Want to Become the Best at What You Do?

“It doesn’t matter how good your strategy is, if you’re not skilled at what you do, that strategy won’t take you very far.”

As Jason Fried and DHH have said: “Many amateur golfers think they need expensive clubs. But it’s the swing that matters, not the club. Give Tiger Woods a set of cheap clubs and he’ll still destroy you.”

When you’re confident about what you do and clear about where you’re going, the right strategy will make itself known. Hence, when your “why” is strong, you’ll figure out “how.” The how comes from the why. Not the other way around.

If you’re looking for how to be successful, you’re going about it all wrong. You’re doing it for the wrong reasons. And you’ll continuously be left searching for the next patch of land to find gold. What will be left? An open field of half-dug holes, three feet from gold.

If you know what you want and why you’re doing it, you’re not worried about the “gold.” Your security is internal. You aren’t worried about the outcomes because you already know they are coming.

For you it’s never actually been about the rewards. It’s only and always been about seeing how far you can go. About achieving the impossible. About never stopping.

Take everything external away and you’re still going to continue with the same intensity you always have. Give you everything – fame, money, whatever else – and it wont derail you.

Here’s how to become the best at what you do:

1. Work On Yourself, Not On Your Job

“Work hard at your job and you can make a living. Work hard on yourself and you can make a fortune.” – Jim Rohn

Your work is a reflection of you. If you’re not getting the results you’re looking for, stop looking for better strategies. Instead, look inside.

Are you currently the person who would attract the level of success you seek? Your outer conditions are a reflection of your inner reality. As James Allen has said, Your circumstances reveal you to yourself.

Where you are right now: that’s you.  If you want something different: improve you.

Most people focus on their craft or their “job.” That’s all well and good. However, you’ll get far more bang-for-your-buck by focusing on yourself.

20% of your energy should be devoted to your work. 80% of your energy should be devoted to rest and self-improvement. This is what fuels your work and makes it better than anyone else’s. Self-improvement is more than books and true rest is renewal.

While others are trying to improve their job, you’re continuously improving yourself, expanding your vision, skills, and abilities. This is akin to Stephen R. Covey’s 7th principle: Sharpen your saw. Most people are trying to chop down their tree – their “job” – with a dull saw.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

Within a short period of time, you’ll have developed true mastery. Everyone else is trying to hone their “craft.” Don’t work on your job. Work on yourself.

When you do, your work will far exceed what other people are painstakingly producing. Your work will be cleaner, clearer, and more powerful because you’ll be more evolved as a person. Most people you’re “competing” against are an inner mess.

2. Consistently Put Yourself Into Situations Others Can Only Dream Of

“Necessity is the mother of invention.” – English Proverb

Your results aren’t a reflection of your talent. Lots of people have talent. Few people, however, are required to rise to a difficult challenge.

Most people never put themselves in demanding situations – situations that humble and scare you.

You need to put yourself into positions that create immense pressure. The kind of pressure that will either make or break you. This is how you purge out your weakness and small-mindedness. It won’t be pretty. But it will change you. And eventually, you’ll rise up. New. Changed. Better.

You need to be taking on challenges that require you to become so much more than you currently are. You need to put your back against the wall so you have no other choice but to produce.

This is how you evolve.

How do you put yourself into these situations? You initiate. You don’t wait for life to come to you. You don’t wait for the “next” opportunity.

You improve your current situation or “job” by providing actual value. You pitch ideas. You ask questions. You try and fail. You take on roles that require greater responsibility.

“Leadership” is available to everyone. You just need to assume a leadership role. You can do that right now, in whatever situation you’re in. You do this enough, and continuously pitch yourself and your ideas, you’ll create opportunities. You then maximize those opportunities and more will come.

Opportunities are like ideas. The more you use them, rather than let them simmer, the more will come. Most people sit on their ideas far too long and they become stale. Similarly, most people sit on their opportunities too long and they stop coming.

3. Don’t Copy Other People. Make Them Copy You.

“From this point, your strategy is to make everyone else get on your level, you’re not going down to theirs. You’re not competing with anyone else, ever again. They’re going to have to compete with you.” – Tim Grover

If you’re still mimicking the work of other people, good luck.

If you’re trying to replicate the work and results of other people, what does that say about your own inner compass?

What does that say about your motivations?

Are you just trying to find what’s working?

Are you looking for the “how”?

Do you actually know where you’re going?

If you’re following someone else’s tracks, where do you think those tracks will lead you? To your own destination or to theirs?

And even if you’d be happy with their destination, do you really think you could do it better than them? It’s their path. They’re driven by something deep and internal. You can’t get ahead if you’re always a few steps behind. If you’re always reacting rather than creating.

If you don’t know who you are, you’ll always try to be someone else. And thus, you’ll never be the best. Your work will always be a cheap imitation. It will lack the feeling that produced the work or the idea.

4. Stay In Love With The Process

“The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” – Norman Schwarzkopf

The process – or the work itself – is all there is. Results come and go. And it’s never been about the results. Success is inevitable.

Success comes easy because it’s the last thing on your mind. You already know it’s going to happen.

The work itself – and becoming better and better at it – is what drives you. It almost doesn’t matter what you’re doing. It’s why you’re doing it that matters.

The “what” can and does take many forms. Don’t over-attach to one role. Whether you’re a leader, writer, athlete, parent, “employee” – the what doesn’t matter. Why you do it and subsequently how you do it is what matters. Hence, how you do anything is how you do everything.

When you are in love with the process, you seek feedback, mentoring, and coaching – even when you’re at the top of your game.

You surround yourself with people who aren’t afraid to tell you the truth. You avoid people who suck-up and only tell you what they think you want to hear. Those aren’t friends. They have an agenda.

Self-transcendence comes from collaborating with others who are driven by a greater and grander vision. When the whole becomes fundamentally different than the sum of its parts. When the work is the reward.

Going beyond anything you’ve ever imagined. Complete openness to the possibilities. Unless you’re continuously improving and working with better people, you’ll never realize this.

When you hone yourself, your work, and you produce – opportunities will come. They won’t help but come. Because you’re a magnet, pulling them in.

5. Never Forget Why You’re Doing This

“So many times it happens too fast You trade your passion for glory

Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past

You must fight just to keep them alive”

— Survivor, Eye of the Tiger

It blows me away how often I see people throw their value-systems out the door in hopes for quick success.

When I see this happen, I already know these people won’t succeed long-term. They clearly don’t have a “why” – or they forgot it. They don’t have an inner compass. Consequently, they don’t really know where they’re headed. It’s a destructive path.

The moment you start compromising, you won’t stop compromising. As innovation expert, Clayton Christensen, has said:

Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of those things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always low. But each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be.

This, unfortunately, is more common than not.

It’s so common, in fact, that it’s almost expected. Hence, few people become the best at what they do. They end up becoming something far less.

Conclusion

Becoming the best is about never being satisfied with what you’ve done. It’s about continually improving who you are.

It’s knowing success will come because you know who you are and what you stand for.

It’s about initiating – continually creating situations that force you to become more than you currently are. Purging yourself of all your imperfections. Evolving.

This is your journey. Take it.

Like this Blog, sign up for our updates:

 

Name(required)

Email(required)

Company(required)

Source: Inc. Magazine and WIH Resource Group, Inc.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com or WIH Resource Group.

WIH Resource Group’s team of expert witness litigation support professionals have a track record of success. Whether you’re facing a valuation dispute, damage assessment, contract claim, employee matter, safety incident, personal injury, landfill gas issue, or other pending legal action, our experts are ready to assist you.

For more information, visit our website by CLICKING HERE and contact us today to see how we can best serve you by phone at 480.241.9994 or by e-mail at admin@wihrg.com

Visit our new website!   www.wihresourcegroup.com

ABOUT WIH RESOURCE GROUP

Celebrating over 13 years in business, WIH Resource Group is a global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range of markets, including waste management, recycling, financials, transportation, M&A due diligence and support, alternative fuel fleet conversions, facilities, environmental, energy for private sector business and government clients.

WIH Resource Group is a leader in all of the key markets that it serves. WIH Resource Group provides a blend of global reach, local knowledge, innovation and technical excellence in delivering solutions that create, enhance and sustain the world’s built, natural and social environments.  WIH Resource Group serves clients in more than 175 key markets internationally.

More information on WIH Resource Group and its services can be found at www.wihrg.com.

Click on an image below to take you to WIH’s other sites!

