Only those intimately involved with landfills can truly appreciate everything that goes into running a successful facility.

To the average person, a landfill is merely a dump where the garbage man drops off the trash after picking it up from the driveway on Thursday morning. Little does John Q. Public know that painstaking efforts go into the development, construction and operation of landfills in order to address the multitude of concerns that go along with such a site.

Long before the first truckload of garbage makes its way to a new location, the potential effects of building a landfill in a given area are carefully considered. Expensive environmental impact surveys must be performed to determine if the site will cause contamination of ground water or other surrounding areas. During the actual construction, several different layers of soil, gravel and plastic liners are compacted together to ensure that possible seepage from the landfill will be completely contained. Collection systems are also built into the landfill's base to remove contaminating substances or to harness methane gas formed when trash breaks down.

In a nutshell, it takes a lot of time and trouble just to develop a landfill. So it only makes sense for the landfill operator to do whatever is necessary to maximize the landfill's usefulness and longevity. This usually means finding an optimum solution for compacting the waste material on site, which helps to maintain an abundance of a landfill's most valuable asset - air space.