Profitability and maintenance

Maintenance often gets a bad rap. By definition maintenance is the process of preserving something or someone. My own experience in learning the value of maintenance stems from my husband of 30 years who has done a great job maintaining my car and so much more. Along the way he also taught our children the value of maintenance (a favorite story they tell is about the time they left their bicycle out in the rain and they had to stand in the rain to see how they liked being left outside in the elements). Maintenance usually comes at a price sometimes time, sometimes money - often both.

The recent issue of MSW Management magazine (Nov/Dec 2011 page 22) has an article titled "The Profitability and the Art of Landfill Equipment Maintenance". It highlights that the size of a landfill's fleet of equipment requiring maintenance will be governed in part by what type of cover operation they choose.

Recently in our office here we have been studying the cost of maintaining various pieces of landfill equipment, specifically to study what kind of savings are available to a landfill that opts for Posi-Shell as their daily cover. It is significant. When you can greatly reduce the hours of use on a haul truck (or two), a dozer, scraper, loader, or excavator the process of preserving your fleet is much easier.

Daniel Duffy's article does a great job of highlighting how best to protect your equipment in the harsh landfill environment. He quoted Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. "Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance." If you want less maintenance - use a system that requires less equipment.