Tarpomatic is a daily cover that is placed on the tip face of an active cell of a landfill. This solution was presented during the 2019 International Solid Waste Association world congress, although thiscompany has already a trajectory of 25 years delivering tarpaulin covers around the world.

   Managing odour impact of landfills is usually challenging. There are not many useful methods to abate odour from these large surfaces with plenty of fugitive odours coming from everywhere. One of the main sources of odour emission is the working front of the landfill. A daily cover of the tip face of a landfill is a must, when there are odour complaints from the communities nearby. Tarpomatic offers a quick and cheap way to cover this surface.

 The usual way to cover the front face of a landfill is by using new excavated clean sand. However, this operation is costly and decreases the amount of volume available to be used to place waste. There are many regulations on the use of alternative daily covers, such as this one from Indiana, USA or this one from Victoria, Australia. A quick search shows many available systems in the market to cover daily the tip face of an active cell.

   What in my opinion makes Tarpomatic a nice choice is that it is deployed very fast, which allows for a shorter time of odour releases, although I would add some sort of system to clean the tarpaulins daily*. According to Steve Brooks, Managing Director of this company, the average tip face covered in their projects is around 700 square meters but there is no limit on the amount of surface covered. The maximum extension covered by them at this stage is 7000 square meters from a massive landfill in USA (name not disclosed).

  According to Steve, Tarpomatic is actually paid by itself when considering the amount of volume to landfill gained by not adding fresh sand every day at the tipping face.

   Learn more about this system here.

*2019/12/12 update: According to the manufacturer, the tarpaulins have an anti-bacterial, flame retardant and UV resistant coating that is self-cleaning

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