Golf Channel’s Post

Transcript

In the previous episode of How and Why WM is Impacting Community and the Environment, we learn what they are doing during tournament week and how some of those initiatives impact the greater good of Arizona. We've got an enterprise goal to impact more than 10 million people by the year 2030 through targeted social programs. But WM isn't just a company managing waste. They are managing what happens after that waste is brought to a landfill. In an impressive, enlightening and cyclical story arc of how our trash becomes energy and gas, let's take a trip to Texas. Where are we? Where are the top of the security landfill which is about 35 miles north of Houston, TX? And what goes on here? This is a WM modern landfill and essentially people put trash at the curb and that trash is picked up by trucks and brought here for disposal. I made the mistake of referring to something like this as a dump. When I say that, what do you say? This is a highly engineered, modern landfill with technology that is so sophisticated that when we tell you about what's happening here, you're going to be very surprised. Brian Tindell, like Dodie, has been with the company for almost 25 years. At WM, he is combining his love of engineering and the environment. In the older days, the dump was the place where there was just land outside of town, maybe old farmland or old, old quarries where people would take their their garbage and literally just dump it and open areas. Over the past 30 years, that has all changed thanks to innovation and modern landfill technology. These pipes that you see on the surface of the landfill, those are actually. Wells that we drill into the waste and we put perforations in the section that's under under the waist mask so that we can extract the landfill gas. And we put a vacuum that pulls that gas out of the landfill and pushes it into a renewable energy plant where it can actually be used to as a source of renewable energy. Sometimes that's putting it into the electric grid for the community. Or maybe it's being used to put into our natural gas fleet of trucks that are actually collecting the garbage. More on that plant in the next episode. But impressive to note, WM is the largest landfill network in the country. They have over 250 active landfills and over 36,000 landfill gas wells pulling gas out of those landfills. We take right now about 43% of that and convert it for beneficial reuse, and we have goals to get that to 65% in the very near future, Dodie explained. We are all garbologist, which is to say we're all in it together. And her passion is to get the word out about modern landfills. People fear the unknown. What is behind that gate? What are they doing with all that trash? It can't be good. And so our role as an ambassador of WM is to tell our story about what's happening and how people can be a part of it and become many ambassadors themselves.