Girish Kumar, Illinois Land of Lincoln Chapter, attending the University of Illinois at Chicago is the 2019 Robert P. Stearns – SCS Engineers Scholarship recipient. The SWANA scholarship is for students entering or already enrolled in a graduate program and pursuing a degree in environmental science, engineering, or other major related to solid waste management.
Kumar’s research offers an alternative to the conventional landfills in the form of bioreactor landfills, where the collected chemical liquid derived from waste degradation and other permitted liquids recirculate into the landfills. The recirculation systems enrich the moisture conditions and accelerate waste degradation, which is beneficial to enhancing biogas production and early waste stabilization.
Kumar works at the Sustainable Engineering Research Laboratory and the Geotechnical & Geoenvironmental Engineering Laboratory, on a project to develop a practical and reliable coupled thermo-hydro-bio-mechanical model. The model can enable safe design and the operation of stable, effective and sustainable-engineered landfills.
Congratulations, Girish!
Learn about this SWANA Scholarship and more.
Ryan Joslyn
University of Central Florida, MS
Robert P. Stearns/SCS Engineers Master’s Scholar
Project: Field Investigation of an Elevated Temperature Florida Landfill
For reasons that are not entirely clear, incidents of elevated temperatures in municipal solid waste landfills are occurring at increasing frequency. These landfills present temperatures that well exceed the range tolerable for micro-organisms (~176°F). Given the significance of elevated temperatures at landfills and the growing number of landfills with these issues, the goal of Joslyn’s research is to develop a more complete understanding of elevated temperature landfills using landfill gas and leachate monitoring data, specifically in the state of Florida.
Robert P. Stearns, Chairman and CoFounder of SCS Engineers, joined the EREF Board of Directors in 1999 and served as Chairman from 2004–2005. At SCS, he directed or served in a review capacity on many of the firm’s solid waste management-related projects. In 2007 EREF awarded the first Robert P. Stearns/SCS Engineers Master’s Scholarship, which was established to expand EREF’s successful doctoral-level scholarship program.
