Secrets of the Mega Landfill | Free Documentary

[Music] as a planet we're throwing away more than ever before and here in california it's the front line of the global war on waste welcome to the mega landfill one of the biggest destinations for our trash in the world up top boss go ahead dealing with nearly a million trash bags worth of garbage every day not a good smell like a guy uh not going in the shower for a month or so so what does it take to tackle this tidal wave of trash [Music] with exclusive access we go behind the scenes and spill the secrets of this super sight this machine detects the radiation meet the troops on the front line battling the bin juice i see a horse a big horse it wasn't the bean the mighty machines that move mountains of mock as you can feel beneath us the ground's shaking it's not solid the landfill is constantly settling and the pioneering tech taking trash into the future so there it goes so where we're standing right now we're going to be a hundred feet below trash welcome to secrets of the mega landfill the hills of orange county in california a gentle peaceful place far away from any signs of bustle and bustle [Music] well maybe not this is frank r bowerman landfill [Music] the last place you'd think to find one of the biggest landfill sites in the world every day this 725 acre site faces the challenge of dealing with eight and a half thousand tons of trash it might be out of sight out of mind when it's dumped on the curb but it's just the start of an extraordinary journey into the afterlife of junk never seen before 5 30 a.m and with cities all across the state about to wake up and put out millions of trash cans there's no time to waste at the landfill site every night the trash from the day before is put to bed under nearly 2 000 feet of covers that must be taken off before any more can get in there are 40 feet wide by 150 feet long and there's usually two tarps per spool overseeing this mammoth task is landfill operation superintendent greg adrian can you make a pass for that water truck over here by the landing where we're working we used to cover it with six inches of dirt by replacing that dirt with tarps it preserves that space where dirt used to consume we're able to put trash right on top of trash and boy there's a lot of trash below greg's feet is a massive lined sink full of garbage that reaches an epic 450 feet down enough to bury the statue of liberty one and a half times over in charge of one of these giant machines is javier or big cat to his friends [Applause] yeah that'll give him time to move the other sports out of the way in less than 90 minutes big cat and the rest of the team must have the site ready otherwise there will be chaos at the gates when hundreds of garbage trucks arrive in just one day america alone chucks away 60 million plastic bottles 220 000 tons of packaging and 38 million plastic bags it's the tip of the iceberg of a mind-boggling amount of trash but we all know where it ends up don't we it's just like a giant hole that's on fire and all the garbage goes in there to waste [Music] i have no idea what they do with the trash i don't know if they burn it or they bury it i have no idea they don't just leave the trash there do they [Music] orange county is home to three million people each one chucking on average one ton of waste a year may not know where it all ends up but one guy sure does david is part of a hundred strong fleet on a mission to clean up the streets and he can't be late for the landfill i've been doing for like almost 15 or 16 years and the trash never ends but it's good not complaining [Music] today he must stop at more than 500 homes but to speed things up there's some heavy tech to lend a helping claw you just press the button the arms goes out to get the barrel and put it up down it's like a little robot doing the job but you have to have a lot of practice to not put a car into the sidewall run lady run although it's not just normal household waste that finds its way into david's garbage truck i was they get one of those at the restaurant being the big ones and one lady was behind me waiting in the hand she was like oh my god and that being your dump right now there was a horse but i that was like a rocking horse you know like those were little kids like and then i asked the day well you want the horizon no no no not the rocking horse i mean a real horse what do you mean like like a horse horse she said yes [Music] while david keeps an eye out for random garbage back at the landfill the minutes are counting down until the gates are open 10-4 and there's a big problem no it's not spending or nothing some things happen unplanned right now we have a tar machine that went down with the tarp machine out of action the day could end before it's begun and there's already dozens of garbage trucks waiting to get in [Applause] luckily a team of seven mechanics are on site to deal with emergencies they fix the tarp machine and big cat can get back on the job turn four to make up the lost time it's all hands on deck this is just a small portion of the operation there's a lot of things that happen day to day behind the scenes that people aren't aware of to help keep a large landfill like this moving at the front gate 40 garbage trucks from all over southern california are now in line to get in it's up to supervisor mimi to keep everything