Since they are a company that deals with so much waste, they
continuously try to find ways to better their operations, and decrease their
impact on the environment. As a company specializing in waste management, they
are part of an industry that is one of the most heavily regulated in the world.
There are countless laws they have to abide by, which means they are constantly
measuring the quality of groundwater, amount of air emissions, and checking
soil quality. In order to be a good neighbour within the municipalities they
operate, BFI provides many programs to help benefit the people of the
communities. Some of the programs they facilitate throughout the year include:
Christmas Tree recycling, household hazardous waste collection, food drives,
environmental college scholarships, adopt-a-highway, and clean-up days.
Some environmental safety systems BFI has in place in order
to help protect the environment include: the collection and treatment of
landfill gas, leachate removal and treatment, crews to pick up trash blown on
to public roads, washing down all roads on-site in order to minimize the
tracking of waste off-site, and falconry (training birds of prey to catch game)
in order to control the amount of seagulls around landfills.
After doing research on what BFI does to be socially responsible
as a whole, I wanted to look at a single landfill location and see what they do
in order to decrease their environmental impact. One location that caught my
interest is The Ridge Landfill in the Municipality of Chatham-Kent Ontario. I
am interested in this location because it is in a small community called
Charing Cross, very close to my hometown of Blenheim, and I have heard some
conflictive stories about it. The Ridge Landfill covers an area of 260
hectares, and half of that is permitted for landfilling.
In the past couple years this particular landfill has
increased the amount of garbage they take in per day, from 4391 tonnes of waste
to 6661 tonnes per day, raising the maximum annual fill from 899,000 tonnes per
year to 1,300,000. That is a ton of trash. This increase of garbage per day is
due to the fact that garbage isn`t strictly from surrounding municipalities,
but trucked in over 3 hours from the GTA. As a result of the increase in annual
trash, the lifespan of the landfill as decreased from 2027 to 2022.
The expansion of this landfill has provided more jobs for
people within the local community and a substantial increase of the amount of
money brought into the community by the landfill. In order to decrease the
amount of pollution in the surrounding community, and to make the site more appealing
to the eye, BFI has constructed a 7-meter high berm around the entire landfill and
dress it up by planting many gardens and trees. To decrease the air pollution
and smell caused by the landfill, BFI has included a smell mitigation system
which minimizes odour by spraying the entire site with a cherry-like mist. They
also have 2 flares set-up which burns harmful gases emitted from the landfill,
diverting the gas from leaching into the ground and causing damage to the environment.
Another way they give back to the environment is by donating funds to local foundations
and organizations. One of their most recent donations was $5000 to the
Children`s Treatment Centre Foundation of Chatham-Kent, to go towards a ``Child`s
Play`` accessible playground.
Researching BFI and The Ridge Landfill has answered all my
questions about what the company does to minimize its impact on the
environment, and what it does to give back to the communities they operate in.
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