SWACO nearing completion of 16.2-acre closure at Franklin County landfill

GROVE CITY, Ohio ( WCMH ) — A 16.2 acre project called a “cap closure”, required by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and United States Environmental Protection Agency, is almost complete at the Franklin County Sanitary Landfill.

Most don’t think much about where their trash goes after it gets picked up. It ends up on a giant hill in Grove City, the landfill. The team there thinks about trash daily and they handle a lot of it.

“4800 tons per day, 600 truck trips through the gates every day. Last year we took in about 1.2 million tons,” said Matt Readon, Environmental Manager for the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio (SWACO), which operates the landfill.

The areas where trash is dumped, moved around, and compacted are called cells.

“It always comes in no matter what the weather is, day in and day out,” Reardon said.

Once a cell is full, the EPA requires a cap closure to be done. Reardon said a closure on 16.2 acres of the landfill is about two weeks away from being finished. There is a protective layer under all the waste in the cell. Reardon said the closure layer at the top involves a foot and a half of clay, a special liner, and a couple feet of soil that has been seeded. The closure is on the south slope, and the landfill site has remained open and operational throughout.

“It’s an environmental protection. It keeps anything from coming out of the landfill and also like I said keeps any rainwater or storm water from coming into the landfill,” Reardon said. “We are permitted to, where we can, put the trash and if we go over that we have to remove it so once it hits that limit, it doesn’t make sense but to close it.”

Some stages of the project have been visible from I-71. This is the first time SWACO has done this type of closure at the landfill, according to Reardon.

“We’ve up until this point put what’s called transitional cover on, which is an Ohio EPA approved temporary until you put final closure on,” he said. “Since we have filled up enough of this portion of the landfill it is justified to put a closure cap on top of it.”

Reardon said the landfill as a whole will be open for about 40 more years before the entire site is full. SWACO hopes to make it last longer with more recycling and other diversion efforts.

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