At its recent teleconference the ADC Committee of the Construction Materials Recycling Association (CMRA) decided to support a plan to provide the scientific data to show the safety and usefulness of alternative daily cover (ADC) made from C&D debris.
The goal is to show regulators, legislators, and other interested parties that the material is safe. Indeed, as several members of the committee, which is largely made up of manufacturers of ADC, say, they never have any problem with hydrogen sulfide gas, the smelly nuisance that has been blamed on ADC, even when it sits outside in large piles for more than a year. The problems start when the ADC goes to the customers’ landfill facilities, and the committee feels there is a need to provide the best techniques for handling the material.
To that end, CMRA members are meeting with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for two reasons: to discuss recent financial assurance mechanisms the state is placing on landfills that use ADC and to get them to partner with the CMRA on an in-field project on ADC.
In addition, the CMRA has an opportunity to work with an eastern state’s solid waste authority on a project that looks at two of the authority’s landfills that use ADC from the same supplier. One landfill has no problem with odor, but the second does, and it accepts materials such as municipal sludge, which the first does not.