Garbage Mountain in The City of Angels - Puente Hills and The Externalities of Waste Disposal

Garbage Mountain In The City Of Angels Puente Hills And The Externalities Of Waste Disposal

Mario Ghosn

THE INTRODUCTION The escalating population growth in developed territories, intensify in return the substantial externalities of human life. Among negative externalities, trash overrun its own limits of generation, which makes the task of waste management an overloaded burden. Landfilling is still one of the most widely applied methods of municipal solid waste disposal, especially in the United States. This type of plant addresses challenging environmental emergence due to the possibility of contingent formation of contaminants01 , such as leachate generated during landfilling, which is an achingly defiled wastewater that may contaminate groundwater, soil and even surface water. Concerning the landscape pattern, the magnitude and the structural aspect of a landfill may establish an updated affiliation with the surrounding landform. The establishment process of a landfill imposes its accessibility to the community in order to serve as an attainable destination of municipal solid waste collection, heading from curbside collection into landfill waste disposal. The design of waste landfills has evolved through the last sixty years. Many restrictions and requirements were imposed in order to make the process of landfilling more efficient and environmentally conscious, which made land disposal of waste no longer a simple practice.

Topographic Map Of Puente Hills Landfill Source: www.topoquest.com 01 Anna Artuso & Elena Cossu - After-use of Landfills Methodological approach, project requisites and relationship with the surrounding area - Published 2018 with Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0 Firenze University Press. P. 102

For closed landfills, such as Puente Hills Landfill (closed on Oct 31st 2013), reclamation strategies are nowadays more necessitated for the purpose of elaborated urban reusability of these newly formed geographic entities.

2

Ghosn | 3

02 P. Jayarama Reddy - Municipal solid waste management: processing, energy recovery, global examples - 1st Edition - Published November 30, 2011 by CRC Press P. 184 03 Edward Humes – Garbology: our dirty affair with trash 2012 Published by Penguin Group

Puente Hills Landfill Will close forever thursday Source: www.sgvtribune. com/2013/10/30/puentehills-landfill-will-close-foreverthursday/

These designed structures are no longer considered “garbage dumps”, they are maintained and re-used for the benefit of the community02 . With these benefits, landfill’s placement becomes a mutual interest to the community by making it more included in land-use urban planning and energy generation by the utilization of imbedded methane gas as a source of energy, recovered through a network of gas collection pipes connected to an on-site power plant.

In The maze of all these approaches wandering around the waste disposal process, Puente hills Landfill, referred to as “Garbage Mountain”03 , rises as an urban phenomenon Rising five hundred feet out of the earth and sprawling over 1300 acres of land togging over 130 million tons of waste. Los Angeles County’s megastructure has received trash from more than 80 Los Angeles area jurisdictions and stole the spotlight from Fresh Kills landfill after its closure in 2001 to gain the boon of the largest landfill in the United States. This report study focuses on the structuration and development of Puente Hills Landfill in relation to its surrounding, in addition to its requalification as a closed landfill.

PUENTE HILLS LANDFILL & THE AMERICAN WASTELAND As humans, our daily lifestyle consists on consuming resources and then leaving an amount of waste, resulting of that consumption, which is heading into landfills every week.

Landfills are the primary method used today for municipal solid waste disposal in many countries in the world. In 1994, over 306 million tons of municipal solid waste was generated in the United States, and the amount is increasing at roughly 5% annually according to Resources for the Future (RFF), a Washington DC - based public interest group. The United States of America produces more garbage per person than any other country on the planet with an average of 230 million tons per year.

The state of California by itself is consuming 35 tons of trash per person which illustrate why California’s landfills produce 419.6 millions of

4

cubic feet of methane gas each day. The number of active municipal solid waste landfills in the country has decreased from approximately 7,900 in 1988 to 1,900 in 2009 due to the expansion of waste recycling through the 50 states04 . The mission of landfills is mostly handling the magnitude of that mega-mess, and when it comes to mega, no landfill experienced such expansion more than California’s Puente Hills.

