by Malcolm Bates
Twenty minutes ago, I was getting off a plane at Helsinki International airport. Two minutes ago, I was driving along a well-maintained highway around the city. But what I’m looking at now shatters any preconception of Finland being a quiet European backwater with a population interested in nothing more vital than a regular visit to the sauna. Quite simply, the Ammassuo landfill site is breathtaking.
It would be all too easy for the people of Finland to say that the amount of waste they generate is insignificant in comparison to that generated by near neighbours, Germany, France, or the UK. In fact, there is so much ‘nature’ in Finland – undeveloped and unspoiled countryside – that they could probably get away with dumping their garbage in natural holes in the ground without the rest of us even noticing. But, you’ll be glad to know, the five million Finns don’t see it like that. If the rest of us looked after our environment half as well as the Finns look after theirs, our world would indeed be a better place.
Wow! This site is big. But that’s not what makes it so impressive. You see, it’s not a natural ‘hole in the ground’, it’s a vast manmade, open-topped concrete storage bunker, complete with a double layered impervious membrane and built-in methane gas collectors. And it has been excavated out of solid rock. This site has been planned to accommodate the waste disposal needs of Helsinki and the surrounding area for many years to come. That alone is impressive in any democratic society where long-term planning often takes a back seat to political expediency.
But the key reason why the site has been built to the standard it has, is so that the key by-product from it – landfill gas – can be safely fed back into the economy. When fully on-stream, that will amount to 8000 cubic metres of gas per hour, with a value of 40 MW.
Up-front decisions
Offhand, I can’t think of anything tougher than excavating more than 10 million tonnes of solid rock – aside from filling it all back up again with residual waste in an efficient, controlled way, that is ...
Just standing on the well-surfaced haul road got me thinking back to other landfill sites I’d visited over recent years, sites where trucks with extra heavy-duty suspension had to be specified, if they were ever to get to the waste tip face on a good day. But this is not a good day, it’s still winter in Finland and on the day of my visit it had snowed the previous night and was giving the impression of doing so even more now I had arrived to take photographs.
My original brief was a simple one, to take a closer look at the operation of landfill compactors in a country with a climate that can range from 40 degrees below zero in the winter, to hot, sunny days that would make a Mediterranean landfill site jealous in mid-summer. The idea being that, lessons learned in Finland’s dynamically different seasons, might benefit operators in other parts of the world. As magazine feature article ideas go, it was as good as any. But within minutes of meeting Enska Mantyla, CEO of BIMU Oy (and the operator of the Caterpillar 836H I’d come to see), it was quite clear that there was a bigger story here.
The first question I was going to put to Enska was pretty obvious: What kinds of equipment are used on the landfill? As was the second: Is the harsh and changeable weather in Finland a factor in machine choice?
‘Obvious’ because the answers to both were right there in front of my nose – it was getting colder, so obviously, any machine had to have good visibility and top quality driver comfort. But more to the point, the winter months in Finland are clearly not the sort of place to grapple with unplanned downtime, so reliability and spares back-up are doubly important. Why?
Because taking a machine out of service, fixing it and returning it to the site becomes a much more problematical exercise when even a split hydraulic hose can’t be fixed in the open, due to sub-zero temperatures. So what kind of equipment does BIMU operate on landfill sites in Finland? Again the answer was pretty obvious: Only the best.
Life on the frontline
So, with my original script right out the window, I accepted Enska’s invitation for a tour of the 150 hectare site in his 4x4. That way, I could use the time to think up more relevant questions. I naturally asked about the choice of machine brands his company favoured for this exacting task.
 The new Cat Tier III C18-powered 836H, featuring Mechanically Activated Electronic Fuel Injection, deals with up to 400 truck loads of domestic residual waste everyday |
Especially as the environmental guidelines in Finland are as stringent as any in the whole world and don’t go ‘on hold’ just because the weather makes life difficult. ‘Well, although BIMU Oy is one of the biggest operators of Tana landfill compactors in the world, we are constantly evaluating what is available from other manufacturers,’ he replies. ‘As we operate a large number of Cat wheeled loaders, we recently decided to take a new 836H Landfill Compactor to see how it stands up to life as a frontline machine,’ he explained.
In spite of having another well-known manufacturer of hydraulic machinery in nearby Sweden (Volvo) and a manufacturer of purpose-built landfill compactors right on his doorstep (Tana), the after sales support for Caterpillar machines in Finland is right up there with the best, according to Enska. And to make sure the new arrival was performing to plan, the regional representative for Caterpillar, Nicholas Mollard, and Pertti Rekonen, vice president and general manager of the Wihuri Group Oy (Witraktor, the Cat distributor for Finland is a group company), also agreed to meet me on site. They needn’t have worried, it was running like clockwork.
