When Anthony Detweiler, Manatee County’s superintendent at the Lena Road Landfill, started working at the landfill 22 years ago, the piles of garbage were measured using basic equipment — a measuring tape and a level.
“We’d take a big PVC pipe and put marks on it,” Detweiler said. “That’s where we’d fill our lifts (a 10-foot layer of waste) to. We didn’t know any different back then.”
Now, the process of compacting garbage barely requires human input. Instead of the drivers eyeballing massive piles of waste to try to achieve the perfect compaction and slope, the bulldozers are equipped with technology that guides the drivers’ every move…