Dumpster Rental in Sanderson, FL

Environment, Landfills & The Community of Sanderson

Sanderson, Florida is named after John Pease Sanderson. Sanderson was a Florida politician that served as the delegate of the Florida Secession Convention before the Civil War and a delegate to the Confederate Provisional Congress and, during the Civil War, served as a representative to the Congress of the Confederate States. Today, Sanderson is an unincorporated community in the northern County of Baker near the border with Georgia.

New River Solid Waste Association (NRSWA)

Sometimes cooperating on the use of public utilities can be a sound strategic move. This is what the New River Solid Waste Association (NRSWA) has set out to do with by combining the efforts of Sanderson’s Baker County with those of Bradford County and Union County to create a wider spectrum of waste management methods and services that can better serve the environmental needs of all three counties.

New River Regional Landfill (NRRL)

One highly effective method of combining solid waste resources and needs is through the development of a landfill that serves multiple communities. This is exactly what the New River Regional Landfill (NRRL) does. In addition, the NRRL serves a model in Florida as the first regional landfill that encompasses multiple counties through a public system.

One of the advantages of a multi-county landfill facility is that the by putting greater resources into a single landfill, more efficient and advanced technologies can be incorporated. Accordingly, the New River Regional Landfill is a bioreactor landfill that circulates liquids and air throughout the mass of waste that is contained by an outer wall. The new technology causes the waste in landfills to deteriorate at a much faster rate, making much better use of space. The New River Regional Landfill is located at 24276 NE 157th Street in Raiford.

Developing More Environmental Landfills

When we think of landfills, we imagine piles of waste and bulldozers moving that waste in some distant and deserted place. These images rarely include anything that resembles technologically advanced processes. In reality, the landfill, which is the oldest form of waste disposal in the United States, has benefited from technological advances that seek to improve the processes of waste disposal by attempting to reduce the negative impacts on the environment. For example, over the past decade, many counties in the United States have developed waste-to-energy plants that incinerate garbage through turbines that create energy. Another such development has been the bioreactor landfill, such as the New River Solid Waste Association’s NRRL.

Bioreactor landfills

The jury is still out on how environmental bioreactor landfills are; however, they have given promising results thus far and are increasingly being used in places, such as Sanderson’s Baker County in cooperation with the New River Solid Waste Association. The bioreactor landfill often places a network of vertical and horizontal pipes in the landfill. These pipes circulate air (condensed gases) and water and leachate material. In the case of aerobic landfills, oxygen is circulated, while anaerobic landfills use water and leachate material. Additionally, hybrid facilities use both.  One of the differences between condensed oxygen and liquids is the amount of gas produced.

Potential Benefits of Bioreactor Landfills

There are a number of potential benefits to the bioreactor landfill:

• First, it is believed that the bioreactor landfill is a safer work environment than traditional landfills.
• Second, because the waste decomposes at a much faster rate, new space is more quickly made available for new waste.
• Third, the bioreactor landfill creates methane gas at a faster rate so that is can be used for energy if captured. In some analyses, the gas production is seen as a potential downside of the landfills if it cannot be captured fully. Additionally, bioreactor landfills only speed the production of methane and do not increase the aggregate amounts that result from decomposition.
• Fourth, anaerobic and hybrid bioreactor landfills efficiently use leachate material by redistributing it into the landfill and requiring less maintenance of the leachate and sludge, which is continually processed through the system.
• Finally, the faster disposal of landfill areas can, in some cases, enable these areas to be converted into parks and recreational area years ahead of the typical schedule.