How Drones Can Benefit Landfills: Volume and Cover Surveys

How can drones benefit landfills?

Drones for landfills mainly save survey time. A landfill operator needs to know how much material sits in stockpiles, how much airspace remains and whether the cover over closed areas is holding. Those answers used to come from crews walking the site with survey instruments. A drone can fly the same ground in a fraction of the time and return the data as a three dimensional model that the team can measure.

The biggest benefit is that a survey stops taking a crew's whole day. According to an engineering firm that surveys landfills, technicians might once take an entire day to survey a site. The same firm says a 200-acre site can now be surveyed within 4 hours, including only 1 hour of drone flying time. The people still plan the flight, check the results and write the report, but the long walk across the site is largely gone.

Drones for landfills also reduce how often people work near active equipment. The same firm notes that surveyors do not enter active areas or approach operating machinery. For operators, that means fewer people crossing haul roads and working faces during busy hours. Our team helps you decide if a drone fits your site, sets it up and trains your staff to run the routine flights.

What does the survey problem look like at a landfill today?

Most landfills run the same cycle every working day. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, operators compact and cover waste frequently with several inches of soil, and that practice helps control odor, litter, insects and rodents. Each cover placement creates a new surface that someone eventually has to measure and record.

The measuring is where the time goes. Stockpiles of cover soil and recovered material grow and shrink with each week's work, and their volumes matter for reporting, for planning the next cell and for checking what the site has actually received. Covered areas also need checks for thin spots, ponding and erosion. Doing this on foot across a large site means hours of walking, carrying equipment and working around trucks and dozers.

The number of sites facing this work is large. The EPA's Landfill Methane Outreach Program database is a repository for more than 2,600 municipal solid waste landfills that are accepting waste or closed. Many of those operators run the same walking survey cycle, and most of them have the same question about how to get the work done faster.

Which areas of a landfill does a drone survey cover?

A drone survey covers the whole footprint of the site, but the most useful flights focus on the areas where volume or condition changes from one survey to the next. Those are the places where a walking crew loses the most time and where a mistake costs the most later.

The list below shows the areas that usually matter most. Each one gets its own flight plan, with the flight height and image overlap adjusted to the surface. Tall stockpiles and steep faces may need extra overlap so the sides of the pile are captured, not just the top.

How does a drone survey work day to day?

The routine is simple, but it depends on discipline. A pilot flies a planned grid over the site, usually on a fixed schedule so the results can be compared with earlier surveys. The images are processed into three dimensional maps and orthomosaics, which are flat, georeferenced photo maps that show the surface as it looks from above.

Comparison is what makes the data useful. According to the same engineering firm, quarterly drone surveys are processed into 3D maps and then compared quarter to quarter to calculate the volume difference in cubic yards. The operator sees how much material moved, not just what a pile looks like from the edge.

Flights are scheduled around the working site. The aim is to fly when the active face is quiet or when a survey window is open, so the drone is not in the way of trucks, dozers and compactors. Keeping the flight time consistent from quarter to quarter also keeps the comparison honest.

How accurate are drone volume numbers?

Accuracy is the first question engineers ask. A 2023 peer-reviewed review in the journal Drones reported landfill tests. In an 82,000 square meter landfill, a drone survey processed with photogrammetry software showed a volumetric error of 0.8 percent when compared with terrestrial laser scanning. A 53,628 square meter landfill in the same review showed an error of 0.3 percent.

The review also reports that a multi-agent aerial-ground robot system reduced the average volume estimation error for a large landfill to 0.27 percent. For an operator, the lesson is that the result depends on the method and the setup, not on the drone alone. Results from a well-run flight can be checked against a ground survey on a sample of points.

The same review states that ground control points are required for accurate stockpile volume estimation from photogrammetry. A drone equipment guide reports that surveys can reach 2 to 5 cm accuracy using RTK or PPK GPS and photogrammetry software. That figure is vendor-reported, so the safest approach is to confirm the setup and the control points before relying on the numbers.

What changes for the field crew?

A drone does not remove people from the survey. The work shifts from walking and reading instruments to planning flights, placing and checking control points, and reviewing the results. A small crew can keep the survey schedule, and the people who know the site still decide what the numbers mean.

Labor is where the savings come from. A survey that once took a full day now runs about 4 hours on a 200-acre site, according to the engineering firm's account, and only about 1 hour of that is flying. The hours recovered from walking can go to the working face, the cover and the maintenance list that always runs behind.

The wider workforce picture helps set expectations. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 94,170 refuse and recyclable material collectors were employed in 2025, and average weekly hours for all employees in the sector were 42.3 in May 2026. A careers site summarizing an O*NET survey reports that 64 percent of refuse and recyclable material collectors usually work more than 40 hours a week. Field crews are already stretched, so the hours a drone returns to the crew are worth protecting.

What can a drone not do?

Drones have real limits, and an operator should hear them before the first flight. A drone industry guide notes that strong winds, rain, poor lighting, dust, battery endurance and active construction environments may affect survey quality. Dust and wind are common at landfills, so the flight calendar needs room for days when the drone simply cannot fly.

A drone also does not replace the engineer. The same guide says drone surveys complement conventional surveying methods rather than replacing professional engineering expertise. The volume figures still need a ground check, and any permit comparison still needs a licensed professional to review and sign it. Airborne LiDAR, according to the 2023 review, needs more processing data than terrestrial scanning, so that option brings its own workload.

Which landfills are a good fit?

Fit depends on how much the site changes between surveys. Large active landfills with frequent cover work and busy stockpile yards gain the most, because their volumes move every week. A closed site with little change may need surveys less often, and the drone may be used only for periodic condition checks.

Landfill gas programs are another fit. According to the EPA's LMOP state table, with data as of September 2024, the database lists 2,639 landfills, 542 operational landfill gas energy projects and 444 candidate landfills. Sites with gas collection systems have extra infrastructure on the cover, and imagery can support those condition checks alongside the volume survey.

How do we get started?

Start with a free site assessment. We are a US commercial robot integrator, and we begin by looking at your site, the survey routine you already run and the areas that change the most. We then recommend the right robot for the site, which may be a drone, a different robot or no robot at all if the site does not need one.

If a drone fits, the robot is leased through financing, deployed and integrated into your survey workflow, and your team is trained to run the routine flights. We provide service nationwide, so help is available wherever your site is. The payment comes in the quote, which is prepared after the free site assessment.

Keep your engineer involved from the first day. Ask us to run the first survey alongside your current method, so your engineer can compare the numbers before you change any routine. That comparison is the fastest way to build confidence in the results.