By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
For nearly 50 years, Wood County trash has been dumped into the front 43-acre footprint at the county landfill.
But now the man-made mountain has reached its limit and is being capped off.
The capping procedure is quite detailed, explained Landfill Superintendent Ken Vollmar.
And quite expensive – costing $207,032, according to Wood County Assistant Administrator Carri Stanley.
It began with the landfill crews covering the top with 18 inches of recompacted clay. Then a contractor from New Jersey, specializing in capping landfills, placed a plastic liner on the top. That was then covered with a foot of sand by landfill crews.
Next, the contract workers put a layer of a geosynthetic fabric over the site, followed by 16 inches of topsoil applied by landfill employees. And finally, the mountain will be seeded with grass, Vollmar said.
The filled footprint has trash buried about 20 feet underground, and mounded about 40 feet above ground.
On Wednesday, the contracted crews were sealing the seams of the fabric on top of the mountain. Initially they were using a specialized handheld “sewing machine,” Vollmar said. When that broke down, they switched over to cauterizing the seams together.
The lining of the landfill footprint and the capping of its top follow the strict requirements of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. Methane gas is monitored with a series of wells, and leachate is captured so it doesn’t move off site.
The front section of the landfill filled up faster than first expected.
The reason was three-fold, according to a presentation made to the county commissioners a few years ago. First, the Henry County landfill closed, resulting in much of the garbage from that neighboring county coming to Wood County. Second, as the economy rebounded in 2016, the increase in new construction created more debris, and people were buying new items and throwing out the old, rather than stretching out their usefulness. And third, improvements at Wood County Landfill made it more attractive to waste haulers.
For a period of nearly 15 years after 2000, the Wood County Landfill averaged about 35,000 tons a year taken in. Then Henry County closed its facility, and for three years, Wood County Landfill took in about 48,000 tons a year. In 2017, that tonnage jumped to 58,000.
But the county won’t be running out of landfill space anytime soon. At the going rate of garbage, the 360-acre landfill still has about 100 years left, Wood County Administrator Andrew Kalmar said.
The landfill currently has a section to the north of the capped area that is now being used for dumping. That is predicted to have another five and a half years of space left.
The county has applied for a permit expansion with the Ohio EPA. But that was five years ago, and the county is still waiting for the permit.
“We are finalizing that process right now,” Stanley said.
