Alliance Landfill

About the Program
Located in the city of Taylor in northeastern Pennsylvania, the WM Alliance Landfill property was once the location of deep mining activities, strip mining and waste dumping. These activities were done without the benefit of liners, caps, monitoring or nuisance controls. In 1987, private operators re-opened the facility as a modern lined, capped and monitored municipal waste disposal facility. Today, the Alliance Landfill’s main habitat areas include mountainside woodlands common to the region, a large sedimentation pond, smaller surface water control ponds and grasslands growing atop the landfill’s synthetic cap. Team members at the Alliance Landfill assist in habitat management and species monitoring to encourage increased wildlife use and native vegetation.

Practices and Impacts

• Within the 200-acre grassland on the property, American kestrel nest boxes were placed to support the breeding and conservation of the native falcon species. The nest boxes were moved to a more suitable habitat in 2018 after the program was restarted. Team members monitor the boxes for kestrel use and maintain the boxes as needed, performing tasks like adding in wood chips for nesting material. The Pennsylvania Game Commission assists the team in banding young kestrel chicks to support the research and conservation of the species.
• Team members replaced a monoculture grass plot into a 16-acre diverse community landscape project to encourage wildlife use and to determine if woody plants could be grown on a landfill cap without affecting the cap’s function. The site is inspected bimonthly for wildlife use and mowed to encourage native grassland growth.
• With rapidly declining populations of bats due to white-nose syndrome, Alliance Landfill team members installed a bat box on property, which provided an education opportunity for a group of 50 local scouts. Team members provided education handouts, information about bats and conservation, and materials to build bat boxes. The local participants received the completed bat boxes to install around the community. The site’s partners from USDA-APHIS and Rick Fritsky from the Pennsylvania Game Commission provided technical information and bat box materials..