under control this is the front line they come from a long way so to avoid the traffic so they come here before the opening time and once they come in i don't want them to run me over once mimi has given the ok there's no holding back the swarm and these trucks are on the clock they need to offload and get back out to collect more waste as fast as possible trash waits for no man as you can see they're really fast [Music] every haulage company must pay on behalf of their customers to unleash their loads depending on how much they're carrying and the only way to figure that out it's time for a weigh-in on a mega scale this is not a row this is the scale all the way to that strip over there these giant scales are 70 feet long the length of the longest truck and where there's trash there's cash the regular customer they pay 59 dollars per ton with as many as 750 trucks arriving from morning till night mimi can easily take a staggering quarter of a million dollars every day [Music] and next to arrive with his 12 tons of trash is garbage hauler david enjoy the view because we're gonna be all the way on top and what a view this massive area looks like a big crater but under all this dirt is trash and the active part of this site covered this morning with greg's gigantic tarps is now covered in trucks i hope this thing he doesn't give up in the middle of the way and what goes up must come down you have to really careful about the weight down because of the brakes the brakes get burned are they hot easy does it david we're going good norma normal temperature the road is conquered but with several trucks already in front of him there's the risk of a traffic jam on the trash bring it in boss but not on this man's watch this is phil it can get very chaotic down here during a busy time we have machinery moving trucks moving trying to park coming out it is my responsibility to make sure that no one's crashing into one another trucks are getting where they need to be and everyone's working safe as possible a truck is arriving every minute so phil has a very hands-on approach when it comes to managing the traffic [Music] first and foremost cone this is like our bread and butter when i do this symbol to a driver they know to go to the very first lane designated by the cone sit down on the ground new line don't double up if i'm asking for a big truck i have my arms outstretched if i need one of the little guys or the residential guys put my hands close together the cone the spread eagle and not forgetting the tap up top tapping your hard hat has a couple different meanings depending on the truck for this guy it means go to the top lift a lift is a specific spot where trash will be dumped today before getting covered tonight we have a top and a bottom lift today allows us to dump more trash more efficiently we have to structure it in such a way that it's uh stable i guess would be the way to phrase it stable with 450 feet of trash below phil's feet stability is everything especially when it's constantly getting higher around my second year here i really took a good look around and i realized how much the landscape had changed we had gone up in elevation maybe a solid 40 to 60 feet in only a few years i've seen people throw out entire lives wedding photos you know all kinds of stuff even though you see sad things like that keepsakes being thrown out you can't dwell on it there's always another truck that needs to be parked so life moves on and the next truck that needs phil's handy direction is david's david may be a pro but dumping 12 tons of moving trash can lead to disaster back door open [Music] if you go sideways a little bit it's really dangerous because you can flip to the side and you don't want that it looks like it's already done so see you guys as david knows from his travels with the trash some people will try their best to sneak on the garbage truck what they're not allowed but here at the landfill there's a team dedicated to seeking it out as more and more of this morning's trash arrives the detective work falls to the masked man waste inspector chris i'm the guy in blue i have the face mask on for dust i don't want it in my lungs so i just try to keep covered here's some potatoes r2d2 [Music] i'm looking for hazardous materials i'm looking for electronics chemicals paints asbestos appliances any kind of a tank that has any kind of gas in it they end up mixing in here you were talking about a chemical fire these are items that we need to keep out of the landfills for the protection of the environment but also for our employees a fire on a landfill site could rage for weeks and it's not long before chris finds something sinister lurking in the trash i found a propane tank which is a very flammable very combustible and i've seen it happen where a dozer ran over propane tanks exploded and it'll lift that right off the ground the landfill will be the forever home for most of the stuff here but for the lucky few there's a route to another life we want to limit the recyclables that come into the landfills anything that's electronic that would have a circuit board in it there's metals in here and there's and there's plastics stuff that could be recycled to say this wouldn't be most people's dream job is an understatement but for the masked man there's no place he'd rather be i like being on the field i'm a field guy i don't want to