Ben Nevis

Our job isn't all glamour and it is a little ironic, given my rant about litter yesterday, where we are today.

This is a landfill site. Just as we do measurements in quarries and big earthworks projects there is a similar requirement for survey and volumetric work here too.

Non recyclable refuse (and with poor household segregation probably a large amount which should be recycled) ends up here. The scale and volume of debris is astonishing given that it serves just a handful of small Highland communities. I spoke briefly to the driver of this machine. He shared my feelings and despite working here for several years had not grown immune to the sheer profligacy he witnessed daily. The binning of out of date food has hit the headlines several times but general food packaging and supermarket bags lies everywhere. We as a nation need to be better house keepers.

There would be health and safety issues no doubt but I think it would be a useful idea to allow school children a site visit.

Landfill isn't simply a heap of piled high rubbish. Significant planning and engineering goes in to the preparation of a cell. A cell is a vast basin formed in the ground lined in various tough layers of slurry and impermeable membranes. The floor slopes like the bottom of a bath and the liquid which drains down (leachate) is drawn off for effluent treatment. A big land fill site may have several contiguous cells and as the last one approaches capacity another will get constructed.

Later in the life of a cell it gets capped with more natural material and well points are introduced with connecting pipe work to syphon off methane gas.

I'm looking forward to a day in the mountains up west tomorrow. I almost forgot, the big hill you can see here in the distance is Ben Nevis so the view is from the top of a man made hill to the top of a natural one.