This megastructure covers 1,365 acres including the dump site, materials recovery facility and the Gas-to-Energy facilities, and it used to handle the bulk of one-third to one-half of Los Angeles County’s trash. The Landfill still accepts clean dirt, and the Material Recovery Facility there is still open and is among the largest MRF in the nation. It is also the depot for the proposed trash train, which would connect to the Mesquite Megafill dump site 150 miles away near the Salton Sea. Puente hills landfill was regulated with ground water contamination control when it was active, and it captures some of the methane it produces to power the facility instead of letting it escape into the atmosphere. In 2007, due to manifested overloaded disposability on site, the number of trucks accessing the landfill were decreased from 1,900 trucks to 400 trucks a day, which provided the garbage mountain with extended life expectancy.05

04 Reynard Loki – Salon America is a wasteland: The U.S. produces a shocking amount of garbage - July 15, 2016 05 Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilley - Touring the Largest Active Landfill in America - The Atlantic, April 5, 2013

THE GARBAGE MOUNTAIN & ITS URBAN SCENERY The astounding and monumental act of landform construction, which was in the past a canyon on the edge of the San Gabriel Valley, followed some kind of rhythm during its expansion, and turned over four decades, into a megastructure rising 500 ft. above the original ground level. Situated in the middle of the most populous urban sprawl in America, this manmade garbage mountain sits on a 1,365 Acres site, half of which is devoted to a buffer zone and wildlife preserve leaving an area roughly the size of New York City’s Central Park, to receive one third of Los Angeles County’s trash.

Ghosn | 5

06 Ghosn Rania, and El Hadi Jazairy “Georama of Trash” August 2016 - P. 99 07 Edward Humes – Garbology: our dirty affair with trash 2012 Published by Penguin Group P. 23 08 Waste Management World - End of an Innovator as

Edward Humes’ “Garbology” related the pictorial vision of the garbage mountain to “a huge and eerily modern version of an ancient tell, giant mound in the Middle Eastern deserts that mark where once-mighty cities rose and fell, and that now lie buried and broken beneath the sands”. The Canyon Fill Landfill is a whole organism made with thousands of cells stacked and buried beneath a green fabric, representing the monumental forms to the components of landfill architecture.06 After Thousands of years, the Puente Hills megastructure will be bulwarked, insulated, enveloped in layers of clay and polyethylene, and more secure against earthquakes, winds and floods than any other structure in California, which will represent its objective civic pride and disciplinable visionary for future Angelenos as an enduring monument holding tons of legacies.07 After its closure on October 31st 2013, the construction of the landfill cover layer took from 12 to 18 months of processability.

Gas To Energy Facility Source: https://wastetoenergysystems.com/largest-renewable-energy-projects-in-the-world/

6

The final cover, resembling to an exoskeleton for an invertebrate, helps with: reducing the amount of storm water entering the landfill, minimizing the surface water on the liner system, resisting erosion due to wind or runoff, controlling the migrations of landfill gases, and improving aesthetics. The Sanitation Districts will maintain and monitor the landfill for at least the next 25 years in order to protect public health and the environment.08 In 2016, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved the final environmental report for the future Puente Hills Landfill Park. The construction of the park’s first phase started in 2018 and may be completed by 2021. The developed land re-use strategies will provide an opportunity to guarantee a qualified territorial reorganization in which the redevelopment process of the atmosphere may constitute a leading element in effective rezoning of the area.

PUENTE HILLS LANDFILL’S GAS TO ENERGY: RECOVERING ENERGY FROM WASTE Landfill manifestation is considered a suitable preference for municipal solid waste disposal, while maintaining energy due to methane spawned through anaerobic fermentation with carbon dioxide and traces of other gases formed such as hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen, and nitrogen.09 Puente Hills’ megastructure built with millions of tons of decaying suppressed garbage generates millions of cubic feet of methane gas each day (31,000 cubic feet a minute of landfill gas), which is enough to produce 50 megawatts Net of electric power around the clock,10 equivalent to the energy requirements of approximately 70,000 homes in southern California. The landfill is expected to keep generating gas for at least another 15 to 20 years after its closure.

09 Amalendu Bagchi - Design, Construction, And Monitoring Of Landfills Second Edition – 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. P.57 10 Edward Humes – Garbology: our dirty affair with trash 2012 Published by Penguin Group P. 24

The Collection System is composed of a network of 1400 vertical extraction Wells, overlaid throughout the site, linked by a header pipe, penetrated through the capped layer to collect the gas and transmit it for processing through miles of underground pipeline transporting the gas to an on-site Gas-to-energy plant (68 miles gas collection trenches and 35 miles of header lines). It uses vacuum pressure to collect landfill gas through extraction wells. Gas is extracted using central blowers that are sized according to the volume of the gas that needs to be transported. Spacing of wells is based on expected gas flow from the landfill. Extraction wells are installed within a pattern avoiding the overlapping of the zones of influence with each other by a certain percentage. Backup flare stations are implanted at the cruxes of the pipeline network to burn the gas in case of any automatic transmission glitch of the collection system. The landfill gas then crosses through a complex process of compression and purification in the filtration plants and gets out of the system as clean treated methane gas. Landfill liners help keep methane from escaping from the landfill and help maintain the anaerobic conditions necessary for methane production.