be in an office i feel like my calling's right here my heart's right here it's in the trash and it's a love affair that's about to get tested at the front gate a load has just arrived that's causing concern for mimi radiation [Music] a truck has set up the radiation alarm at the gate no mask needed here this job requires a more technical piece of kit it picks up radiation uh more rapid and it'll pinpoint it for me too so what i'm doing is i'm just trying to locate it again radiation can be deadly to humans and contaminate land for hundreds of years there's no way chris can let the truck into the landfill until he's found out what's in there you'll hear an alarm on this when i pinpoint it there'll be an alarm did you hear that there's our detection right there with radiation confirmed in the truck chris thinks he knows what it can be it's uh probably iodine it's a medical waste which is found in a diaper or human feces it can't be disposed of here at the at the county landfill treatments in hospital can transfer radiation through a patient's body so it's a common find but to be sure the truck's radioactive contents must be sent to a specialist site to be identified and disposed off safely thank you job done back down on the active site it's 11 a.m just hang tight landfill operation supervisor nathan is in charge of the whole force but for the next stage in the afterlife of what we chuck away it's these extra large dozers that are boss daily we utilize about four trash dozers typically have two on the bottom two on the top the trash must be moved to certain areas to be buried and it's a job that's perfect for these beasts each one weighs in at 72 tons and under the hood is 579 horsepower five times more powerful than the average car it's super strength that's needed to drive its huge caterpillar tracks trash is the hardest thing on the bulldozers to replace all this undercarriage is 200 000 so it's very expensive it's roughly done every year and with thousands of tons of garbage to shift every day these dozers or trash cats need a super-sized shovel this one's about roughly 20 feet the largest in the industry and this enables it to be able to push a large amount of trash almost an entire transfer load that's 20 tons in just one push or 60 if you get a few friends to help so right now you can see them triple pushing you can see how much trash they've just cleared off the landing with basically one push these machines are so gigantic they literally make the ground move it's not solid the landfill is constantly settling so you never feel an earthquake at the landfill it just shakes it up it's like a big bowl of jello even when today's trash has been moved into position it can't be buried yet our whole existence is about squeezing as much trash into this site as possible and to do that every bit of air around the trash needs to be eliminated javier david one of you guys need a comfortable top landing it's a job for this metallic monster the compactor with its immense 62 tons of weight it stomps across the mountains of trash moved by the dozers pummeling it into the ground and you wouldn't want to find yourself on the receiving end of these the wheel is made of steel they're about five and a half feet tall there's 35 spikes on each wheel and that's how you get the compaction of the trash adrian has operated a compactor for 31 years if you're not careful it's a very dangerous piece of machine that if you don't focus on what you're doing you can even kill yourself or kill other people although it does have its upsides very fun i mean that's the reason why i've been doing it for 31 years already this machine isn't just about brute force it also has brains we have a gps system that will help you a lot both adrian and the dozer team have this tech in their cabs that tells them exactly where to move it and precisely how far down to compact it but how does it do it [Music] all right kevin you want to grab the drone all right up in the hills way above adrian and the team engineers kevin and christian are using the latest drone tech to give the guys all the details they need to move and pummel the trash there you go pilot thanks the surface here is constantly changing what we do is take the drone fly it and using a technology called photogrammetry it's actually able to map this surface for us safety checks complete the drone can take to the skies so there it goes [Music] the drone gets you within one centimeter accuracy rely on a very advanced gps technology around here with this drone to work at its accuracy it needs the space station to be set up on a control point it's referencing all the gps satellites that are up in space and correcting the drone position with the satellite positions but it's not all about the practicalities to be honest we don't always do the uh the pre-programmed flight path sometimes we we have a little fun with it thanks to the drone kevin and christian now have enough data to feed back to the team on site this surface here will send it out to the machines and that will help them to build the next trash lift the most important thing is is utilizing airspace in the landfill so doing these designs helps to make sure that we that we utilize every cubic foot that we're authorized to use [Music] as morning turns to afternoon adrian and the team haven't stopped but high above them there's another crucial squad getting