> Another option is to put it to beneficial use to create heat or even electricity. The Puente Hills landfill I showed earlier has a gas-to-energy facility that’s been running since 1987, and even though the landfill is now closed, it currently provides enough electricity to power around 70,000 homes.
And towards the end
> Landfills seem like an environmental blight, but really, properly designed ones play a huge role in making sure waste products don’t end up in our soil or air or water. It’s not possible to landfill waste everywhere... But my point is: landfills are a surprisingly low-impact way to manage solid waste in a lot of cases. I hope the future is a utopia where all the stuff we make maintains its beneficial value forever, but for now, I am thankful for the sanitary engineers and the other professions involved in safely and economically dealing with our trash so we don’t have to.
I love reading about landfills. I wish more environmentalists would be excited about engineering solving environmental ills and relied less on knee-jerk reactions.
I genuinely use landfills, especially with plastic waste, as shibboleth to know whether I'm talking to somebody who is an environmentalist or somebody who is an "environmentalist."
Anyone who thinks recycling plastic is some sort of normative good because "waste is bad" clearly hasn't put any thought into what environmental issues need to be focused on right now.
Waste is inherently problematic, regardless of how we manage it. While burning plastic for energy might seem like a solution, it's not ideal. We can generate clean electricity through other means that are cheaper and less polluting. Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change. Ultimately, the best approach is to minimize waste generation in the first place, as this prevents both environmental harm and the need for costly and imperfect solutions.
> Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change
This is not axiomatic. The gases from the incineration can be put into productive use (cf. Vienna heating and providing hot water off of their incinerator), and the harmful stuff can be filtered (cf. Vienna where the incinerator is in a dense urban area, and an architectural masterpiece).
Yes they exist and they work. However to build them requires stringent regulations to make them a viable cost solution.
If it is ok to blow out the toxic smoke the high end solution will not be built.
The best thing is still avoiding waste.
> However to build them requires stringent regulations to make them a viable cost solution
In the US, the EPA has had regulations around this since the late 70's; it's a cost of doing business at this point, not a wild new theoretical rule framework.
It does seem like we are producing an unnecessarily large amount of waste, but the last sentence does not come of as constructive to me, because it doesn't offer any concrete action we can take towards a goal of reducing waste. Instead if comes of as sidestepping the issue of dealing with the waste we have.
I'll pitch in. Standardize on a strict set of allowed mixtures of plastics (and possibly even colors!). Not just "PP", "ABS" and so on, but exact formulas.
Also, keep the set of allowed formules small.
This will serve two purposes, first, allow plastics to be actually recycled to a greater extent. Now, plastics are very much "mystery" items.
Second, it will reduce the amount of harmful and toxic additives in plastics.
Somehow we also need to stop producing so much junk, electronics which is not durable, packing material within packing material and so on. The externalised costs of so many things are huge, we need to somehow de-externalise the costs.
Prohibit importing non-compliant goods. Do compliance checking in ports and punish local importers, both companies and their owners/executives, for noncompliance.
I don't think the political will to do this exists. From the perspective of the state we care way more about drugs than we do about plastics, but people have been ordering asthma drugs, psychedelics, stimulants, steroids, and retinoids from Indian pharmacies successfully for at least a decade now, which makes me think that it's a hard problem to solve at scale.
I don't think the political will exists do much of anything which is hard, definitely not to coördinate laws on plastics. But to compare import of stimulants to plastics... I don't think it's the same thing. Nobody is going to gray import a plastic toothbrush from China just to get that extra cadmium.
It comes down to the 3 Rs: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. There's a reason Recycle is the last word in that mantra. It's the most expensive of the three things a person can do. The other two are about habits, and those really are things you have to just decide you want to change.
However what I couldn't find was how much overall waste consumers create vs other sources, just this:
And it seems to imply that consumer behavior has little direct effect on the overall amount of waste we humans produce. Like, how many people would have to stop drinking canned beverages to see a decrease in bauxite tailings? Probably an unrealistic amount.
Another way of looking at it, is that your vision is not constructive, because you wave away the real solution as "not actionable". Parent does not propose concrete action, but neither do you. We can have meaningful discussion without everything having to be accompanied by a five-step plan.
For actionable reduction of waste, just look at how Europe has a comparable life style as the US, whilst using less resources and emitting less GHG equivalent. Not placing the EU on a pedestal. Just saying that reduction is not just possible, it's being done, as we speak. But it requires changes and is for sure a harder sell than "no need to change any habits, technology will save us".
