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 2: Dust (Roads/Pits)
We joke that there’s only two seasons at the landfill, the muddy season and the dusty season. We have a lot of gravel roads around our landfill, and lots of dirt covering the garbage. We even get semi loads of ash on a regular basis. This means if we go more than a couple of days without rain our landfill gets very dusty. This is a problem because the dust covers our directional signs, and irritates people’s eyes and lungs.
CHALLENGE: Find a way to minimize dust on our 600 acre site.
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 4: Storm water/Erosion
Because our landfill is shaped like a giant upside down bowl, anytime it rains the storm water running off the side of the landfill creates erosion. If we don’t find ways to control this the erosion it will quickly carry away all the dirt covering garbage and we’ll have exposed garbage on the sides of our landfill (something that’s against the law).
CHALLENGE: Find a way to minimize erosion on the sloped areas of our landfill.
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 6: Speeding/traffic flow
We average about 150 truckloads of garbage every day. That’s a lot of traffic on our small site. Also, the truck drivers do not want to spend much time at the landfill. They’re job is to collect garbage from our area residents, not sit at the landfill. As a result the drivers are often in a hurry, and some of them are guilty of speeding or not going slow enough to operate safely around our equipment, workers and the other drivers.
CHALLENGE: Find a way to force drivers to slow down and be more aware of their surroundings.
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 8: Wet weather/Stuck vehicles
We don’t use concrete for asphalt for roads on the landfill because it costs a lot of money to make roads out of these materials and the roads on our landfill will eventually get buried in garbage as the landfill grows. This makes sense financially, but anytime it rains the areas where trucks dump turns into a mud pit and vehicles get stuck easily. This means our staff has to step away from their normal job and spend time pulling stuck drivers out of the mud.
CHALLENGE: Find a way to create a firm base for garbage trucks to drive on whenever it rains or turns muddy so they’re not constantly getting stuck.
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 10: Leachate (garbage juice)
We have a giant plastic liner that sits at the bottom of the landfill to make sure no liquid seeps out of the bottom of the trash contaminating the local water supply. Think of it like a massive Tupperware bowl filled with garbage. The problem is every time it rains that bowl starts filling up with liquid that has seeped through 100+ feet of garbage. NASTY. The technical name for this liquid is leachate (aka garbage juice). We pump it out of the bottom of the landfill, but have to find something to do with this liquid because we get more every time it rains or snows.
CHALLENGE: Find a way to use leachate (garbage juice) in a beneficial way.
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 12: Mattresses
Mattresses are one of the most challenging things for a landfill to bury. They’re full of metal springs, which means when they get run over by our bulldozers and compactor they get tangled up in their tracks and drug all over. When we do get them buried they have a tendency to “float” through the garbage that’s placed on top of them because they’re so springy. Basically, they don’t stay put like we want them to. We bury them, then as we continue working throughout the day we see them start to rise up out of the garbage – zombie mattresses?
CHALLENGE: Find a way to dispose or recycle mattresses that does not involve placing them in the landfill.
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.
Problem 14: Deer eating our willow trees
Willow trees consume a lot of water. A few years back we planted more than 200 of these trees on a closed section of our landfill. It was an experiment to see if we could use the trees to soak up some of our leachate (garbage juice) that collects at the bottom of our landfill. On paper it makes perfect sense and would be a perfect, environmentally friendly way to help manage this liquid. The problem is the deer that live around our landfill ate nearly every single one of the trees before they could start growing and start soaking up our leachate.
CHALLENGE: Find a way to discourage deer from eating our young trees!
Problem 15: Your own problem
In your research leading up to this point you might have uncovered a problem that is not on this list that you really want to explore and solve. We don't want to hold you back so you can always choose your own problem to solve. The key here is to share the problem so we can be aware of this problem and others can help you along the way.
CHALLENGE: Find a way to solve the problem you have identified