Advertisements

12 Things Successful People Do Differently

I’ve always been fascinated by people who are consistently successful at what they do; especially those who experience repeated success in many areas of their life throughout their lifetime.  In entertainment, I think of Clint Eastwood and Oprah Winfrey.  In business, I think of Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett.  We all have our own examples of super successful people like these who we admire.  But how do they do it?

Over the years I’ve studied the lives of numerous successful people.  I’ve read their books, watched their interviews, researched them online, etc.  And I’ve learned that most of them were not born into success; they simply did, and continue to do, things that help them realize their full potential.  Here are twelve things they do differently that the rest of us can easily emulate.

1.  They create and pursue S.M.A.R.T. goals.

Successful people are objective.  They have realistic targets in mind.  They know what they are looking for and why they are fighting for it.  Successful people create and pursue S.M.A.R.T. goals.

S.M.A.R.T. goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.  Let’s briefly review each:

• Specific – A general goal would be, “Get in shape.” But a related specific goal would be, “Join a health club and workout 3 days a week for the next 52 weeks.”  A specific goal has a far greater chance of being accomplished because it has defined parameters and constraints.
• Measurable – There must be a logical system for measuring the progress of a goal.  To determine if your goal is measurable, ask yourself questions like:  How much time? How many total?  How will I know when the goal is accomplished? etc.  When you measure your progress, you stay on track, reach your target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs you on to continued efforts required to reach your goal.
• Attainable – To be attainable, a goal must represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work.  In other words, the goal must be realistic.  The big question here is:  How can the goal be accomplished?
• Relevant – Relevance stresses the importance of choosing goals that matter.  For example, an internet entrepreneur’s goal to “Make 75 tuna sandwiches by 2:00PM.” may be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, and Timely, but lacks Relevance to an entrepreneurs overarching objective of building a profitable online business.
• Timely – A goal must be grounded within a time frame, giving the goal a target date.  A commitment to a deadline helps you focus your efforts on the completion of the goal on or before the due date.  This part of the S.M.A.R.T. goal criteria is intended to prevent goals from being overtaken by daily distractions.

When you identify S.M.A.R.T. goals that are truly important to you, you become motivated to figure out ways to attain them.  You develop the necessary attitude, abilities, and skills.  You can achieve almost any goal you set if you plan your steps wisely and establish a time frame that allows you to carry out those steps.  Goals that once seemed far away and out of reach eventually move closer and become attainable, not because your goals shrink, but because you grow and expand to match them.

2.  They take decisive and immediate action.

Sadly, very few people ever live to become the success story they dream about.  And there’s one simple reason why:

They never take action!

The acquisition of knowledge doesn’t mean you’re growing.  Growing happens when what you know changes how you live.   So many people live in a complete daze.  Actually, they don’t ‘live.’  They simply ‘get by’ because they never take the necessary action to make things happen – to seek their dreams.

It doesn’t matter if you have a genius IQ and a PhD in Quantum Physics, you can’t change anything or make any sort of real-world progress without taking action.  There’s a huge difference between knowing how to do something and actually doing it.  Knowledge and intelligence are both useless without action.  It’s as simple as that.

Success hinges on the simple act of making a decision to live – to absorb yourself in the process of going after your dreams and goals.  So make that decision.  And take action.  For some practical guidance on taking action I highly recommend Getting Things Done.

3.  They focus on being productive, not being busy.

In his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris says, “Slow down and remember this:  Most things make no difference.  Being busy is often a form of mental laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”  This is Ferris’ way of saying “work smarter, not harder,” which happens to be one of the most prevalent modern day personal development clichés.  But like most clichés, there’s a great deal of truth to it, and few people actually adhere to it.

Just take a quick look around.  The busy outnumber the productive by a wide margin.

Busy people are rushing all over the place, and running late half of the time.  They’re heading to work, conferences, meetings, social engagements, etc.  They barely have enough free time for family get-togethers and they rarely get enough sleep.  Yet, business emails are shooting out of their smart phones like machine gun bullets, and their daily planner is jammed to the brim with obligations.

Their busy schedule gives them an elevated sense of importance.  But it’s all an illusion.  They’re like hamsters running on a wheel.

The solution:  Slow down.  Breathe.  Review your commitments and goals.  Put first things first.  Do one thing at a time.  Start now.  Take a short break in two hours.  Repeat.

And always remember, results are more important than the time it takes to achieve them.

4.  They make logical, informed decisions.

Sometimes we do things that are permanently foolish simply because we are temporarily upset or excited.

Although emotional ‘gut instincts’ are effective in certain fleeting situations, when it comes to generating long-term, sustained growth in any area of life, emotional decisions often lead a person astray.  Decisions driven by heavy emotion typically contain minimal amounts of conscious thought, and are primarily based on momentary feelings instead of mindful awareness.

The best advice here is simple:  Don’t let your emotions trump your intelligence.  Slow down and think things through before you make any life-changing decisions.

5.  They avoid the trap of trying to make things perfect.

Many of us are perfectionists in our own right.  I know I am at times.  We set high bars for ourselves and put our best foot forward.  We dedicate copious amounts of time and attention to our work to maintain our high personal standards.  Our passion for excellence drives us to run the extra mile, never stopping, never relenting.  And this dedication towards perfection undoubtedly helps us achieve results…  So long as we don’t get carried away.

But what happens when we do get carried away with perfectionism?

We become disgruntled and discouraged when we fail to meet the (impossibly high) standards we set for ourselves, making us reluctant to take on new challenges or even finish tasks we’ve already started.  Our insistence on dotting every ‘I’ and crossing every ‘T’ breeds inefficiency, causing major delays, stress overload and subpar results.

True perfectionists have a hard time starting things and an even harder time finishing them, always.  I have a friend who has wanted to start a graphic design business for several years.  But she hasn’t yet.  Why?  When you sift through her extensive list of excuses it comes down to one simple problem:  She is a perfectionist.  Which means she doesn’t, and never will, think she’s good enough at graphic design to own and operate her own graphic design business.

Remember, the real world doesn’t reward perfectionists.  It rewards people who get things done.  And the only way to get things done is to be imperfect 99% of the time.  Only by wading through years of practice and imperfection can we begin to achieve momentary glimpses of the perfection.  So make a decision.  Take action, learn from the outcome, and repeat this method over and over again in all walks of life.  Also, check out Too Perfect.  It’s an excellent read on conquering perfectionism.

6.  They work outside of their comfort zone.

The number one thing I persistently see holding smart people back is their own reluctance to accept an opportunity simply because they don’t think they’re ready.  In other words, they feel uncomfortable and believe they require additional knowledge, skill, experience, etc. before they can aptly partake in the opportunity.  Sadly, this is the kind of thinking that stifles personal growth and success.

The truth is nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises.  Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow emotionally and intellectually.  They force us to stretch ourselves and our comfort zones, which means we won’t feel totally comfortable at first.  And when we don’t feel comfortable, we don’t feel ready.

Significant moments of opportunity for personal growth and success will come and go throughout your lifetime.  If you are looking to make positive changes and new breakthroughs in your life, you will need to embrace these moments of opportunity even though you will never feel 100% ready for them.

7.  They keep things simple.

Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”  Nothing could be closer to the truth.  Here in the 21st century, where information moves at the speed of light and opportunities for innovation seem endless, we have an abundant array of choices when it comes to designing our lives and careers.  But sadly, an abundance of choice often leads to complication, confusion and inaction.

Several business and marketing studies have shown that the more product choices a consumer is faced with, the less products they typically buy.  After all, narrowing down the best product from a pool of three choices is certainly a lot easier than narrowing down the best product from a pool of three hundred choices.  If the purchasing decision is tough to make, most people will just give up.  Likewise, if you complicate your life by inundating yourself with too many choices, your subconscious mind will give up.

The solution is to simplify.  If you’re selling a product line, keep it simple.  And if you’re trying to make a decision about something in your life, don’t waste all your time evaluating every last detail of every possible option.  Choose something that you think will work and give it a shot.  If it doesn’t work out, learn what you can from the experience, choose something else and keep pressing forward.

8.  They focus on making small, continuous improvements.

Henry Ford once said, “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small pieces.” The same concept configured as a question:  How do you eat an elephant?  Answer: One bite at a time.  This philosophy holds true for achieving your biggest goals.  Making small, positive changes – eating a little healthier, exercising a little, creating some small productive habits, for example – is an amazing way to get excited about life and slowly reach the level of success you aspire to.

