wastewater treatment plant will have the capacity to treat 50,000 liters of water per hour and will use a proprietary organic/natural solution called CWP-121 to remove the contamination from the leachate pools. The treated effluent will then be used for agricultural applications.
The project is scheduled to be installed later this year.
WHILE Malaysians are busy worrying about whether radiation-contaminated seawater surrounding Japan's nuclear disaster zone is going to wash onto Malaysian shores, or whether radiation-contaminated food from Japan is going to get past Customs inspections and be consumed by unsuspecting foodies, the fact is, the health of Malaysians have long been at risk of contamination by poisons contributed by leachate from our own landfills.
The poisons, including heavy metals like mercury, leach into groundwater and flow into our rivers, contaminating riverwater and the eco-system that depends on it. If the leach goes undetected, the poisons will flow into our body through the water, fish and shellfish that we consume.
Who is responsible for this insidious poisoning of the people? We are.
Every person who has ever thrown a dry cell battery (like the ones used in torchlights and television remote controls), a fluorescent tube, handphone batteries and other hazardous e-waste like computers, televisions and printers into their household dustbin has contributed to this potential poisoning of the people. Broken or crushed fluorescent tubes leak out mercury gas; dry cells leak out heavy metals. This e-waste, which is scheduled waste, cannot be thrown into an ordinary dustbin, cannot be picked up by an ordinary rubbish-collection lorry, and should not end up on a normal rubbish heap at a normal landfill which is not equipped to deal with leachate.
And yet, every day, more than 42 tonnes of such hazardous e-waste is thrown out together with ordinary household waste.
It is not enough for consumers to know their rights; they must also take responsibility for what they consume, and this includes how they dispose of what they have consumed. But it is one thing to educate the consumer about separating their rubbish; it is another thing altogether to make sure that the rubbish stays separated. Besides building more sanitary landfills with leachate treatment facilities, the government needs to set laws which require e-waste to be compulsorily recycled.
In June 1998, the Japanese government enacted a Home Appliance Recycling Law, in which all white goods were required to be cannibalised and their components recycled. The responsibility for this is borne by the consumer, who pays a compulsory up-front collection charge at the time of purchase, and the manufacturer, who must collect the used product later in the future and recycle it. No government subsidy is involved, as the role of the government is to provide direction to the public to take responsibility for their consumer habits.
Since Malaysia intends to make separation of rubbish at the source for household goods compulsory in 2013, it is only fair that this should be followed through with a plan for how to keep this waste separate.
