Alternative Daily Cover - definition?

Hi Helen - Alternative Daily Cover is used in the landfill itself to cover the active cell at the end of the day in lieu of earthen material. Please see http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/lgcentral/basics/adcbasic.htm and https://www.usgbc.org/glossary/term/5369 for more information. I have personally diverted concrete rubble for MRc2 in LEED 2009 that is reprocessed by a landfill for its roads. This is not ADC because it is not used on the active landfill face as replacement for earthen material. I would be surprised if the person you spoke to was actually using an amalgamation of C&D waste for roads at the landfill. They were most likely referring to concrete, brick, or masonry rubble, which would be a viable diversion and hence count under LEED v4.

FYI: My understanding for LEED v4 is that the MR TAG was trying to avoid projects putting C&D waste into the landfill as ADC and counting it as diverted when the intent of this credit is to reduce materials disposed in landfills by (actually) recovering, reusing, and recycling them. In this case, the rubble would be recycled into gravel for roads.

I believe Helen is referring to our conversation at Greenbuild. I noted that in Massachusetts you can get the annual reports for each C&D waste facility from the DEP website but the state does not consider any landfill-dependant application to be recycling (ADC or roadbase) and the two things are reported as a combination. There is no public reporting that separates ADC form landfill roadbase so you have to ask facilities to pull out ADC separately. Perhaps not suprisingly most now indicate very little ADC but high landfill road base so you end up with a letter from the faciity saying 70 or 80% reycling of commingled but a state report that says less than 50% recycling for source separated and commingled. It is great that we have publicly available state reporting in MA (RI to the south doesn't even have state reporting) but it would be great if the state reporting on waste diversion matched the LEED definition. Another discrepency is that the state allows facilities to exclude material transferred to another facility with the thinking that its fate will be included in that facility's report, but LEED wants you to include the transferred material in your facility calculations.

ADC refers to cover material that is not made of earthy material that is spread out over the active face of a municipal solid waste dump. It is good to note that it is not calculated as part of waste diversion.