And if you start small, you don’t need a lot of motivation to get started either.  The simple act of getting started and doing something will give you the momentum you need, and soon you’ll find yourself in a positive spiral of changes – one building on the other.  When I started doing this in my life, I was so excited I had to start this blog to share it with the world.

Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they arise.  For instance, if you’re trying to lose weight, come up with a list of healthy snacks you can eat when you get the craving for snacks.  It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier.  And that’s the whole point.  As your strength grows, you can take on bigger challenges.

9.  They measure and track their progress.

Successful people are not only working in their job/business, they are also working on it.  They step back and assess their progress regularly.  They track themselves against their goals and clearly know what needs to be done to excel and accelerate.

You can’t control what you don’t properly measure.  If you track the wrong things you’ll be completely blind to potential opportunities as they appear over the horizon.  Imagine if, while running a small business, you made it a point to keep track of how many pencils and paperclips you used.  Would that make any sense?  No!  Because pencils and paperclips are not a measure of what’s important for a business.  Pencils and paperclips have no bearing on income, customer satisfaction, market growth, etc.

The proper approach is to figure out what your number one goal is and then track the things that directly relate to achieving that goal.  I recommend that you take some time right now to identify your number one goal, identify the most important things for you to keep track of, and then begin tracking them immediately.  On a weekly basis, plug the numbers into a spreadsheet and use the data to create weekly or monthly trend graphs so you can visualize your progress.  Then fine-tune your actions to get those trends to grow in your favor.

10.  They maintain a positive outlook as they learn from their mistakes.

Successful people concentrate on the positives – they look for the silver lining in every situation.  They know that it is their positivity that will take them to greatness.  If you want to be successful, you need to have a positive outlook toward life.  Life will test you again and again.  If you give in to internal negativity, you will never be able to achieve the marks you have targeted.

Remember, every mistake you make is progress.  Mistakes teach you important lessons.  Every time you make one, you’re one step closer to your goal.  The only mistake that can truly hurt you is choosing to do nothing simply because you’re too scared to make a mistake.

So don’t hesitate – don’t doubt yourself!  Don’t let your own negativity sabotage you.  Learn what you can and press forward.

11.  They spend time with the right people.

Successful people associate with people who are likeminded, focused, and supportive.  They socialize with people who create energy when they enter the room versus those who create energy when they leave.  They reach out to connected, influential individuals who are right for their dreams and goals.

You are the sum of the people you spend the most time with.  If you hang with the wrong people, they will negatively affect you.  But if you hang with the right people, you will become far more capable and successful than you ever could have been alone.  Find your tribe and work together to make a difference in all of your lives.  Tribes by Seth Godin is a great read on this topic.

12.  They maintain balance in their life.

If you ask most people to summarize what they want out of life they’ll shout out a list of things like: ‘fall in love,’ ‘make money,’ ‘spend time with family,’ ‘find happiness,’ ‘achieve goals,’ etc.  But sadly, a lot of people don’t balance their life properly to achieve these things.  Typically they’ll achieve one or two of them while completely neglecting the rest.  Let me give you two examples:

• I know an extremely savvy businesswoman who made almost a million dollars online last year. Based on the success of her business, every entrepreneur I know looks up to her.  But guess what?  A few days ago, out of the blue, she told me that she’s depressed.  Why?  “I’m burnt out and lonely.  I just haven’t taken enough time for myself lately, and I feel like something is missing in my life,” she said.  “Wow!” I thought.  “One of the most successful people I know doesn’t feel successful because she isn’t happy with how she has balanced her life.”

 

• I also know a surfer who surfs all day, every day on the beach in front of our condo complex in San Diego.  He’s one of the most lighthearted, optimistic guys I’ve ever met – usually smiling from ear to ear.  But he sleeps in a rusty van he co-owns with another surfer, and they both frequently panhandle tourists for money.  He has admitted to me that the stress of making enough money to eat often keeps him up at night.  So while I can’t deny that this man seems happy most of the time, I wouldn’t classify his life as a success story.

These are just two simple examples of imbalanced lifestyles that are holding people back from their full potential.  When you let your work life (or social life, family life, etc.) consume you, and all your energy is focused in that area, it’s extremely easy to lose your balance.  While drive and focus are important, if you’re going to get things done right, and be truly successful, you need to balance the various dimensions of your life.  Completely neglecting one dimension for another only leads to long-term frustration and stress.  For some practical guidance on balancing your life, I recommend Forget What You Think You Know written by Tracy L. Todaro.

Source: Marc & Angel Hacklife

WIH Resource Group’s team of expert witness litigation support professionals have a track record of success. Whether you’re facing a valuation dispute, damage assessment, contract claim, employee matter, safety incident, personal injury, landfill gas issue, or other pending legal action, our experts are ready to assist you.

For more information, visit our website by CLICKING HERE and contact us today to see how we can best serve you by phone at 480.241.9994 or by e-mail at admin@wihrg.com

Visit our new website!   www.wihresourcegroup.com

ABOUT WIH RESOURCE GROUP

Celebrating a decade in business, WIH Resource Group is a global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range of markets, including waste management, recycling, financials, transportation, M&A due diligence and support, alternative fuel fleet conversions, facilities, environmental, energy for private sector business and government clients.

WIH Resource Group is a leader in all of the key markets that it serves. WIH Resource Group provides a blend of global reach, local knowledge, innovation and technical excellence in delivering solutions that create, enhance and sustain the world’s built, natural and social environments.  WIH Resource Group serves clients in more than 175 key markets internationally.

More information on WIH Resource Group and its services can be found at www.wihrg.com.

Click on an image below to take you to WIH’s other sites!

Top 5 Reasons Why You Need an Expert Witness

There is no greater make or break moment for your business than when it’s involved in a lawsuit. Building your case using the appropriate expert witnesse can be the difference between winning and losing – between growing your company and scrambling to stay afloat.

While there are plenty of reasons why expert witnesses can make or break a legal case, the most convincing benefit has to be the expert witness testimony they provide. We have broken down the top five reasons why expert witnesses are truly invaluable to pretrial, case due diligence, discovery, the expert witness written report of findings, expert witness deposition and expert witness testimony at trial in ways that other methods simply cannot be merit the effectiveness of an expert witness.

Reason One – Expert Witnesses Have Historically Worked in Similar Cases.

It’s absolutely true – in courtroom jury trials, testimony from an expert witness almost always helps represent the facts in an accurate, clear way that the judge and jury will understand. Sometimes, such as with complicated waste management safety cases, getting the facts across and proving the point is especially difficult because of complex industry jargon and technical speak. Expert witness testimony is convincing and persuasive because it gets through to the judge and jury.

Reason Two – An Expert Witness Can And Does Achieve Settlements.

If the ultimate goal of the legal proceedings is to achieve a fair and reasonable settlement rather than drag the case through years of litigation and complicated court proceedings, then it is probably worth consulting with an expert witness in this scenario too. Many times, just the knowledge that a true expert professional will be testifying in court is enough to convince the other party to settle the case out of court.

Reason Three – Expert Witnesses Help Either Side Of The Case.

The common perception is that only defense legal teams choose to work with expert witness testimony by hiring expert witnesses. Unfortunately, this is nothing but a misconception. Both defense and prosecuting legal teams should be aware of the benefits an expert witness is able to provide. Anytime an indsutry expert witness professional can make the facts speak more clearly, there’s a strong argument for using an expert witness to support your case throughout the entire case and legal proceedings.

Reason Four – An Expert Witness Can Offer More Than A Simple Testimony.

Receiving expert witness testimony is only one part of hiring an expert witness. Or in other words, the testimony itself is extremely valuable, but an experienced, professional expert witness also understands how to explain complex issues in a clear and scholarly founded manner.

If the ultimate goal of the legal proceedings is to achieve a fair and reasonable settlement rather than drag the case through years of litigation and complicated court proceedings, then it is probably worth consulting with an expert witness in this scenario too. Many times, just the knowledge that a true expert professional will be testifying in court is enough to convince the other party to settle the case out of court.

Reason Five – Qualified Experts, like WIH Resource Group’s Experts Offer Insight.

Even if expert witness testimony in and of itself will not be necessary, qualified expert witnesses can indeed provide the insight and vision needed to ensure a positive outcome through litigation, often assisting in reaching a settlement and avoiding going to court. Consulting with the witness to understand their point of view, as well as to benefit from their industry experiences with similar cases can be invaluable.