Many if not all "large" (50k) cities in Sweden burn their trash for district heating, we filter most bad stuff out with filters, it still releases CO2, but burning it means it won't start producing methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas.
Europe also doesn't tax "light trucks" as if they were bicycles nor force people into cars to survive.
The American mindset "I do what I do and you do what you do" worked in the 60s and 70s when people were unaware they're fucking the planet (as hard as they are), but I can't help but look down on wasteful people, they're subsidized by people doing their part (or continents doing their part)
> Anyone who thinks recycling plastic is some sort of normative good because "waste is bad" clearly hasn't put any thought into what environmental issues need to be focused on right now.
Thing is, we need to find out ways to remove, reduce and recycle plastics as soon as possible. The US may have enough place to place landfills without impacting anyone, but densely settled Europe does not - we're having the requirement that landfills can only take up 10% of residential waste by 2035, the rest has to be either burned or recycled by then. And for that, we need technology to actually recycle the plastic waste to be ready at industrial scale, so we need to focus on that right now. Sorting trash, separating modern multi layer plastics (sometimes a dozen layers of different materials!), recovering polymer source compounds, a lot of that is still open topics that need to be researched.
Additionally, landfills are already bad for the environment - Grady points out the issue in his video indirectly: the birds eat the food waste from all the packaging and end up distributing (micro)plastic waste across the environment surrounding the landfills, which then ends up in the groundwater and surface water bodies. Also the birds pick up and distribute pathogens from the decomposing waste.
Side note: we also need plastics recycling to reduce our dependency on fresh oil products used to manufacture them. Again, the US has it a bit easier due to self-sufficient domestic oil production, but Europe does not.
Europe is not densely populated. There is plenty of empty space, they just have decided to place rules on how that space is used.
The US east of the Mississippi and the far west coast has similar (lower, but not by much) population density. However there is a lot of space in Alaska and west of the Mississippi that almost nobody lives in and that brings down the density measures.
How do you feel about plasma gasification to ensure robust destruction of anything non-inert? I love landfills too! But humans are various shades of tricky, lazy, cost adverse, and untrustworthy (think limited liability) as it pertains to long term custodianship and management of things bad for people and the environment.
TLDR You must engineer around the human. Potentially harmful physical matter that requires waste management? Default to destruction vs storage, if at all possible. You have now defaulted to success instead of failure.
The big problem with plastic waste is getting it to the landfill (or incinerator) in the first place.
Once the plastics are captured, I don't see too much benefit in incinerating it beyond freeing up landfill space. But that's really not a major issue as you can always dig a deeper and wider landfill.
In fact, a major downside of incinerating the plastic is you end up with greenhouse gasses as a byproduct.
Certainly, you are generating some greenhouse gasses in the process, which is a trade off to ensure immediate waste destruction. To note, you will have to flare methane from the landfill in perpetuity when landfilled. If one is so inclined, internalize the cost of direct air carbon capture into the cost of waste disposal for those emissions.
> Municipal solid waste (MSW) landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, accounting for approximately 14.4 percent of these emissions in 2022. The methane emissions from MSW landfills in 2022 were approximately equivalent to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from more than 24.0 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year or the CO2 emissions from more than 13.1 million homes’ energy use for one year. At the same time, methane emissions from MSW landfills represent a lost opportunity to capture and use a significant energy resource.
TLDR Whether landfills or gasification, you are paying the piper regardless for emissions. Don't trust the human, pull forward the disposal.
While I might be wrong, I seriously doubt the plastics creating the methane emissions you are referring to. That is almost certainly the organic matter.
I have no idea how you think plasma gasification -- requiring extreme amounts of energy -- is in any way helpful to our current environmental concerns. Unless we somehow magically start relying on 100% renewables, it seems like landfills are far-and-away the best way to go until we are able to grapple with climate change.
Money. Landfills aren’t cheap to operate and burning also reduces transportation costs.
Incineration ends up being quite profitable in isolation. Take stuff worth negative X$ per ton and turn it into a smaller pile of stuff still worth negative X$ per ton. Generating power is a useful side effect, but not the main reason.
By the end of this year, the world will be deploying 660GW of solar annually. Within 18 months, that figure rises to 1TW/year (based on current manufacturing ramp trajectories).
On the contrary, I’m unsure how you think we don’t have the clean power for this, not even accounting for the power you can generate from the syngas that is a byproduct of the process. The process is not energy positive, but it’s also not wildly net negative due to the energy content of the matter being gasified.
