Landfill Surveying Drones- How to Use Drones for Landfill Site

Landfill Surveying Drones reduce survey time to hours rather than days and Landfill Surveying Drones are cheaper than traditional surveying equipment. However, Landfill Surveying Drones can do much more for waste management. Let’s look at a few workflows to understand how best to use your data.

Remaining Airspace Calculation by Landfill Surveying Drones:

Increasing landfill productivity means getting as much trash as possible according to the Top of the Waste (TOW) design. Thanks to the degree of compaction, you fill the cells selectively and depend on the waste that settles under the lid. 

But an overflow can be disastrous and result in serious repercussions from your environmental agency or local council. Sometimes that means wasting time and money digging up waste to specification.

With the help of landfill surveying drones, you can easily measure the ledge and the remaining airspace. Sometimes in a few clicks.

This is a big difference from traditional methods. In the past, you have had to run multiple lines through a dump, use those points to interpolate an approximate elevation model, and then compare that model to the TOW project.

But with 3D surveys rendered by processing, you can measure volumes directly on the visual model. Because landfill surveying drones collect data in all three dimensions, you can see sections of your cell or site over time and, importantly, in comparison to design.

Once you upload a design file, it will also become a 3D overlay in your survey. This allows you to easily see how far you need to go or how far you need to go back. You can spot errors before they become costly and validate your estimate.

Combine this with sophisticated calculators that crunch numbers to give you the remaining airspace, and you can get an idea of the performance and status of your entire site right from your browser in just ten minutes.

Landfill cell management can improve by Landfill Surveying Drones:

Because landfills pay per ton of waste and you can only fill a set amount of airspace, you want to be able to dump as much waste as possible to get the best performance out of your site. You want the highest possible compaction speed. As you might guess, Landfill Surveying Drones can help with this.

It basically works like this: weighbridge + drone + handling platform = measure compaction on every flight. It may sound too simple, but that’s the point. Once you’ve explored your site, you can compare individual cell volumes from survey to survey. Combine this with your weighbridge data and a density calculator and you can get your rate at a glance.

This data can also be exported to CSV and PDF files for required reporting, or you can share these metrics with colleagues and superiors right from your platform.

Contract negotiations and operator reviews usually took place quarterly or possibly months due to a lack of funds and time. But, as with this frequency, by the time the bug reaches you, it’s usually too late to react to changes. Think of it like driving a car that only tells you your speed a few hours ago.

But because landfill surveying drones are more economical and efficient, you can fly as often as you like to collect data. You may have a modern speedometer. By collecting data frequently, you can arm yourself with the right and timely data to proactively manage your discharge and track progress.

Manage the ecological zones of your landfill

Monitoring of ecological zones is essential for any waste management operation. When shooting with landfill surveying drones, you will always have visual data at hand, making it easy to identify both of these things. Since everyone is working with the same data, you have a source of truth that everyone can rely on. And thanks to cloud processing platforms, you can share data with your team.

If you have an area that needs regular reporting, mark it once and share it with anyone who needs to know. From there, whenever you check your dump, you can include visual updates to that area in your reports.

As we mentioned above, since landfill surveying drones make shooting cheaper, you can shoot more often. This means that collecting all the data from landfill surveying drones provides an accurate visual timeline of your site’s life.

In many jurisdictions, environmental protection agencies inspect landfills quite frequently to ensure that protected areas have not been disturbed. The visual timeline makes it easy and quick to check a specific place in place over time and provides a source of truth without arguments. Without such ability, such questions are not easy to answer and the answers are not easy to prove, often leading to lengthy litigation affecting everyone.

Make sure your drone data is accurate

All of the workflows described in this article require fairly accurate data from landfill surveying drones.

To ensure the reliable accuracy of your landfill surveying drones data, the most important factor is proper control from the ground. Landfills present a unique challenge to all permanent land management solutions – the earth will not stand still!

Since the ground is constantly sinking (on the order of 1 m/year [1 yd/year]), all surveyed ground control points quickly become unusable. So you have two options:

Check ground checkpoints every time you take over a junkyard.

Use AeroPoints (smart ground control points).

You may or may not decide to use AeroPoints, but the importance of having a current and accurate ground control cannot be overstated. Without it, you have no way of being sure of the accuracy of your data and therefore you cannot trust the results, especially if you are comparing data at different points in time (important for compaction factors).

Note that this still applies to RTK or PPK landfill surveying drones. Their claimed accuracy may meet your requirements, however, there are many potential sources of error so you still need to check a few items (at least) to make sure the actual accuracy is sufficient.