The new Tier III C18-powered 836H, featuring MEUI (Mechanically Activated Electronic Fuel Injection), helps to deal with up to 400 truck loads of domestic residual waste brought in every day. More than 80% of all households in the greater Helsinki area have a bio-waste collection, and currently over 50% of waste is recycled. But to reduce the impact of a peak rush hour period, the compactors on this site operate on a two shift basis – meaning the 55,604 kg operating-weight 836H is on duty for up to 16 hours a day. ‘It’s worth adding that we must, by law, complete and cover each intake of material before the end of each day,’ Enska Mantyla explains.
Now you can understand why reliability is such a key issue. Unplanned downtime could disrupt the whole process.
‘A third way’ that works
While we’ve covered the close working relationship between BIMU (the owner of the machines on this site), Wihuri Oy and it’s Cat dealership, there are also some other interesting relationships worthy of closer examination here.
Elsewhere in the world, most waste landfill sites are either state or regional government-owned, and operated with sole regard to meeting agreed environmental standards. Alternatively, there are those structured from the politically opposite view; that the State is best left to regulate, and that the actual operation is best left in the hands of a commercial company where options for selling recycled materials or the generating of power from waste is free to operate within commercial market conditions.
Historically, very few ‘third way’ solutions tend to work. In the UK for example, where there is a false political barrier preventing local authorities from co-ordinating both collection and disposal operations, any desirable development such as a multi-modal waste handling collection and disposal system is rendered more difficult. So it’s refreshing to find ‘a third way’ that really does work.
As Enska Mantyla explains, in Finland, waste disposal starts from the basis that collection and the setting of environmental standards should not be an entirely commercial issue. Decisions as to the best methods and the setting of overall policy is such a large issue, it should stand alongside policing and taxation as a decision best taken on by people with a direct democratic mandate, rather than the demands of shareholders.
But hang on … if that’s the case, what is BIMU – a successful commercial company – doing owning and operating over half the waste compactors and materials handlers in Finland? The answer is closely related to the relationship between central and local government and commercial concerns in Finland.
With a previous background in highway construction and mineral extraction and processing, BIMU Oy has been operating machines on behalf of local communes (councils) for more than a decade, but what makes it all the more interesting is that it seems free from political dogma and... well, it might just help explain why Finland has one of the best records relating to environmental standards on the planet.
Significantly, according to Enska Mantyla, BIMU has no ambitions to become what might be termed a ‘full service contractor’, out to win entire waste collection and disposal contracts. Instead, the company provides what can best be described as a ‘flexible service’ geared to the needs of a large urban area like Helsinki (where most Finns live), right down to a rural co-operative of communes that might require just a single compactor or wheeled loader.
The key factor is that Enska Mantyla’s company specializes in doing what it does best, and that’s supplying the best machines for the job and keeping them ready for work. With 15 major worksites around Finland – 13 of which are landfills owned by local communes – the 100+ machine fleet owned by BIMU is responsible for handling over three million tonnes per annum. So this ‘third way’ could be said to work rather well.
So well in fact, that the way in which BIMU selects that equipment, and the brands it chooses, is now very much an export commodity. It seems that BIMU has something of a growing reputation for putting together complete turnkey packages of machines to operate a specific waste handling task outside Finland. ‘We started advising the authorities in some of the other Baltic states such as Latvia,’ Enska explains. ‘Then we made contacts in Russia and have since undertaken consultancy projects in Oman and Africa,’ he adds.
Smart thinking
Obviously, not all developing countries can afford to fund a new project with all new equipment, but even here BIMU can provide a solution, says Enska: ‘For example, while we have an excellent relationship with Witraktor, the Caterpillar dealer here in Finland, we still tend to try and replace frontline machines on larger sites every two or three years. That enables us to not only provide new machines capable of meeting the highest environmental demands in Europe, it also means that good quality used machines can be offered to our clients in other countries where budgets for new machines are not yet available. Working with a global player such as Caterpillar ensures they can still be serviced and maintained to a high standard by trained fitters wherever they are needed,’ he adds.
If ‘recycling’ the machines used in the waste sector as a way of increasing global environmental standards without increasing third world debt sounds refreshingly logical, I should add that compared to excavating a new landfill site out of solid rock, it’s just a walk in the park for the Finns.
But then if the rest of Enska Mantyla’s consultancy solutions are anywhere near as logical, he stands a good chance of saving the planet single-handedly.
Malcolm Bates is Transport Correspondent for Waste Management World
e-mail: wmw@pennwell.com
