Like many municipalities, the City of Arlington, TX, needed equipment to perform a wide variety of tasks at its landfill, but budget constraints limited the city’s options.After much consideration, city officials arrived at the idea of finding one piece of equipment to take on multiple tasks.The highest priority was dust control to meet EPA standards on the 6-plus mi. (9.6 km) of dirt road on the 500-acre (202 ha) landfill, which is located at Mosier Valley and Highway 157. The city also needed a spare receptacle to store and move refuse onsite.Once city officials reached consensus on what they needed, the concept was put out to bid and Klein Products of Jacksonville, TX, won the contract. Klein applied its wealth of experience to meeting the city’s specifications. The result was a truck built to last, and to perform multiple functions. Plus, it was street legal. “At Klein Products, we enjoy start-to-finish projects that are challenging, hard to design and difficult to manufacture. The City of Arlington presented us with this type of opportunity,” said Barry McManus, Klein Products vice president. “The big challenges on this project were to make the final package completely self-contained, completely portable, easy to use and durable enough for the severe conditions in which it was intended to work –– all while staying within the budget constraints of the city. Our people rose to the occasion and really responded to the challenge. The finished product turned out great, one that makes us very proud.”The project lent itself to a rail-designed frame built on a 2001 Freightliner FL80 chassis that could accept various payload devices. Equipped with a 4,000-gallon (15,141 L) non-potable water tank, the unit is used not only to subdue the dust problems inherent to landfills, but also to suppress spontaneous combustion fires. With the tank in position, the unit can pump out the leachate system, clean the compaction and track-type equipment on the spot, drain the stormwater retention pond that collects the landfill and service area’s runoff, and finally, transport the runoff to the sanitary sewer deposit station.To ensure the unit can be used at all times, five of the 26 workers onsite are trained to operate it. “Klein Products really built the unit to last and made it so easy to operate that our people are very comfortable and confident every time they use it,” said Allen Jones, manager of Arlington’s Solid Waste Division. “We try to think of all sorts of ways to use the unit, even watering the grass on the landfill’s new landscaping project. Also, a few times a year, the City has functions at the convention center, and we save quite a lot of money by transporting our own trash bins to the landfill instead of having to contract those services.” Arlington has even used the unit for white goods removal.“Since we designed the vehicle to be street legal, we can store discarded refrigerators in a trash bin body. When we have enough refrigerators stored, the water tank is rolled off and the bin body is loaded on the chassis to transport the appliances to the Freon recycling unit,” said Jones. According to the official, the city has used many different types of equipment at its landfill since its permitting in the early 1970s, and is particularly pleased with the new Klein custom-built multi-tasker.“We have had the unit for about seven months now and there have been no problems,” said Jones. “Normally we handle about a million gallons of leachate per month, but there has been a lot of rain lately and we had to remove over 7 million gallons last month to the sanitary sewer facility, still with no problems.”In the past, the city had a vehicle with only a 2,000-gallon (7570 L) capacity that traveled more than 2,000 mi. per month inside the landfill. According to Jones, Arlington’s fuel and maintenance savings will be significant now because the new 4,000-gallon unit should only have to return for refilling half as often.For more information contact Allen Jones, City of Arlington, at 817/571-7273; or Will Hallmark at Klein Products, 903/589-4546.This story also appears on Construction Equipment Guide.
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