Design, Build and Test Your Own Landfill
Students design and build model landfills using materials similar to those used by engineers for full-scale landfills. Their completed small-size landfills are "rained" on and subjected to other erosion processes. The goal is to create landfills that hold the most garbage, minimize the cost to build and keep trash and contaminated water inside the landfill to prevent it from causing environmental damage. Teams create designs within given budgets, test the landfills' performance, and graph and compare designs for capacity, cost and performance.
The trash that people throw away gets put in landfills that are designed and built by engineers.Copyright 2004 Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399 USA. All rights reserved.
Engineers design landfills to contain waste from many types of anthropogenic (human-generated) sources. The garbage comes from many places, including household trash cans, worn-out tires, sludge from wastewater treatment plants, old couches, and scrap metal. The main challenge for engineers is to keep the waste materials from being a health hazard. Also, because of economic constraints, landfills must be as small as possible while holding the most amount of waste material possible. Engineers work with regulators to design landfills that are suitable for hazardous and non-hazardous waste.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Describe a landfill and its purpose.
- Explain the alternatives to dumping human-made garbage in landfills and ways to decrease the amount of waste that ends up in landfills.
- Describe how landfills can be hazardous for the environment if they are not well engineered.
- Describe the kinds of materials make good liner systems for landfills.
- Explain what it means to optimize something.