If you or your students are stuck for an idea to develop a solution for, then we have an awesome list of authentic problems presented by the actual workers themselves. Below are 15 prompts captured from Scott County Landfill where we asked the workers to identify their biggest issue in their job. If you choose any of these we can have your students submit their ideas to the workers for feedback to make it feel authentic and important...... becuase their ideas are just that!

Problem 1: Birds/Vectors

All landfills are required by law to cover their garbage at the end of every day. This is because if we left the garbage exposed we’d have every raccoon, possum, deer, rat, and more picking through the garbage looking for food as soon as our operators went home for the night. The problem is if these animals get sick, or step in something in our landfill that’s contaminated and then leave the landfill they’ve now spread their sickness, germs or disease to areas beyond our control. Covering the garbage every day keeps the four legged critters out, but we can’t seem to stop the birds, especially seagulls, from flying in while we’re working.

CHALLENGE: Find a way to scare off birds and keep them from landing in our landfill when there is exposed garbage.

Problem 3: Blowing litter

Our landfill is the highest point in the county (and getting higher all the time). It’s located in a rural part of the county and there’s very little in our area to stop the wind. This means it’s almost always windy where trucks are dumping garbage. Any time they dump, the lightweight garbage, things like plastic grocery bags, paper and so on all blow away as they get tipped out of the back of the trucks. We’re required by law to keep litter picked up.

CHALLENGE: Find a way to minimize wind and/or blowing litter where trucks dump garbage.

Problem 5: Track cleanouts on equipment

Our tracked equipment, bulldozers and excavators, are constantly having their tracks get clogged up with debris, garbage, mud, dust, and so forth. Every day our operators have to spend time cleaning out the tracks so the equipment can continue to run. This takes a lot of time. Time that could be used doing other things.

CHALLENGE: Create something that will cut down on the amount of material clogging up the tracks of our equipment.

Problem 7: Fires/Rechargeable batteries

This is one of the biggest threats we face. Rechargeable batteries are found all kinds of items. If these batteries get damaged they have a dangerous tendency to burst into flames. Managing garbage all day every day means we use a lot of heavy equipment – bulldozers, loaders, excavators, a giant 116,000 compactor tractor – there’s lots of ways a battery could get damaged and burst in to flames. We need residents to recognize that their rechargeable batteries cannot go in the garbage and must be taken to an e-waste processor (just like their electronic devices).

Problem 9: Methane mitigation

As organic materials (food waste, paper products, and other natural items) decompose in an anaerobic environment they produce methane gas. Methane case is an extremely potent greenhouse gas (more than 20x worse than the exhaust from your car). We are required by law to capture the methane gas created by our landfill. We currently have a system of wells buried throughout our landfill that vacuum off the methane.

CHALLENGE: Find a way to collect the methane created in our landfill and use it beneficially.

Problem 11: Lost recyclables (in the garbage)

Even though we have recycling available everywhere in our county we still see lots of recyclables in the garbage that’s brought to our landfill. We cannot pulled these items out of the garbage for two reasons. One, having our staff pick through the garbage would put them at high risk for injury as there are lots of dangerous items in garbage (think broken glass, jagged metal, and so on). Second, we get more than 500 tons of garbage every single day. Even if we had a safe way to go through this material there’s so much stuff we’d never be able to keep up with amount of inbound garbage that needed to be sifted through and still get our normal job of managing a landfill done.

CHALLENGE: Find a way to get residents to stop putting recyclables in their garbage.

Problem 13: Wind Turbine Blades

Landfills throughout the country are discovering that we may have a big problem on our hands. The blades off of wind turbines are being replaced with newer, more efficient blades. But what do you do with the old blades? There’s no real outlet for them so energy providers are taking these old blades to landfills. They’re really big, and they’re extremely hard – almost impossible –to break into pieces. Cutting them up takes lots of time for our staff and is not financially feasible. They’re so tough that running them over with our 116,000lb compactor does nothing virtually nothing to them. There are tens of thousands of wind turbines out there, and all of them will need new blades in the coming years. We’ve got to find a way to manage these old blades, because there are lots, LOTS more coming.

CHALLENGE: Find a way to recycle or break up old wind turbine blades.