Facing dwindling room for residential and commercial trash in its landfill, the Atlantic County Utilities Authority has been employing engineering solutions in recent years, including building a retaining wall six stories high that will eventually span a mile.
Operators for the ACUA started employing these techniques to extend the life of landfill.
Instead of piling the trash up in a pyramid shape as in the past, the current landfill procedure is to stack the garbage vertically up against a wall, which contains the refuse, said Rick Dovey, ACUA president.
“The wall was actually originally permitted in 2006, so we had this on the books for a while knowing that sometime in the future, we would need it. So, a few years back, we started with phase one, and now, we are into phase two,” said Thomas Ganard, the ACUA’s chief engineer.