Sample Landfill Operations Manual
Up to 10 billon metric tons of solid waste is generated annually from urban households, commerce, industry, and construction globally. This is bound to increase further as populations grow and migration from rural to urban areas occurs with wealth and consumption inevitably rising, prompting the amount of waste per person to multiply.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) implemented a regional technical assistance, TA 8566: Mainstreaming Integrated Solid Waste Management in Asia, to conduct an assessment of solid waste management practices in five case study cities in Asia and to provide recommendations and best practices that can guide municipalities, ADB project officers and others on how to improve proper waste management and achieve a clean, livable city.
The toolkit, Integrated Solid Waste Management for Local Government: A Practical Guide, is a major knowledge output arising from this TA. The lessons learnt from studying the five cities under this project were collated, and supplemented with general industry experience of the consulting team, bank staff and reviewers. The toolkit contains more than 40 practical briefs designed to provide easily accessible information in a very targeted manner, with embedded hyperlinks to reference documents should the reader wish to obtain more data on that topic.
One section of the toolkit focuses on landfill operations, and there are 10 practice briefs in this category. It is essential for practitioners or interested municipalities to know that most landfills fail due to poor operation rather than poor design. Improved operations do not necessarily require a massive increase in budget, just an understanding of the required operational targets and the correct approaches. Together with the practice briefs, guidance is provided through a sample landfill operations manual as a resource document.
This manual can be used on site as a day to day guidance for operators of larger landfills, that is, sites where equipment is permanently established on site. For smaller landfills where equipment is only brought onto site from time to time, a simplified cut-down version of the manual should be used. Finalization of the document is not possible until after the specific landfill has been designed in detail and all the government and agency approvals are received.