ready for work [Music] so this is my crew here [Music] that's wendy in the back squawking she's saying i'm ready for my close-up mr demille i've been working on that line all week al is the resident birdman and his crew of raptors trump any monster truck when it comes to dealing with the biggest pest on site seagulls for the seagulls it's a smorgasbord it's just free food for seagulls when i started here six years ago you wouldn't have even been able to see the trash down there it would just be a moving mass of seagulls and all these these guys down here they were just getting peppered with bird poop but it's not just a shower of seagull poo that's the concern the scavengers cause much bigger problems the seagulls that carry trash off fly out over the public areas out here in the housing districts and stuff they drop their trash we come up here with predators and make this a dangerous area for the seagulls to be we're not here to kill seagulls we're here to scare seagulls time for wendy to take to the skies we take that off and there she goes [Music] here she comes come on come on had a girl these remarkable birds of prey are the perfect hunting machines not only do they have eyesight eight times better than ours but once they've spotted their prey they can enter a killer glide of 50 miles per hour as wendy is giving the local seagulls a run for their money al keeps falcon b warmed up [Music] this is training so she knows if she catches this lure she's gonna get fed oh what she just did there it is you'll notice she's got her wings spread out and her tail spread out and she's hunching over the whole thing because she doesn't want any of the other predators in the area to see that she's caught something so she's hiding it well wendy's job seems to be done and the guys are safe from the poop for another day instead of having our flocks of 5 000 like we had six years ago an average flock for us is about 60 to 80 seagulls in the afternoon [Music] back down on the active site and it's time for this morning's garbage to disappear the whole site may get covered with tarps at the end of the day but as soon as an area reaches capacity it's time for it to be sealed with dirt this is one of the biggest machines here in the landfill this machine is called the scraper and it certainly lives up to its name slicing wedges of earth to bury trash as well as hauling dirt around site this afternoon operator david is tucking up the trash with one of these mighty machines and just like his ride he has a nickname of his own smiley i got that nickname 21 years ago as a labor i think i did something wrong directing traffic i didn't answer they said smiley and it stuck for 21 years even if i'm mad at somebody i still smile at him to stand any chance of moving a mega load that weighs the same as two garbage trucks the scraper has not one but two engines transferring this double power into actual movement on the landfill means the scraper has some serious rubber so this tire it's about nine feet tall brand new this tire cost fifteen thousand dollars and smiley has pushed these wheels to their limits my rookie years i popped three tires in one night i went over a christmas tree stumps and i parked it the next morning they were all flat three of them yeah forty five thousand dollars worth of damage i thought they were gonna fire me showtime [Music] but sometimes even giant tyres and two engines won't do to scrape up even more dirt smiley needs a hookup with two scrapers instead of two engines is four engines saves time and time is money once you get it it's just like dancing you go forward backwards a colossal 100 tons of earth moved in just five minutes but smiley's not the only one delving into the dirt melissa is a fossil hunter and here in california every landfill site must have one on call in case any prehistoric residents decide to pop up here alone 20 000 fossils have been dug up from the dirt while the machinery is coming around and moving dirt we walk behind it or we stand off to the side to see if we can find any fossils and if they do find something it can stop work in its tracks our job is to get it out as quickly as possible so a project that would take a school or a museum an entire summer we would have to do in you know two weeks the fossils are the oldest secrets of the landfill and there's so many you can literally trip over them okay can we stop because i just found a wild vertebra okay that's hilarious it's right here if you want to get a close-up of it it's a little bit different color than the sediment surrounding it so it stands out and you can actually see the the pores in the in the bone so uh this is kind of exciting it may look just like a rock but if this is confirmed as a fossil it will join the many others melissa and her team have found on this patch [Music] there's another chunk of bone right here [Music] but how did a whale end up here in the hills of the landfill 20 miles from the coast this area was underwater probably between about 25 and 7 million years ago but the land has been uplifted so now it's 1500 feet above the ocean [Music] it's 2pm and the californian sun is heating up the mega landfill here temperatures can reach more than 30 degrees celsius and with high heat comes danger for the team dust [Music] if it's not kept in check it can cause mayhem blinding and choking the workers on the ground try to