Ghosn | 7

11 Edward Humes – Garbology: our dirty affair with trash 2012 Published by Penguin Group P. 33 12 LACSD Website - Sanitation Districts Of Los Angeles County

Quality and composition of the landfill gas in the landfill and in the nearby soil need to be monitored.

Gas monitoring probes are installed to monitor the concentration of methane and other hazardous air contaminants. Gas is burnt inside a giant torch to keep the row methane from entering the atmosphere, where it becomes a potent greenhouse - instead it is used for power generation.11 THE MEGA DUMP & ITS ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL SYSTEMS

MRF Facility Source: LACSD Website

8

For more than three decades, Puente Hills Landfill has been the finish line for the bulk of Los Angeles County’s cosmic solid waste collection marathon.

With Its escalating sprawl, Puente Hills has evolved its own ecosystem and nature preserve with extensive practices included within its state of art facility (such as managing odours, dust, birds, and providing landscaping to blend with the local native habitat), induced several community organizations (such as managing materials recovery and recycling programs MRF), and holds enough strata of methane exuding decomposing garbage to power a hundred thousand homes.12 The environmental impact of landfill sites varies depending on how well they’re managed and resourced. Before the termination of its operating permit in 2013, Puente’s Hill Landfill was fairly wellrun with its environmental control system, and it used to deal with over 13000 tons of municipal waste on daily basis, which made it a challenge to handle its mess safely.

Referring to Puente hills landfill in an interview for National Public Radio, Edward Humes said: “They’re managing our waste, they’re not reducing our waste, they’re not disappearing our waste, and what that means is they’re really good at picking it up and getting it out of sight and making Garbage Mountains out of it.” If Puente Hills Landfill used to handle the bulk of one-third to one-half of Los Angeles County’s trash, with the mountain of garbage now enclosed, it’s hard not to think of the fate of Los Angeles County’s solid waste at the present time. The Sanitation District has plans underway for a new and even larger landfill in an abandoned gold mine in Imperial County known as the Mesquite Canyon Landfill, which will be accessed by trash train filled with the county’s solid waste

dumped by residential and commercial garbage trucks. The landfill possesses an ambient aroma due to the skin of dirt covering the garbage mountain’s cells built hierarchically.13 LEACHATE COLLECTION & REMOVAL SYSTEM Landfill Leachate is generated as a result of the seeping of water or any other liquid through solid waste or by the squeezing of the waste due to its self-weight14 , and has extracted soluble dissolved or suspended materials in the process. In Puente Hills Landfill, the construction of a final cover effectuated significant reduction in leachate quantity, but the leachate collection system runs the leading position in this removal task by minimizing the depth of leachate above the liner. The collection system consists of a drainage layer, drainage pipes, shafts, and collection pipes. The four parameters that have the greatest impact on head above the liner are: permeability of the drainage layer, Flow rate of leachate into the LCS, the length of the drainage path and the slope of the liner. Leachate drains from the LCS to a series of sloped trenches that contain pipes surrounded by a blanket of gravel, which drive them to a sump or lift-station. The sump contains a pump that is used to remove leachate from the landfill and carry it to a storage system connected to a leachate treatment system.15

13 Edward Humes – Garbology: our dirty affair with trash 2012 Published by Penguin Group P. 33 14 Amalendu Bagchi - Design, Construction, And Monitoring Of Landfills Second Edition – 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. P.22 15 Debra R. Reinhart & Timothy G. Townsend - Landfill Bioreactor Design & Operation – 1998 by CRC Press LLC P. 14 - 15

THE GARBAGE MOUNTAIN AS AN ENVIRONMENTAL LOCUS Puente Hills Landfill wasn’t established in a selfsupporting ecosystem, it was developed in a cycle of subsistence, where waste is generated, collected, and buried in a landfill. Although, in that non re-evaluated infrastructure system, Los Angeles County’s “Garbage Mountain” alleviated the burden of half of the county’s trash flows for 56 years. After years of depositing the community’s dominant negative externality, Puente Hills Landfill is going through an inversion of requalification, where it will serve the community by generating energy from the methane buried beneath its fine aromatic cover. The Closed Landfill will serve eventually as a recreational space promoting an ameliorated quality of life with its new environmental silhouette which is an added value to the territory as well.