WIH Resource Group’s team of expert witness litigation support professionals have a track record of success. Whether you’re facing a valuation dispute, damage assessment, contract claim, employee matter, safety incident, personal injury, landfill gas issue, or other pending legal action, our experts are ready to assist you.

For more information, visit our website by CLICKING HERE and contact us today to see how we can best serve you by phone at 480.241.9994 or by e-mail at admin@wihrg.com

Visit our new website!   www.wihresourcegroup.com

ABOUT WIH RESOURCE GROUP

Celebrating a decade in business, WIH Resource Group is a global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range of markets, including waste management, recycling, financials, transportation, M&A due diligence and support, alternative fuel fleet conversions, facilities, environmental, energy for private sector business and government clients.

WIH Resource Group is a leader in all of the key markets that it serves. WIH Resource Group provides a blend of global reach, local knowledge, innovation and technical excellence in delivering solutions that create, enhance and sustain the world’s built, natural and social environments.  WIH Resource Group serves clients in more than 175 key markets internationally.

More information on WIH Resource Group and its services can be found at www.wihrg.com.

Click on an image below to take you to WIH’s other sites!

The History of the Automated Side Loader – How One Small City Changed The Industry Forever

The modern refuse truck operator has it pretty easy today compared to his peers of yesteryear. Gone are the days of the “Vic Tanney” bodies and the driver lugging around 55 gallon drums on their backs. For haulers and drivers who collected trash for the majority of their lives, they were lucky if they could continue to stand up straight by the time they were 50 and their bodies weren’t completely broken. In 1968, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the injury rate among refuse collectors was higher than the rate for coal miners, police officer, firefighter or loggers. A report put out between 1969 to 1971 showed that nationally there were 98.8 disabling accidents per million man hours worked in refuse collection. Those numbers are staggering when compared with the next closest industry, police departments, which had 48.15 accidents per million man hours. A fact not surprising considering the nature of the job. Workers were required to jump on and off the truck continually, handle hundreds of containers, many of which were overweight and easy to drop.

An average worker could lift up to 6 tons a day and walk up to 11 miles in all type of weather, which led to multiple injuries and massive insurance claims to the hauler (if they offered insurance) and time away from work. This is why, even today, refuse collection is listed in the Top 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Why do you think so many of the articles in this publication and those like it are filled with safety related items? It’s a major concern and issue even with the advanced technology modern refuse trucks are built upon.

Now there has always been a drive in the industry from the truck manufacturers to deliver the highest compaction body to maximize on-route time over the competition yet they all required one key ingredient before the early 1980s: manual loading. Commercial collection already saw vast improvements in safety, productivity and cleanliness with the introduction of the Front End Loaders (the industry’s first automated truck) in the 1950s. Unfortunately, residential drivers wouldn’t start seeing some relief for another few decades. Let’s explore this history more in-depth.

The City that Birthed a Revolution

Scottsdale, Arizona, a town northeast of Phoenix, incorporated in 1954 with a population of 2,032. After having a major annexation in 1961 that more than doubled its population, the city took over refuse collection from private contractors in March 1964. From 1960 to 1970, the city population increased from 10,026 to 67,823. The new Refuse Division was put under the direction of Marc Stragier, the director of Public Works. Looking at all the available systems at the time, Scottsdale chose to use the recently developed “Refuse Train” system used in many parts of the country. Even though the Train method was an improvement over the use of rear loaders, it still carried all the negative attributes of manual collection. Scottsdale also experienced a high personnel turnover rate due to the 110+ degree working conditions during summer months.

In 1965, the City Manager, Assistant City manager and three Department Heads formed a brainstorming club apart from the city to develop and promote new ideas. They called themselves Government Innovators and among some of the ideas to emerge was the concept of mechanized refuse collection. After searching for a body manufacturer to partner and develop the idea with, Marc found George Morrison, owner of Western Body and Hoist in Los Angeles. After some convincing and motivation, the creative juices in George’s head started to flow and a few months later, George and his lead engineer Otto Ganter met with Marc to show him a concept idea called the “Barrel Snatcher” based off their Wesco-Jet Front Loader platform.

Taking the idea and drawing to Bill Donaldson, Scottsdale City Manager for final approval, the City applied for a Federal grant to develop a mechanized residential refuse collection system. After the initial application was sent back, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare sent a representative down to help edit and draft a second application. The new application proposed a two-phase demonstration: Phase 1—to determine if the concept was practical using city provided containers and if successful; Phase 2—build the sophisticated Barrel Snatcher truck to prove mechanized collection was economical and cost effective. The second draft was approved and awarded in February 1969 with the grant period lasting from March 1969 to June 1972.

Phase 1: Godzilla

Now faced with building a proof of concept truck, it was decided to use a 1964 International Lodal Front Loader not in active service as the test bed. Marc designed the mechanical grabber assembly to attach to the front of the arms and after $2,000 in repairs were made to the truck to make it useable, construction and modifications began. The mechanic in charge of creating the grabber assembly, Chuck Kalinowski, remembers constructing the mechanism, “I didn’t know that Marc was in the shop one day and I was working on the slide, trying to figure out what he wanted there for the arm to grab the container. So I tried two or three different things, you know, just things we had around the place here. I said ‘Aw, for crying out loud, they want you to build something but they won’t give you the material, they want you to build a darned monster… a Godzilla!’ Marc was standing right behind me and from that time on, that’s what it was called.”

After some trial and error, Godzilla was finally ready to go on route in August 1969. The first container it picked up slipped through the grabber and fell into the hopper. Next, the brakes locked up and truck couldn’t be moved. After modifications and repairs, the truck operated for the next six months proving the concept of mechanized collection was sound.

An often overlooked aspect of creating and later adopting a mechanized collection system is the container cost associated with it. For the city, to order a “set” of containers and collection trucks ran about $40,000 (pre-additional modification) for equipment and about $120,000 the containers in 1970 dollars. Scottsdale had many alley routes and after a survey, they decided to use container sizes of 80, 160 and 300 gallons for collection service. The size of the container the customer received was determined by the number of days picked up, either once or twice, and the number of houses per container: one, two or four. It broke down to each household receiving at least 160 gallons of refuse capacity per week. County Plastics was initially awarded the contract for 350 containers in each of the three sizes. After the Phase 1 trials were complete, it was determined that the 80 and 300 gallon containers were the most effective. 300 gallons were used on alley streets while the 80-gallon shined the best for street-side collection. Godzilla and later Son of Godzilla was the most successful in the alleys with the 300 gallon, but too slow and bulky for the 80 gallon service.

Phase 2: Son of Godzilla

Western Body and Hoist’s Barrel Snatcher was a modified version of their Wesco-Jet Front Loader. The Wesco Jet was a 35yd full pack body that evenly distributed the weight over two axles with four super single tires and a specialized cab designed and engineered jointly by Reo Motors and Western. Complete with an Allison automatic transmission and a narrow, air conditioned telephone booth cab, the Barrel Snatcher weighed in empty at 22,500 lbs. and had a GVWR of 36,500 on the two axles. With three years of engineering going into its design, the Barrel Snatcher featured an 8-foot boom, which could extend out to 12 feet to grab the 300 gallon containers. Cycle time from pick up to set down was only 20 seconds.

Modifications and improvements were required after the first unit went online in October 1970. A joystick was added later to help improve operator control as the boom had a tendency to knock down fences in the alleys due to the uncontrollability of the rotary motor that swung it. The frame at the base of the boom was beefed up due to frequent cracking due to weight, in addition to a heavier duty rotary motor that swung the heavy boom. The extension cylinder was moved to the outside of the boom to reduce the six hour repair time needed to get at it when it was mounted inside. The city sent these lists of improvements to Western to be implemented on the second truck they ordered.

Due to the national popularity of the Phase 1 Godzilla truck, the Barrel Snatcher was affectionately called the “Son of Godzilla”, which only served to fuel local and national interest in what Scottsdale was trying to do. The city invested a lot of time and effort to sell the new concept to the public and they constantly fielded requests from foreign dignitaries, state and city governments to come and personally view the trucks in action and on route.