keep the dust down or they get to eat the dust all day every day water is blasted from the truck to dampen down the dust but this water isn't from the tap [Music] within the layers of trash the decomposing garbage creates liquid called leachate that's hovered up and sent to the tank farm along with groundwater together this affectionately called trash tea is then recycled by big cat back on site [Music] and with an empty truck he needs to top up his tank quickly before the dust starts to cause mayhem [Music] getting a ground water getting about 400 gallons a minute and just like a good copper needs milk this trash tea needs topping up with lovely leachate but there's no earl grey aroma for this special blend uh leech of water does not smell good really really don't smell good at all not a good smell like like a guy uh not going to the shower for a month or so after 31 years i can't smell nothing no more [Music] but there are some people who aren't just okay with the smell they're drawn to it my speaker system is not working today are you are you able to hear me okay back there that's great big cart and the team are about to get an audience [Music] so right now we're driving on trash everything to the left of us and everything to the right and below of us is trash you won't find it in your holiday brochure but once a week the landfill opens its doors to people from all over the world this afternoon weiner is their guide you guys see these tarps rolled up on their spools right here they'll use that to cover up the trash tonight no one realizes what goes on in a landfill for them they throw away their trash the trash truck comes and picks it up and it's out of sight out of mind they just want it gone well time for them to see where it all ends up all right alan just watch your step there's a handle right here okay does it smell like trash yet or a downwind so that all the smell is coming our way it is pretty disheartening to see what people throw away i think we can use more and reduce what we throw away which means if we put more thought into that that means our landfills last longer very few people have seen the landfill this close and it looks like they're impressed i'm amazed that they can do all this i i have no idea i live not far from here and i'm just amazed what shocks me about the place is so busy and this is every day and we're even standing on trash right now we're at one landfill imagine the state the country countries every day the amount of trash that's accumulated in bucks and the landfills look like apocalyptic wastelands like there's uh smoke coming up and there's of course gases coming up oh it's so much better i like to come back and take another two sometime it's so nice when i have visitors come and they recognize all the work that goes on in a landfill oh my gosh i see a seagull oh where's that i want to see [Music] as soon as the tour is over weiner has another job to do at the landfill she's the resident biologist and all that trash talk has her running late sorry i'm running late so are these the last few plants you got [Music] in california there's a lot of protected wildlife plant life that are threatened or endangered whenever their habitat is removed i have to compensate for its destruction and replace it somewhere restore plant life restore habitat today the team are planting up a new area to replace one destroyed by the landfills expansion [Music] healthy plant yep we can plant this one and the law says if this work isn't done the landfill won't be allowed to run is california state law what you see planted today is in replacement to something that was the home to a bird species or a lizard right now it's brand new container plants there is a delay in the compensation that we're doing so we're doing whatever we can to put it back so far weiner's team have recreated 14 of what used to be here before the landfill and their efforts have reap rewards bringing many rare species back to the area when i do encounter protected species it makes my heart twitter it brings me joy to see these protected species flourishing even if it is on a landfill but it will be a long time before things are as good as new we'll do our best to put the landfill back into the natural environment but it'll look like a puzzle piece it'll look just a little bit different given a hundred years time 200 years time perhaps it will absorb back in and look the same weiner is not the only one on site getting green fingered [Music] on a hill not too far away look at the stuff it doesn't look much but administration manager isaac and director tom have high hopes for this humble pile of compost what you see behind me is the pilot but this area will really be the cornerstone of greenways composting here in orange county just over a third of all the trash brought on site is food and green waste that causes lots of greenhouse gases by composting it instead it's better for the environment and they'll save up to a whopping 20 of space but this rotten idea does have its risks phase one will cover 200 tons per day we'll have a flat pad and fire extinguishers surrounding the pad supported by two 100 000 gallon water tanks the pile can combust and we are in a canyon area on a high fire location we want to make sure that we don't have any situations where the compost can combust so we have to water that pile if it gets too warm so before