> Plasma gasification uses around 800 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of power per ton of municipal solid waste (MSW).
Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve. We're burning obscene amounts of nat gas, petroleum, and even coal currently. Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity.
> Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve.
Well, landfill management is something you could (mostly) only run whenever you have excess (solar) power on the grid. So it's an excellent consumer for intermittent generators.
Think when these plants would come online. Think when solar and storage will be up to speed on the grid. Skate to where the puck is going to be. Think in systems. To say no today because of current state today is irrational and ignores the data. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth within ~30-60 minutes to power all of humanity for a year, and an enormous global clean energy flywheel is coming up to speed (first solar, with batteries right behind).
I've been trying to advocate for slowing climate change since about 2000. I've been to enough city council meetings, and seen enough government promises simply abandoned to know that this is a deeply naive way to just "expect" the world to suddenly become rational.
Let's stop the actively bleeding artery that is actively killing us before we even start to worry some efficiency gains we could get by asking the surgeon to do two things at once.
This is the difference between an environmentalist and an "environmentalist."
We need to fix climate change now. Get to carbon neutral now. Literally nothing else matters much.
It’s not human rationality, it’s cold, hard economics (scoped to renewables and storage uptake). Climate change is already happening, and there is nothing you can do to stop it immediately, just as you will get killed stepping in front of a freight train. You can only build systems that can attempt to outrace it to slow it down (various efforts to achieve net zero in a domain), and then eventually reverse it (an efficient, scalable carbon sequestration solution to existing atmospheric carbon load, powered by clean energy) over the next ~100-150 years.
A substantial portion of the duck curve problem is overproduction at no-peak hours. Plasma gasification can take that excess strain off the grid and put it to useful work, while even providing a by-product that you can burn in the event that all of your renewables are underperforming, reducing the risk of relying on renewables.
It is literally (part of) a solution to the problem you're bringing up.
> Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity.
That’s not realistic. You can and probably will have a complete excess of renewable energy on bright and windy days that is well beyond electrical demand, and at the same time rely on baseload power during still nights. Energy storage helps even things out, and plasma gasification is one possible way to store that energy.
Point taken. Though I do wonder how much of the methane released is from plastic decomposition and how much of it is from food/biomaterial decomposition. I'd naively assume the primary emission would come from readily decomposable materials and that most plastics would remain fairly stable for a lot longer than yesterday's half eaten hamburger.
Indeed, waste sorting might improve the situation, but all available evidence indicates there is no will to do this (caveats being parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics, and anywhere else diverse multi stream waste management can be effectively operated), which leads me to believe gasification is the superior path (with a bypass stream for glass, brick, earth, rock, and metals, primarily to prevent process efficiency reduction during gasification but also for reuse of those materials).
Hardly the best solution, but I argue the least worst solution. Landfilling is just too much risk considering leaching from lining failures (putting water tables and aquifers at risk from permanent contamination) and the lifetime of methane destruction that must be accounted for.
I'm generally down on sorting unless you have a lot of one particular type of waste. If you are not generating a full truck worth of that type of waste every week sorting efforts mean more trucks (since the truck with compartments for each type cannot hold as much waste because of the compartments, and also it has to go empty when one compartment fills). Combine that with the need verify the sorting was done correctly and it isn't worth it. We have made trade progress on automated sorting machines that solve a lot of problems - lets instead ban things that cannot be automatically sorted.
What has been successful in my city, Portland, is separating the food and yard waste. The food and yard wastes are composted. Composting produces methane, but there is a trial to capture the methane which is burned as natural gas.
Capturing methane from compost should be easier than whole landfill. It also keeps the organics instead of losing them.
A wrinkle I read somewhere - organics in traditional landfills kept toxic materials like heavy metals "locked up", less risk of such stuff leeching out in the ground water.
Reads like it's worth than just straight up incineration. At least with current technologies. (Apart from perhaps the installation on that American military ship. Maybe. But that's just because they have unusual requirements.)
Interesting point I hadn't thought of! Had previously thought that obviously things should go straight in the ground to avoid CO2 emissions and hadn't thought about decomposition.
Not OP but long been intrigued by possibilities in this domain (ever since Changing World Technologies promised to, um, change the world -- not plasma based but same proposition).
I've yet to see a truly viable solution in this space that can economically compete; it would be nice to see it happen.
“Recycling” sometimes (often) includes burning it in waste-to-energy incinerators, which emit CO2 and other pollutants just as if the original oil had been burned directly instead of taking a detour via a plastic product. It would be better to put waste plastic in a carbon storage device, a.k.a. a landfill. At least that way we are caching a little bit of easy-access fuel to help re-bootstrap civilization in case of global catastrophe.