During the construction of the second Barrel Snatcher, George Morrison’s partner and co-owner was killed in an accident. In order to provide and take care of his partner’s widow, George decided to sell the company to Maxon Industries in December 1970. After study, Maxon expressed no desire to continue development, sales or orders for Barrel Snatcher concept with the City, although they did agree to honor the original contract for two additional trucks. The City received many postponements and delay’s from Maxon and finally threatened to sue for breach of contract. None of the improvements recommended by the city were implemented in the second truck when it was delivered in May 1971. The mechanics were well versed in the necessary improvements and changes needed to be made and when the second truck started going on route, the original Godzilla that was built to last six months of the concept phase was finally retired after two years on route.

The Concept Fully Realized

After Phase 2 was complete and the third and final Barrel Snatcher was delivered from Maxon in 1973 (two years after it had been ordered), the city continued to improve upon the arm design and even modified three city owned Wesco-Jet Front Loaders to Barrel Snatcher configuration in-house to expand their growing mechanized routes. However, they realized a more permanent solution was needed when it came time to start replacing their aging fleet. Marc Straiger continued to work on designs for an improved automated arm that could be fit to different side load bodies and was not specific to the now discontinued Maxon Wesco-Jet. He designed a prototype to be tested on one of the city’s experimental truck beds and it later came to be known as the “Rapid Rail” arm. It consisted of a grabber assembly with rollers on the rear which allowed it to slide up and down the rail that curved at the top to invert and empty the container.

The city eventually ended up abandoning the project, yet a few companies had taken the idea for Marc’s “Rapid Rail” and developed it into an effective system by 1978. Government Innovators (now a fully realized company), Arizona Special Projects and Ebeling Manufacturing Corp (EMCO) all offered a version of this arm to the public. EMCO was the first company to offer market ready automated packages with their arm design based on Straiger’s “Rapid Rail” for commercial side load dumpsters. However, their arm could be easily modified with “Rapid Rail” grippers for cart collection. Maxon, who had no interest in pursuing further Barrel Snatcher product development with the city after their purchase of Western, finally saw the future in automation and offered their integrated Eagle cab and body truck with an arm copy of the Rapid Rail by 1980.

When it came time for the city to start replacing their worn out fleet of Barrel Snatchers in 1978, they turned to International Harvester chassis with Norcal Waste Equipment 24yd bodies fitted with a modified EMCO lift arm. Each truck cost the city $58,000, which was a bargain compared to the last Barrel Snatcher that cost a low estimate of $63,230. What many people don’t know is that Norcal in Oakland, CA was started after the sale of Western by Otto Ganter, the lead engineer and designer of the Barrel Snatcher.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

In 1980, the city did a comparison to see if the mechanized trucks lived up to their original idea and potential. The numbers were quite staggering and especially in an unforgiving climate like Southern Arizona, well worth the effort and money spent. According to the records and findings from the city: in 1968, 34 men were employed to collect 17,800 homes twice a week. By 1980, 13 residential routes were needed to collect 24,000 homes twice weekly with 13 drivers. The city estimated that if the train method was still being used in 1980, 18 pickup trucks, 72 trailers, seven front loaders and more than 60 men would be required. The injury rate was also reduced from 36 preventable injuries a year average using the train system to only 1 in 1980.

Production rates also increased per man. In 1968, the average was 95 tons per man compared to 212 tons by 1980. They also showed a drastic reduction in employee turnover from 91 percent in 1986 to one employee who left and transferred to another department within the city. While some of the costs of running more advanced trucks were passed on to the residents in terms of monthly collection cost, the state of their streets, alleys and roadways was greatly improved over manual collection, which often left trash and debris in its wake. Their aggressive advertisement and citizen buyoff of the program went a long way to mitigate the town’s outcry over the increase in cost.

Slow to Catch On

Throughout the 1980s, body manufacturers continued to develop and improve the automated arm. For the average hauler, however, it was a gigantic investment in new fleets and carts—one that they were hesitant to make. Municipalities were some of the early adopters to automation due to the fact that they could justify the initial investment by projecting the savings over long term. Automated technology didn’t really take hold nationwide until the 1990s when the technology and arms were more proven and reliable. Even today, the arm design on an ASL is the most competitive feature builders continue to refine and market. Some builders have multiple arm or gripper designs available for customers to choose from, each with their own unique use and application. Also, many haulers tend to stick to one design because it’s a system they adopted early on and know and trust. I can say with absolute confidence that there is no “best arm and gripper” on the market. Each has their strengths in different conditions (alley, confined space, parked cars) and some perform better than others. The Automated Side Loader is still the new kid on the block compared to the rest of the refuse truck styles and there hasn’t been an “industry” standard design established yet. But next time you see one on the road or hop in one to run your route, think about the blood, sweat and cursing a special group of men invested to make your lives a little bit easier and a whole lot safer.

Zachary Geroux is a videographer, photographer, historian and owner of Refuse Truck Photography, which focuses on media and marketing for the Waste Industry. He lives in Western Washington with his wife and newborn son who will soon fall in love with garbage trucks. Currently, he works full time for the Air Force and is focused on growing his business. He has been driving garbage trucks off and on for the past 10 years and considers it the best job he’s ever had. He can be reached at (541) 301-1507, via e-mail at Zachary@refusetruckphotography.com or visit www.refusetruckphotography.com.

*Special thanks to the City of Scottsdale for sending me years and years ago their self-published booklet “Revolutionizing an Industry.” Without this amazing documentation of strife and effort to create and field this system, this article and the knowledge contained within might have been lost forever to the coming generations.

Reposted by WIH Resource Group
For more information, Visit our website by CLICKING HERE and contact us today to see how we can best serve you by phone at 480.241.9994 or by e-mail at admin@wihrg.com

Visit our new website!   www.wihresourcegroup.com

ABOUT WIH RESOURCE GROUP

Celebrating a decade in business, WIH Resource Group is a global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range of markets, including waste management, recycling, financials, transportation, M&A due diligence and support, alternative fuel fleet conversions, facilities, environmental, energy for private sector business and government clients.

WIH Resource Group is a leader in all of the key markets that it serves. WIH Resource Group provides a blend of global reach, local knowledge, innovation and technical excellence in delivering solutions that create, enhance and sustain the world’s built, natural and social environments.  WIH Resource Group serves clients in more than 175 key markets internationally.

More information on WIH Resource Group and its services can be found at www.wihrg.com.

Click on an image below to take you to WIH’s other sites!

Landfill Mining: Current Trends

Landfill mining is a term used to describe a process whereby landfilled solid waste is excavated and processed for beneficial purposes.

The beneficial purposes can include recovery of recyclable materials, recovery of soils for use as daily or intermediate cover in active landfills, or recovery of land area for redevelopment. As urban sprawl has continued in many metropolitan areas, landfills—which previously were located in areas relatively distant from the population centers—are less so, and the value of those properties for redevelopment have increased.

CLICK HERE NOW to sign up to receive great articles like this and other industry news and updates!

In the US, however, the term “landfill mining” has increasingly become a misnomer, as the primary driver has been to reclaim the old footprint and develop it to meet current Subtitle C regulations (i.e., typically at a minimum installing a bottom-lining system with leachate controls) and gain valuable additional airspace for active waste filling. The reclamation of recyclable materials—like plastics, metals, and glass, and plastics and paper for energy recovery—are secondary and do not typically justify the total cost to reclaim them with natural gas energy, both abundant and relatively “cheap.”

As pointed out in the recent International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) publication on landfill mining, the concept of mining landfills is not new. Some 60 examples have been cited in solid waste literature since the first reported project in Israel in the 1950s. Landfill mining is a practice not unique to any particular country or even region. The practice has both advantages and disadvantages, which are summarized in Table 1.

Planning Aspects
An overview of the entire landfill mining process is helpful to be able to properly plan all of the parts of the process and have contingency plans ready if something does not go according to plan. Table 2 presents a summary overview of the overall aspects to consider on a mining project.

Add MSW Management Weekly to  your Newsletter Preferences and keep up with the latest articles on municipal solid waste management: landfill disposal, recycling, waste collection, waste collection containers and vehicles, waste to energy, and waste vehicle safety.

What About Recyclables?
Some landfill owners have opted to separate and sell recyclables obtained from a reclamation project; however, the value of these materials is elusive. Cal Recovery, Hercules, CA, conducted a study for EPA of the Collier County, FL, landfill mining demonstration process in 1993, and concluded that plastic and metal were the only viable recyclables, but were not of acceptable quality for the resale market. They indicated that the actual “cost” of mining and separating the recyclables was about $115 per ton. Extrapolating that cost to today’s dollars would cost approximately $250 per ton. This cost is high, relative to the price being paid for recyclables as discussed in the section on benefit-cost.