they supersize their plans it's crucial they know their cooking times you want to see that compost around 131 to 160 and right now this pile is about 145 and it's looking like a perfect bake but here's a little bit this is what we have so far if all goes to plan there soon should be more root but the landfill and tons of compost for the locals that's if they can keep careless consumers in check we're getting glass plastics a lot of different materials that it's not green waste one of the challenges that we have is to make sure that people are throwing away the right things and recycling the right things because once the waste is buried it's there forever and what we're doing today isn't just for us we're doing this for generations to come [Music] as the day creeps forward at the mega landfill so does the wall of waste it's hard to believe but this site bigger than disneyland is running out of space and with less and less landfills being allowed to open in california the team need to use up every bit of it they can it's a huge mega structure that we're building here it's almost like an architect that's designing it that's constantly being built like a mega skyscraper [Music] forward this team of hard hat heroes who have a mega plan for the mega landfill ah so this is a good vantage point to take a look at where we're going here's the ada excavation plan that we're doing kevin and his team are getting ready for a trash takeover on an epic scale this whole large area is the landfill so all of the area behind me all of the area over there all of that is gonna be filled with waste and actually be a hundred feet above us so where we're standing right now we're gonna be a hundred feet below trash there's just an awful lot of space to place trash but it is filling up you know quicker than you'd think and it's far from as simple as filling a hole a landfill is an engineered design there's a lot of engineering a lot of very serious thought put into it that includes dealing with four landslides to take this site to the next level when we originally had the landslide in 2002 it was moving probably about a foot a day since then we've actually spent close to 100 million dollars trying to stabilize the whole hill they're literally making mountains so they can get in more trash one of the big problems is that we have soil that we remove and we have to find a place to put the soil and so if you look at that hill over there we're actually in a place five million cubic yards of dirt on top of that hill so that we can then take the trash and place it there it's an unbelievable feat but when the site is projected to be full in 2053 would see their homemade canyon squeeze in another 20 years of waste it won't ever leave here or is there a chance of escape [Music] back on the current site today's trash will soon be mingling with residents who've been here for decades and they're constantly sneaking out as methane gas the gas from the decomposing mass down below is pumped 24 7 through 45 miles of pipes from under the ground to a state-of-the-art electricity power plant on site and today just like every day it's on a mission [Music] we're actually pulling the methane off the landfill and we're cleaning it up and then we're sending it over to the engines to produce electricity the tech is so advanced to transform the trash it only needs four people to run it one of them is brian [Music] time to power up we start the engine up it gets up to speed the red means that the breaker is closed and that we're generating electricity the green means that this breaker is open is not allowing electricity to go through it's fairly simple fairly simple so we had a problem we basically shut down the plant from home [Music] this whopping engine and generator created enough power for 26 000 local homes [Music] well i know that a lot of people look at landfills and and have a frown on their face but we've been able to do something special here you have to send your trash somewhere and we're making the most out of it and doing something special [Music] it's 5 p.m and as the last garbage truck leaves the team can finally put today's trash to bed just imagine if we didn't push trash somewhere the streets would be dirty and gross [Music] in the last 10 hours nearly a million trash bags worth of garbage has been dropped dozered bashed and buried what used to be a canyon is now on its way to becoming a mountain from time to time i go to some higher elevation points just that amazed at the size and what we handle every day it's an epic necessity for millions of people it's a way for society to get rid of stuff so it's out of sight out of mind but it means people don't think about what they throw away and it won't be here forever they think landfills are a endless commodity and it is a finite resource but until that happens there's always a home here for the trash that never stops [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary

Views: 1,109,125

Keywords: Free documentary, documentaries, full documentary, hd documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), Business Documentary, landfill, trash, recycling, documentary about landfill, the secrets of the mega landfill, The Secrets of One of the Biggest Landfill in United States, Secrets of Mega Landfill

Id: 2Vifruk3eSs

Length: 49min 38sec (2978 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022