A Day at the Landfill

In my capacity as a "stable adult/surrogate father" for a hundred-and-fifty teenagers, I am occasionally asked if I'd be interested in going---

---"Yes," is the only correct answer, and given before even hearing where the destination may be. It's been that kind of year.

Recently that destination turned out to be the Whittier Landfill. That sounded like an interesting learning experience for our not-quite-'hood kiddos, and we booked the time and bus. I happened to be one of the chaperones.

We left around 8:40, nearly on-time, and headed north-by-east towards Whittier.

We arrived about eighty-five minutes later, after having to pull over and make calls because---I heard---the entrance was blocked by construction. We headed up a large hill to get to the facility, which itself was nestled behind large wrought-iron fences in the crook of the tiny mountain/large hill.

Once on the property, the bus cruised all over looking for the main office, even busting a three- (seventeen-) point turn. Eventually a lady came out to greet us. Skinny, dressed in a mini-skirt and sporting long blond hair, she got onto the bus with a fifties-era microphone and speaker.

After hearing her speak for ten seconds I knew all about her. I attended a university that had a strong engineering program, and I knew what was going on. She was obviously both the "hot engineer" and "people-person engineer" at this landfill operation. These teenagers would never see that, because she doesn't fit their ideas of "hotness," but worldly folks can tell these things.

Anyway, she cracked a few corny jokes as we drove around the remises on a bumpy road and she enlightened us as to the details of the operation of the landfill: at 93% capacity  it's considered "full" and hasn't taken a truck load for the landfill since 2013; the road was so bumpy because the hill is the trash pile and the anaerobic decomposition of the waste causes air pockets which cause depressions in the surface and road above; the plants were all native to the area and the green piping running all over the place was the only marker that we're on a landfill, as it collects the waste gases.

That part was rather ingenious: they collect the waste methane and burn it to boil the waste water that's also collected from the decomposition. That boiling wastewater powers a turbine, an action that results in the landfill being a net-energy plus operation---they add more power to the grid than they need.

This ride lasted about ten minutes as we snaked up a steep part of the hill and back down, bumping all along the way. Much of the information was contained in the poster she gave all of us upon arrival to our bus:

From there we parked and entered the recycling portion of the plant, the material collection department. This is the part of the operation that's still taking truckloads daily. They separate the material for resale to industry, the end-of-the-line in the world of "recycling,"

We were up in a glass-enclosed room high above the floor. To one side you could see masked humans sorting on a conveyor while bulldozers were hard at work. Mist was constantly coming down from the rafters in an ever-losing battle with dust:

The other side of the hangar facility had the big Wall-E type compactors and cubes:

And that was pretty much it.

The blond engineer disappeared and the kids started asking, "What now, mister?"

Forty hungry and restless young people milling about in the lobby of an engineering building, having apparently completed the day's activities in about 25 minutes.

Seriously, it wasn't even a half an hour. It wasn't even 11 am yet.

I guess there was a miscommunication between the plant's liason and our guy: the lady had a meeting and nobody had been chosen as a replacement, and after some awkward phone calls (which I was not a part of), we were off to find a park between Whittier and the South Bay so lunch could be enjoyed and we could try and get some money's worth out of our bus.

The next day we were off to San Luis for Val's memorial. Weird five day stretch, for sure.