Construction Timeframe
Basic landfill mining equipment may include the following:

• Waste excavation: hydraulic excavators (backhoes)
• Waste screening (large objects): grizzly screen
• Waste screening (smaller objects): trommel screen
• Screen feed: front-end loader
• Waste hauling: dump trucks

The production of a landfill mining operation is mainly dependent on the size and number of pieces of equipment deployed, the types of soils used during landfill operations (e.g., sandy versus clayey materials), the types of waste disposed, weather conditions, liquid levels in the landfill, and gas emissions. More equipment means more production, but more equipment also means additional capital costs.

Certain types of waste are more difficult to excavate and process than others, which can slow productivity. High liquid levels and highly saturated wastes require additional steps to excavate and process, which, again, slows production. Inclement weather is a less controllable factor; however, the timing of major excavation efforts can be scheduled to take advantage of seasons with less inclement weather. Lastly, health and safety issues associated with gas emissions such as combustible gases, odorous gases, and such must be considered and can negatively impact surrounding properties if not controlled properly, ultimately impacting the excavation and processing activities.

Equipment involved in the waste excavation activities typically limits the actual capacity of an operation. This equipment is involved in excavating compacted waste, loading trucks, and moving as the excavation progresses. The other machines in a landfill mining operation, such as shredders, screens, magnets, and conveyors are generally static (i.e., they are not moved for periods of time), and are processing materials that have had some loosening and separation, and are for one function only, so their capacity usually does not limit the operation.

If you are considering implementing a landfill mining project, you should be realistic about the time it will take to complete the project. This timeline needs to coordinated with the overall landfilling activities of a site, assuming it’s an active landfill, and remaining site life calculations. A mining project and the necessity to dispose of much of the excavated materials back into the new landfill can temporarily increase the landfill tonnage by up to 80% over your normal throughput, if everything except the cover soils are put back in the landfill.

Take for example, an old landfill 40 feet high with a base dimension of 800 feet long by 500 feet wide, about a 9-acre footprint. That landfill will contain approximately 383,000 cubic yards of material. Working with three large bucket excavators (total bucket capacity 36 cubic feet), it would take at least a year, or more, to complete excavating, working nine hours a day, 6 days a week, without bad weather delay.

The most efficient approach is to stockpile recovered soils near or with other onsite cover stockpiles in order to handle the materials only once. However, this approach may not always be feasible. If that is the case, all of the mined soil may have to be temporarily stockpiled separately. Soils can make up to 40% of the materials mined from old landfills. In our previous example, that would amount to approximately 153,000 cubic yards of soil, which would be equivalent to a 4-acre stockpile area 40 feet high.

Benefit–Cost Assessment

A benefit–cost assessment should be conducted to justify pursuing a landfill mining project. One way to approach a benefit–cost assessment is to compare the estimated cost of mining the landfill cell against the value of the “new” airspace that created by mining and used for future landfilling (Table 3), or the value of the reclaimed property. We typically would not include the value of any separated recyclables, because the value of these recovered materials generally is inconsequential.

Table 2 summarizes a simple cost analysis for an example landfill mining project at an active landfill based on the following assumptions:

• Landfill cell volume = 383,000 yd³.
• Volume of reclaimed soil = 20% of volume, and it will be reused as cover soil in the active landfill.
• Remaining materials excavated = 42%, and is disposed in adjacent active landfill.

If we further assume that the landfill is reclaimed at an average cost of $4 per cubic yard, then the reclamation cost (383,000 yd³ x $4 per cubic yard) is equal to $1,532,000. Clearly, in this example, the reclamation benefit far outweighs the cost. If cover soil has to be purchased from an outside source, there could be another savings benefit by reusing the recovered soil. At higher tipping fees, the benefit gets even better.

Looking again at the potential value of recyclables, in this case plastics, the market price paid for plastics is down. If the plastics were of a quality to be acceptable on the market, at a price of 12 cents per pound, the value of the recyclable plastic is $240 per ton. Contrasting that to $250 per ton for mining and separation extrapolated from the Collier County study, plastic reclamation would not provide any significant monetary benefit.

Case Studies
Perdido Landfill
A pilot study was performed in 2008 that involved the excavation of 2.5 acres of an unlined cell at the Perdido Landfill in Escambia County. The main goal of the project was to acquire air space for future disposal.

Excavated waste was processed the following ways:

• separating the waste with a shaker screen following shredding,
• utilizing a shaker screen without shredding, and
• using a trommel screen for screening.

After field testing was conducted, it was found that the trommel screen proved to be the most effective at separating the waste from the cover soil, with waste shredding being the most time consuming of the three.

Soil constituted approximately 70% of the unlined cell. This recovered soil was stock piled at the site to be used at a later date for cover material. The excavated refuse was returned to the landfill for disposal. In regard to cost benefit analysis, the project proved to be worth the investment. The value of the acquired airspace outweighed the mining costs themselves. The total cost of mining was $8.60 per yard with a total of 54,000 cubic yards being excavated, 38,000 cubic yards of which was reusable cover soil.

Naples Landfill
The Collier County Solid Waste Management Department was involved in managing and performing a landfill mining project at the Naples Landfill in 1986. This was one of the first landfill recovery projects to occur in the US. No federal or state regulations regarding landfill mining were in place when the project began. At the time, the site was an unlined 33-acre MSW facility.

The three main goals of the project were to: (1) determine if an alternative method to traditional landfill closure was available and more economically feasible, (2) develop a low-cost system to separate the waste, and (3) provide performance data for this system to assist with optimizing the design of said waste processing system. However, the main underlying premise of the project was to reuse the soil portion within the waste mass since cover soil was relatively expensive and limited in the area. At the completion of the project, the site had successfully mined 5 acres of waste and was able to utilize the recovered material for cover, as it showed high levels of decomposition.

In total, 292 tons of waste were processed, with 171 of those tons reusable as cover soil. The waste was excavated at a cost of approximately $115 per ton. In regard to funding, the project received the “Innovations” award from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; therefore, much of the project cost was covered by the award funds. The total cost to the County for this project was only $40,000. Without the award funding, a similar project is estimated to have a total cost of $1.2 million.

Frey Farm Landfill
In 1990, a municipal solid waste combustor (MWC) was constructed by the Lancaster County Solid Waste Authority in Lancaster, PA. The WTE facility had available capacity when built, which was filled through landfill mining and then spot waste until Lancaster County grew into the plant’s full capacity. Since the waste in the lined landfill was less than five years old, a landfill mining project was a viable option for them. The facility was to utilize a mixture of new waste and reclaimed waste from the landfill as its augmented MWC input stream.

The waste was excavated from the landfill and processed using a 1-inch trommel screen. Approximately 56% of the excavated material from the landfill was acceptable for intake at the MWC, with 41% being composed of soil. Only 3% of the total excavated material was neither combustible nor able to be used as cover soil at the landfill, and had to be returned back into the landfill for disposal.

In order for the input wastestream of the MWC to achieve the necessary energy value, it had to be composed of 75% new waste and 25% reclaimed mined waste. While the project itself was cash flow neutral (revenue gains versus expenditures), it resulted in added value of reusing dirt for cover and reusing the cubic yard landfill space a second time. Once those assets were factored in, the overall gain was positive $13.30 for every ton of material excavation.

Lessons Learned
Some of the lessons learned over the last few decades from landfill mining in the United States include:

• Personnel and equipment typically assigned to normal landfill operations generally have the skills and capabilities to perform landfill mining activities, assuming they are available, but if not, these activities can be contracted out to experienced contractors.
• If there is soil and groundwater contamination under the landfill, sufficient time should be allocated in the schedule to remediate the area, preferably before re-lining and filling of waste.
• The quality of recyclables in old landfills (say something more than 10 years old) is questionable for sale in the marketplace. Unless there are extenuating circumstances (i.e., like those of the Frey Farm mining project), the cost of separating recyclables will likely be higher than the potential revenue from the marketplace.
• One needs to be realistic and conservative about the timeframe needed to mine an old landfill. Contingency delays for bad or seasonal weather, equipment breakage, or uncovering hazardous materials should be included in the schedule.
• There are many good case histories of landfill mining in the US that can be reviewed to become familiar with many of the variables that were encountered, costs, equipment, and how well the particular project went.