Ghosn | 9

SPRAWLED EXISTENCE OF LANDFILLS IN THE UNITED STATES Rise of Landfill capacity in the United States from 1957 until 2013.

10

Ghosn | 11

LOS ANGELES COUNTY EXPAND WASTE DIVERSION As the disposal capacity within the County continues to decrease, and the possibility of expansion of existing Class III landfills becomes highly difficult, out-of-County disposal options, such as the waste-by-rail system, will become more essential to

12

Ghosn | 13

TERRITORIAL EXPANSION Puente Hills was the main landfill of Los Angeles County, and America’s largest active Mega-landfill, until it closed in 2013 after 56 years of operations (since 1957). The Site was a canyon at first before reaching an elevation of 500 ft. above the original ground level, built with 130 million tons of waste buried over the years.

14

Ghosn | 15

MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE COLLECTION & MONITORING SYSTEM: household waste curbside collection, transfer facility, materials recovery facility and landfill. Los Angeles County generates around 26 million tons of solid waste a year, with an average of 85,500 tons per day. However, about 65% of Los Angeles County solid waste is reused or recycled, and 42% of solid waste destined to landfills is sent to landfills outside of the county.

16

Ghosn | 17

Puente Hills Landfill In relation to surrounding landfills

18

Ghosn | 19

VISUALIZING THE IMPACT OF WASTE

20

Ghosn | 21

Schematic views of Puente Hills alterability through reclaimed landscape

22

Ghosn | 23

Territorial Usage Diverged

24

Ghosn | 25

Puente Hills Landfill Gas Extraction Network

26

Ghosn | 27

Puente Hills landfill gas to energy process generates electricity for the surrounding territory

28

Ghosn | 29

Territorial Perspectival Section

Leachate Collection & Removal System Pipe Network

30

Ghosn | 31

Bibliography: 1.Ernest C. Lehmann - Landfill Research Focus – Published: 2007 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. 2.Amalendu Bagchi - Design, Construction, And Monitoring Of Landfills Second Edition – 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 3.Anna Artuso & Elena Cossu - After-use of Landfills Methodological approach, project requisites and relationship with the surrounding area - Arcoplan Studio Associato di Ingegneria e Architettura, Padova, Italy - Published 2018 with Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0 Firenze University Press.

4.Steve Scauzillo - Puente Hills Landfill will close forever Thursday - San Gabriel Valley Tribune – Published: October 30, 2013 5.Liyna Anwar - Closing America’s Largest Landfill, Without Taking Out The Trash, Public Radio - February 22, 2014 6.Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilley - Touring the Largest Active Landfill in America - The Atlantic, April 5, 2013 7.Bagchi, A. Design of landfills and integrated solid waste management, 3rd Ed., Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. 2004 8.Focus - Talking Trash, Volume 107, Number 8, August 1999, Environmental Health Perspectives 9.Ghosn Rania, and El Hadi Jazairy. “Georama of Trash” ARQ (Santiago) no. 93 (August 2016): 98-105.

10.P. Jayarama Reddy - Municipal solid waste management: processing, energy recovery, global examples - 1st Edition - Published November 30, 2011 by CRC Press 11.Edward Humes – Garbology: our dirty affair with trash 2012 Published by Penguin Group 12.Debra R. Reinhart & Timothy G. Townsend Landfill Bioreactor Design & Operation – 1998

by CRC Press LLC 13.Revolvy Puente Hills Landfill https://www. revolvy.com/page/Puente-Hills-Landfill 14.National Geographic Megastructures: Garbage Mountain -2006-08-01

32

15.LACSD Website - Sanitation Districts Of Los Angeles County https://www.lacsd.org/solidwaste/swpp/energyrecovery/landfillgastoenergy/ puentehillsgastoenergy.asp 16.Thelma Gutierrez and George Webster – CNN - Trash city: Inside America’s largest landfill site - Sat April 28, 2012 17.Reynard Loki – Salon - America is a wasteland: The U.S. produces a shocking amount of garbage - July 15, 2016

Ghosn | 33