Where does your trash go? Follow a bag to the landfill
From a comfortable seat in a city of Columbus refuse truck cab, Deborah Roddy uses a joystick to grip a heavy 96-gallon garbage bin with the claws attached to her truck.
With another flick of the wrist, that garbage is lifted into her big yellow truck. Roddy, who has worked for the Columbus for 23 years, repeats this move about 900 times every day on her refuse collection route.
The garbage she collects goes into a system few people see. The Dispatch recently followed one bag of garbage through the process, starting at a Clintonville home and ending at the Franklin County Sanitary Landfill.
The bag's first stop was Roddy's truck, one of 172 trucks in the city's fleet. Roddy says her truck can collect from about 900 homes every day as the truck's hydraulic system continuously smashes it in the back of the truck. According to Rick Tilton of Columbus' department of public utilities, more than 300,000 tons are collected annually from city residents.
Once Roddy's truck is full, she stops at one of two collection points: the Morse Rd. transfer station on the Northeast Side or the Jackson Pike transfer station on the South Side. Once a garbage truck enters a transfer station, Tilton said the trash leaves the city's control and is turned over to the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio. This is the agency that runs the Franklin County Sanitary Landfill.
It was at the Morse Rd. transfer station that the symbolic bag of Clintonville trash became mixed in the system. "You will never see that bag of trash again" said Scott Perry, SWACO's operations director, as a seemingly endless flow of garbage was pushed out of Roddy's truck.
The transfer stations allow the city's fleet to quickly dump their loads and start another route, Perry said. The garbage is loaded on long trailers that move the trash to SWACO's Franklin County Sanitary Landfill near I-71 and St. Rt. 665 in Southern Franklin County.
More than 500 trucks unload garbage at the landfill every weekday. "These are no longer 'dumps'" Perry said, calling the landfill "one of the most highly engineered pieces of property you will ever stand on." In addition to the wastewater collection systems, he cites the methane gas recovery system as a ecologically-friendly system. As trash decomposes, it creates methane gas, which is captured and sold to a private company.
As trucks dump their loads, three 125,000 pound bulldozers push the garbage over a newly-created "cell" that will take about three years to fill. "Cells" are what Perry calls the active parts of the 283-acre landfill. After it's full, SWACO plans to open a larger "cell" that will take ten years to fill.
But as for that single bag of Clintonville garbage, it is lost forever at the landfill. "It is gone," he said. "This is the final resting place for that bag of trash."