References
Cobb, Curtis E. and Konrad Ruckstuhl.

SPM Group, Inc. Mining and Reclaiming Existing Sanitary Landfills. Aurora, CO.

Fisher, Harvey and David Findlay 1995. “Exploring the Economics of Mining Landfills.” Waste 360, July 1995.

Innovative Waste Consulting Services LLC. Landfill Reclamation Demonstration Project, June 2009.

International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) 2013. Landfill Mining, prepared by the Landfill Working Group.

USEPA. Solid Waste and Emergency Response. EPA530-F-97-001, July 1997.

Fair Use

You can share the images on this page freely. But please give credit to the authors by linking back to this page, so your readers can learn more about this project and the related research.

Source: MSW Management Magazine

Information provided to you by WIH Resource Group, Inc

Contact WIH Resource Group
For more information, Visit our website by CLICKING HERE and contact us today to see how we can best serve you by phone at 480.241.9994 or by e-mail at admin@wihrg.com

Visit our new website!   www.wihresourcegroup.com

ABOUT WIH RESOURCE GROUP

Celebrating a decade in business, WIH Resource Group is a global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range of markets, including waste management, recycling, financials, transportation, M&A due diligence and support, alternative fuel fleet conversions, facilities, environmental, energy for private sector business and government clients.

WIH Resource Group is a leader in all of the key markets that it serves. WIH Resource Group provides a blend of global reach, local knowledge, innovation and technical excellence in delivering solutions that create, enhance and sustain the world’s built, natural and social environments.  WIH Resource Group serves clients in more than 175 key markets internationally.

More information on WIH Resource Group and its services can be found at www.wihrg.com.

Click on an image below to take you to WIH’s other sites!

Land of Waste – American Landfills & Waste Generation

The average American tosses 4.4 pounds of trash every single day. It may not seem all that astonishing on the surface, but with 323.7 million people living in the United States, that is roughly 728,000 tons of daily garbage – enough to fill 63,000 garbage trucks.

That is 22 billion plastic bottles every year. Enough office paper to construct a 12-foot-high wall from Los Angeles to Manhattan. It is 300 laps around the equator in paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons. It is 500 disposable cups per average American worker – cups that will still be sitting in the landfill five centuries from now.

Approximately half of the 254 million tons of yearly waste will meet its fate in one of the more than 2,000 active landfills across the country – and you probably live, work or socialize closer to one than you may think.

How Close Is Too Close? 

Click HERE to find out!

The easiest way to know you’re living near a landfill is by smelling it, right? Wrong.

The easiest way to know you’re living near a landfill is by smelling it, right? Wrong.

The United States is home to thousands of inactive landfills – and some have found new life and purpose as public parks.

But most are out of sight, out of mind. The West Coast is practically overflowing with landfills: There are a dozen in the Los Angeles area alone, though most are now closed. New Yorkers hailing from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens have no problem beating up on Staten Island, a borough practically built on top of what used to be the world’s largest garbage dump.

Even the Sunshine State isn’t immune to taking some of the load. Landfills linger in the heart of Miami and West Palm Beach, though they pale in comparison to the dump deluge in Tennessee and the Carolinas.

A Tale of Thousands of Dumps

Landfills have a long and relatively unsorted history. Before the first municipal dumps appeared on the map in the 20th century, humans either burned their garbage or buried it on the outskirts of town to avoid disease. The circa 1937 Fresno Municipal Sanitary Landfill is considered the first modern, sanitary landfill of its kind, and future landfills followed suit.

At first, they weren’t much more than man-made craters in the earth – a dramatic step up from the first municipal dump established in ancient Athens but still pretty crude. They were environmental disasters, leaching contaminated liquid into the soil and groundwater, and releasing overwhelming amounts of methane into the air.

The 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act changed all of that. The law requires landfills to be lined with plastic, clay or both, effectively killing the old idea of a “dump,” or those old-school craters.

The Landfill Evolution

Over the last hundred years, the number of dumps and landfills has dramatically increased across the country – as seen in the time lapse above – to accommodate the growing population’s garbage disposal needs.

That’s a Ton of Trash

Las Vegas may be the city of sin, but its home state Nevada is the land of garbage, with a whopping 38.4 tons of waste per person in its landfills.

Idaho, North Dakota, and Connecticut are the only three states in the country with less than 10 tons of landfill waste per person – putting Pennsylvania, Colorado, and California to shame, with their average of 35 tons of landfill garbage per person.

That’s not to say that these state residents are necessarily producing all of this landfill waste themselves. The trash trade is a $4 billion industry, and many state landfills are only too happy to take garbage from other states.

Transport fees are cheapest in the South and Midwest – as low as $19 per ton in states like Alabama. Ohio, for example, is famous for accepting as much as 3.4 million tons of out-of-state waste per year, to the tune of $35 per ton. The most offensive giver of trash was New York, accounting for nearly 32 percent of Ohio’s out-of-state total, with New Jersey not far behind.

Landfill Gases, a Top Concern

Landfill gas is a dangerous, virtually invisible concoction generated in the most natural way possible: the bacterial decomposition of organic material. The result is half methane and half carbon dioxide and water vapor, with trace amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and nonmethane organic compounds, or NMOCs, which can cause smog if uncontrolled.

In the past, environmentalists have been more concerned by carbon dioxide emissions, but now, they are worrying about methane. Even though methane doesn’t linger as long as carbon dioxide, it is far more effective at absorbing the sun’s heat and contributing to global warming. For the first 20 years after it meets the atmosphere, methane is 84 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The population-heavy states of California and Texas are currently facing the greatest problem with landfill-produced methane, but the repercussions of this problem could eventually affect the entire world.

Visualize Your Garbage

It can be hard to wrap our minds around the impact of our waste in terms of landfill gas and metrics that stretch into the billions. So let’s scale it down.

Your 4.4 pounds of daily trash is approximately the weight of a modest-sized pumpkin that you would carve on Halloween. Add up all those “pumpkins” over the seasons and they come in at 1,606 pounds – or the size of your average cow. But if you pack that trash into cubed feet, you’re looking at the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The waste tally for a family of four is even grimmer. That yearly haul weighs as much as an Asian elephant and stacks up to the height of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Think that’s bad? The annual weight of trash for the entire country equals 254 million tons, or 1.2 million blue whales, and would reach the moon and back 25 times, a journey of 11,534,090 miles.

Not all hope is lost, though. Keep reading to learn about how you can cut back on your waste.

Going Green

Now, more than ever, Americans are hopping on the recycling bandwagon. Last year marked the all-time high for recycling: 34.3 percent of our garbage, or 87.2 million tons, could have ended up in a landfill but didn’t. Bravo, America!

But though recycling has increased in recent years, so has trash generation. More than 60 million plastic bottles still find their way to landfills and incinerators on a daily basis. Six times as many water bottles were thrown away in 2004 than in 1997.

Clearly, there is still work to be done. And you can make a difference.

Conclusion

Whether we are a running out of landfill space in America is a hotly debated topic, but that doesn’t mean we should produce garbage like there is no tomorrow. Here are some tips to help reduce your personal waste:

• Bring reusable bags when you go shopping, and choose reusable containers for packing meals.
• Buy in bulk whenever possible. Beware of double packing – or individually wrapped items that are repackaged and sold as bulk.
• Compost your food scraps and yard waste whenever possible.
• Cut back on junk mail – you receive more than 30 pounds of it per year.

Methodology

We analyzed the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program data on landfills to determine the per capita waste in tons for each state. We also looked at the total sum of landfill gasses by state. For the graphic titled “Visualizing the Impact of Our Waste,” we used the EPA’s average estimate of 4.4 pounds of trash produced per person per day to calculate the yearly waste average per person, per family of four, and for the entire United States.

To calculate the height of the waste tallies, we assumed that loose residential waste weighs 225 pounds per cubic yard, and converted this to square footage. To compare these heights and weights with real world animals and objects, we used http://www.bluebulbprojects.com/measureofthings/.

