Recycling A Landfill Site
La Crosse County, Wisconsin
The American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC-WI) has selected Foth to receive a 2009 Best in State Engineering Excellence Award for the remediation and expansion of the 50-acre La Crosse County, Wisconsin, landfill site. The county turned to Foth for help at the landfill site in 2005 when it was faced with the dual challenges of remediating an old, leaking landfill and creating new disposal capacity.
Typically, engineers would undertake two separate projects—one to remediate the old landfill and another to permit a new landfill on a new site with sufficient long-term capacity. Traditional landfill remediation techniques such as leachate extraction with on-going environmental monitoring are costly, time-consuming and frequently ineffective. Siting a new landfill is also costly and time consuming, and often results in major public opposition.
Instead, Foth engineers crafted a single plan for remediation and expansion all at the existing county-owned site—in effect, recycling the landfill site to meet the county's needs. Through careful planning and construction phasing over four years, Foth engineers sequentially:
- Removed the buried trash causing contamination at the old landfill
- Placed it in available space at the current, environmentally sound landfill
- Upgraded the empty, old landfill space to current environmental protection standards so it could accommodate future waste disposal needs
- Scheduled all construction activities to occur at times when potential noise, dust or odor impacts to site neighbors would be minimized
- In total, relocated more than 1.8 million cubic yards of material on the landfill site.
Key Benefits
By recycling the landfill site, La Crosse County:
- Eliminated the cause of nearby groundwater contamination
- Avoided the need to site and permit a new landfill
- Added enough disposal capacity to serve residents for at least 30 more years
- Saved millions of taxpayer dollars
There were no legal challenges to the landfill redevelopment, and the project enjoyed broad public support.
Recycling the La Crosse landfill site also enhanced the sustainability of this county-owned system. For more information, or to obtain a copy of the presentation, "Sustainability and the La Crosse Disposal System", contact Jim Miles-Polka at (515) 254-1393.