1st world business pays 3rd world business to take their plastic for "recycling" (mandatory air quotes). The 1st world gets credit for being a responsible environmentalist. The 3rd world business then dumps the plastic in a river or other convenient but totally not enviro-friendly dumping spot.
It's sort of an open conspiracy at this point. Putting your plastic in the trash may be better for the environment overall.
To self-checkout at my local grocery store, I have to clear a reminder that any soft plastic recycled through the store over the last x years was in fact not recycled and stockpiled around Australia in warehouses “waiting” for it to become economically feasible (it never did)
REDcycle (effectively Australia’s lone large-scale soft plastic recycling effort) folded and it was a big brouhaha
Ironically, just from this comment I get the impression that you are misinformed about environmental issues.
Good job taking down that "waste is bad" straw person.
But what about the EU or the EPAs (or a range of other relevant institutions) waste management hierarchy?
It would appear you've just placed almost the entire waste management industry, its regulators, and related academia in the "don't know what they are talking about" pile, which seems somewhat bold.
It was so frustrating when a dude at work was trying to bust my balls for not using the recycling for my plastic bottle. I didn’t have the energy or patience to explain to him how our city has single stream recycling and there was 100% chance that bottle was being shipped overseas, dumped in the ocean or something else way more stupid than just being buried in the city landfill.
Based on the single stream comment, I'm going to assume you're describing an experience in North America, and your assumptions are pretty off base for PET bottles.
Figure 1 in the linked paper gives the raw numbers for where PET bottles end up. [1]
Yep, I've worked in recycling for 6 years and am well aware that there's a lot of broken parts. My point was that if a PET bottle goes into a single stream system, the recycling industry is pretty good at capturing it, baling it, and selling it to a plastics processor. That processor will clean it, pellet it, and sell it as rPET. 85% of PET bottles that end up in curbside single stream end up getting recycled. I'd like that number higher, but it's where things are at the moment. Throw a bottle in the trash, it's getting landfilled/burned. Throw it in recycling, it's most likely getting recycled.
In Australia the whole hard VS soft plastic blew up recently. The REDcycle brand by mayor supermarkets was shown to just collect and store the soft plastic in large warehouses.
For bottles there is a refund scheme.
I worked in an office with recycling bins where everything was just gathered up and thrown in the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. It wasn't just our cleaning people, either: from my desk I could see the only two parking lot entrances and while the garbage truck came weekly, never once did I see a recycling truck.
You might not be seeing what you think you're seeing, WRT everything going into the same truck. Lots of municipalities (e.g. mine) undertake resource extraction from commingled waste & recycling streams. It isn't the same everywhere, but sometimes it's more efficient to just put the entire waste stream through the same extraction process to recover recyclable materials. The separate receptacles at the client side are obviously redundant, but sometimes those remain from legacy processing arrangements.
I heard this as well. There is a recycling plant that you need to run anyway to separate the waste/rubbish so you might as well use it to get the plastics and cans out. I think there is an argument that while the machine can do it well avoiding the machine does have benefits.
This also doesn't work for paper or cardboard as it would get soiled from what I understand.
The real benefit of separate sources is those machines cannot handle things like plastic bags (they get caught in rollers and jam the machine), dirty diapers, and other such weird stuff. Once you get those out of the stream you may as well separate a few other things that are not recyclable so you need less of the expensive separation machines. However you always need sorting machines - people will make mistakes and so you need to verify everything really is recyclable.
likewise at a large office building I'm familiar with
it was said that because employees/building tenants contaminate the recycling bins with unrecyclable items including food waste, there was no point to do anything but combine it into the trash
however the recycling bins were kept presumably to keep people from protesting about trashing everything, and the memory of this news quickly faded
the same goes for recycling bins in downtown toronto - they're so contaminated that they go straight to landfill
PepsiCo did the same thing. Custodians dumped everything into the same bags. Leadership confirmed it all went to the dump. Still had a personal recycle bin crammed under every desk.
More likely it costs the building cleaners time & money. No economic benefit for them so they don't bother even if overall there might be a benefit. Incentives need to align.
Piling our waste on/in the ground has 1000x less harmful side effects than the waste we burn and spray into the air from hundreds of millions different locations.
Yeah, the environmentalists are the problem here. /s
Anyway, the simple obvious solution (after reduce, reuse, recycle) is molten salt oxidation.