Sources

• https://www3.epa.gov/lmop/projects-candidates/
• https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/ghgemissions/US-GHG-Inventory-2014-Chapter-8-Waste.pdf
• https://www.epa.gov/smm/advancing-sustainable-materials-management-facts-and-figures
• http://recyclemaniacs.org/sites/default/files/documents/Volume-weight-conversions.pdf
• http://www.bluebulbprojects.com/measureofthings/
• http://www.rethinkrecycling.com/residents/reduce/top-10-ways-reduce-waste
• https://www.epa.gov/smm/advancing-sustainable-materials-management-facts-and-figures#Materials
• http://www.census.gov/popclock/
• https://center.sustainability.duke.edu/resources/green-facts-consumers/how-much-do-we-waste-daily
• http://www.statista.com/statistics/186346/number-of-landfills-in-us-municipal-solid-waste/
• https://www.thrillist.com/culture/15-landfills-that-are-now-stunning-parks-wastelands-converted-into-parks
• http://gizmodo.com/5-parts-of-nyc-built-on-garbage-and-waste-1682267605
• http://www.deq.state.ok.us/lpdnew/wastehistory/wastehistory.htm
• http://deq.louisiana.gov/portal/Portals/0/assistance/educate/DYK-Landfills.pdf
• http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2011/02/go_west_garbage_can.html
• https://thetrashblog.com/2013/07/29/trash-trade-in-the-us/
• http://www.ohio.com/news/out-of-state-garbage-finds-home-in-ohio-1.171112
• https://www3.epa.gov/lmop/faq/landfill-gas.html
• https://www.edf.org/methane-other-important-greenhouse-gas
• http://www.container-recycling.org/index.php/issues/…/275-down-the-drain
• http://waste360.com/operations/regional-landfill-capacity-problems-do-not-equate-national-shortage
• https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicited-mail-phone-calls-and-email

Fair Use

You can share the images on this page freely. But please give credit to the authors by linking back to this page, so your readers can learn more about this project and the related research.

Source: SaveonEnergy.com

Information provided to you by WIH Resource Group, Inc

Contact WIH Resource Group
For more information, Visit our website by CLICKING HERE and contact us today to see how we can best serve you by phone at 480.241.9994 or by e-mail at admin@wihrg.com

Visit our new website!   www.wihresourcegroup.com

ABOUT WIH RESOURCE GROUP

Celebrating a decade in business, WIH Resource Group is a global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range of markets, including waste management, recycling, financials, transportation, M&A due diligence and support, alternative fuel fleet conversions, facilities, environmental, energy for private sector business and government clients.

WIH Resource Group is a leader in all of the key markets that it serves. WIH Resource Group provides a blend of global reach, local knowledge, innovation and technical excellence in delivering solutions that create, enhance and sustain the world’s built, natural and social environments.  WIH Resource Group serves clients in more than 175 key markets internationally.

More information on WIH Resource Group and its services can be found at www.wihrg.com.

Click on an image below to take you to WIH’s other sites!

The Past, Present and Future of Recycling

The Past – We’ve Come a Long Way!

Recycling has come a long way over the past few decades – in the US there wasn’t a single recycling program in place until 1973 (in The Hidden Past of Recycling you’ll read that the concept of recycling was widely used in the past, however only privately or individually). Now, there are over 8,000 programs in operation. The first ever curbside recycling program in Canada began in 1973, the program initially served 80,000 homes in the Toronto area and eventually curbside programs and recycling centers were all over the country.

While we’ve come a long way since the explosion of the environmental movement in the 1970s, our recycling programs still have a long way to go as a collective group. Keep reading and you’ll see how we currently reduce our waste today and how we can improve our recycling habits in the future.

The Present – Strategies for Zero Waste

Currently the US recycles about one third of the municipal trash (waste generated in homes, schools and non-industrial businesses) and Canada recycles about 21 percent of what would otherwise end up in the solid waste stream. Here are some strategies you can do today that will immediately increase how much you recycle:

Closing the Recycling Loop

Separating your trash from your recyclables is only one step in the recycling loop – in order to close the gap, manufacturers need to start making more products out of recycled material and consumers need to focus on buying these products. Creating merchandise from scratch is often very harsh and damaging to the environment, the more life that we can get out of a product made from post-consumer recycled content, the better!

Compost, Compost, Compost!

The amount of organic waste that ends up in landfill or burned in an incinerator is a little alarming – 60 percent of household waste in the US is compostable but only 8 percent of Americans compost. Canada has done a fairly good job on the composting front – as of 2011, over half of Canadian households (61%) had participated in some form of composting. If you have a green thumb, composting is the way to go – you’ll never have a better looking garden in the summer!

And if you’re an enthusiastic early adapter to up-and-coming composting trends, be sure to take a look at The Humanure System, which you can guess from the name, involves recycling your poop—and no, it’s obviously not for everyone…

Keep the Garbage Bucket as Empty as Possible

Recycling and composting are great ways to keep what’s going in the garbage to a minimum, but there are more ways to stem the garbage cans’ burly appetite. Pre-Cycling is a great way to reduce how much trash your house is sending to the curb – buying in bulk to reduce packaging, using reusable bags, having a refillable water bottle or coffee mug – these are just a few examples of how you can pre-cycle..

The Future – Strategies to Boost Recycling Rates

While recycling has increased in North America, the amount of trash produced has increased as well. The amount of material recycled today equals the total amount of trash produced in 1960. While recycling programs are a continuing success, experts say in future we should focus on limiting the amount of trash we produce to begin with, doing so will help lower the amount of greenhouse gasses being released into the air.

Updated and Expended Bottle Bills

Having a bottle bill in place is a very effective way to get people recycling. A bottle bill (or container deposit law), requires a refundable deposit on beverage containers ensuring they are returned for recycling. Ideally, every state should have a container deposit law, but unfortunately only 10 states have a bottle bill in place – many of which don’t include plastic bottles. If more states could enact and expand these laws, the amount of plastics ending up in landfills would drop drastically.

Manage Electronic Waste

Technology is always changing, and with the explosion of smartphones, tablets and laptops over the past decade, it has meant an increase in the amount of electronic waste that is being produced. In 2011, the US generated 3.41 million tons of e-waste, of which only 850,000 tons were recycled – the rest ended up in landfills or incinerators, the toxic chemicals that electronic components are made from end up seeping into our soil or up in the atmosphere. Businesses that sell electronics are beginning to take responsibility for the amount of e-waste produced, offering trade in programs allowing them to recycle unwanted gadgets – some even give you some money back!

Stop Using Plastic Bags

This ties back to pre-cycling, but the numbers on how much plastic bags are thrown out versus how many are recycled warrant its own section – 380 billion plastic bags are used a year in the US alone and less than 5 percent are recycled! Plastic made with PET (polyethylene terephthalate, in case you were wondering why we needed an acronym for it) do not biodegrade, they do break down in UV light (photo-degradation), but that can take 10-100 years. That’s if exposed to sunlight, and since most garbage is buried at a landfill, the whole process takes even longer.

Currently, less than 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled each year. Recycling one ton of plastic bags costs $4,000—the recycled product can then be sold for only $32. We don’t claim to be the best mathematicians in the world, but we’re fairly confident we wouldn’t want to enter into the business of recycling plastic bags for profit.

Efforts are being done all over to get people to ditch the plastic bags, supermarkets offer reusable cloth bags and now charge you for plastic bags, and San Francisco has even flat out banned the distribution of plastic bags in the city. Fingers crossed that these measures are the beginning of the end of the dreaded plastic bag.

This should most certainly be enough information to get your started on your way to recycling stardom. Stay tuned and we’ll fill you in on the sensible, not-so-sensible and downright strange recycling trends that you’ll start to see in the coming years—including, of course, recycling your #1’s and 2’s.

Written by Matt Bradbury – Sustainability Research Analyst

Source: BuschSystems.com

Information provided to you by WIH Resource Group, Inc

Contact WIH Resource Group
For more information, Visit our website by CLICKING HERE and contact us today to see how we can best serve you by phone at 480.241.9994 or by e-mail at admin@wihrg.com

Visit our new website!   www.wihresourcegroup.com

ABOUT WIH RESOURCE GROUP

Celebrating a decade in business, WIH Resource Group is a global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range of markets, including waste management, recycling, financials, transportation, M&A due diligence and support, alternative fuel fleet conversions, facilities, environmental, energy for private sector business and government clients.

WIH Resource Group is a leader in all of the key markets that it serves. WIH Resource Group provides a blend of global reach, local knowledge, innovation and technical excellence in delivering solutions that create, enhance and sustain the world’s built, natural and social environments.  WIH Resource Group serves clients in more than 175 key markets internationally.

More information on WIH Resource Group and its services can be found at www.wihrg.com.

Click on an image below to take you to WIH’s other sites!