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A study in feasibility y

As a demonstration project, Mount Trashmore was awarded a matching grant of $192,674 by the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Its specific objectives were:

1. To determine the feasibility of building a hill from municipal refuse in order to create a useful structure of solid waste.

2. To determine the possibility, through construction of an aboveground sanitary landfill, of more than doubling the capabilities of disposal sites.

3. To study thoroughly and report upon unit costs, techniques, environmental needs and problems involved in a project of this nature.

Geological studies done prior to building Mount Trashmore showed that the subsoils could withstand the weight of the structure. Borings found dense clays with extremely low transmissibility coefficients, allowing the minimum distance between the fill and the water table to be set at four feet.

In 1967, five wells were drilled, primarily to provide water for chemical analysis. Two were located outside the project limits and three on the project site. The Public Utilities Department still uses those wells to draw water samples for analysis on a monthly basis. They show that the project has had little or no effect on groundwater in the area.

Difficulties surmounted, cheaply

That isn’t to say that Mount Trashmore has been problem free, but the difficulties arose - and were for the most part resolved - during the actual construction of the mountain.

Odors were prevalent during the clean-up of the old trench landfill and whenever bad weather interfered with scheduled deposits of trash in new assigned cells.

(The cells are comprised of 18inch square units of trash with a sixinch layer of clean soil. The refuse was spread out, covered with dirt and rolled over by a compactor, compressing the soil and garbage into dense layers of 100 pounds per cubic foot for the mountain. For each layer, the process was repeated.)

A conveyor belt was installed to move wastti from central bins to the working site during extended rainy periods, and with this improvement plus the availability of clean soil cover for the exposed trash, odors were eliminated.

Flies, which arrived in the refuse itself, were a problem only when the soil cover could not be applied daily, allowing them to mature and linger. Installation of the conveyor belt Weewise eliminated the fly problem.

The solution to dive bombing gulls wasn’t as simple. Gulls descended by the thousands, diving on workers and trash with equal vigor. Firecrackers set off at periodic intervals proved to be the only effective deterrent. Even this didn’t always work to frighten the birds, but no better solution was devised for this particular problem.

The decomposition of refuse creates gas, particularly methane gas. At Mount Trashmore, this was monitored by the Engineering Technology Department of Old Dominion