> Molten salt oxidation is a non-flame, thermal process that destroys all organic materials while simultaneously retaining inorganic and hazardous components in the melt. It is used as either hazardous waste treatment (with air) or energy harvesting similar to coal and wood gasification (with steam).
> I wish more environmentalists would be excited about engineering solving environmental ills and relied less on knee-jerk reactions.
Are many ... not? Seems like a weird complaint, I haven't encountered an "environmentalist" (whatever that even is) that is against landfills in general or the engineering of it. I'd rather we didn't produce as much garbage as we are and I hate that our city makes me wrap my garbage in more garbage otherwise they won't pick it up. But I still find the engineering impressive.
Garbage Lasagna’: Dumps Are a Big Driver of Warming, Study Says
Don't gaslight me and tell me environmentalists applaud all solutions to environmental issues equally. They have their own solutions, and activists often force things like recycling at all costs, even though it means shipping it across the world on polluting boats and having some other country dump it in their rivers.
Studies researching the negative effects of landfills are the necessary first step in making them environmentally friendly. How else would we know what to do?
Perhaps whatever you have in mind has to do with people's desire to keep more garbage out of the landfill in the first place? I don't know.
> They have their own solutions, and activists often force things like recycling at all costs, even though it means shipping it across the world on polluting boats and having some other country dump it in their rivers.
I don't know what that's referring to but where I live, the vast majority of recycling does not leave the province. So I can't really empathize with the example, I'm aware of the trope though. Perhaps this is one of the things that's much different in the US and less so in other places.
I think the search results are not representative of what actual humans think.
I guess I consider myself an environmentalist, in that it's a relatively high priority to me to avoid causing unnecessary environmental destruction. I regularly take some effort to dispose of hazardous waste appropriately, etc, but I normally don't go around announcing my environmental priorities. It's not that I don't care, it's just that talking about it is usually not much fun, and is unlikely to help anything.
I think my attitude on the matter is pretty common in my area.
> They have their own solutions, and activists often force things like recycling at all costs, even though it means shipping it across the world on polluting boats and having some other country dump it in their rivers.
That's a side effect of (way too) lax regulations and the externalities of disposing of plastics not being paid for!
Germany and a few other EU countries for example force any introducer of "recyclable" packaging to pay into a system to fund recycling stream collection, sorting and disposals ("Grüner Punkt" [1]). Yes, it's not perfect, way too much of our plastics waste still is exported to poor countries, but the ban on that is already law that will come into force in a few years [2].
OP is thinking of people who bumper sticker "Believe Science" but never took science beyond grade school or a required "science for poets" class. People who think "chemicals are bad, but organic is good".
These are not bad people, but they don't know what they're talking about enough to form their own opinions, but they don't know that.
You're perhaps talking about the downstream effects of sunsetting nuclear energy but even since then, the ratio of renewable energy has only increased. So what do you mean exactly?
They barely made it into parliament at all most elections, hovering around 5% in 2002 and 2006 and well below 10% after that until 2021. I think you might be giving them too much credit.
Sorry, it was vegan gas, not organic. They stopped labelling it that way, obviously, after being thoroughly ridiculed. It’s difficult to find references to it now, but some articles from that time (2020-2022 I think) remain, e.g. https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/decouple/greenpeace-sel...
There might be some traces of it in the Internet archive.
I get why people laught at it but let’s not forget anaerobic digestion reactors do produce methane from manure and last centuries oleoindustrie was using tons of cetacean fat, so vegan gaz is not litterally meaningless.
Environmentalists in the US are against nuclear power, solar power, geothermal energy. They are against high-rise buildings and pro-golf-courses. They can be safely ignored since their stated goals and their actions can only be concordant if one assumes they're idiots or enemies.
> ...can only be concordant if one assumes they're idiots. It's unlikely they are...
Why would you say that it's unlikely? That's a very strange assumption to make - Hanlon has a whole razor about that. They're absolutely idiots. Or, put more politely and precisely, they're operating from intuition - "nature good, technology and/or human development bad" - without thinking about whether the ultimate consequences of what they're pushing for will properly advance their cause.
Can you please point me to a single environmentalist who is against nuclear power, solar power, geothermal energy, and high-rise buildings but is for golf courses?
I'm sure you can find plenty of people who check one or more of those boxes, but I'm interested to know if there's anyone who checks enough of them to be self-contradictory.
If you can't point me to one person who holds all beliefs, then you're falling for the classic fallacy of treating a group of individuals as if they were a hive mind. See comments about how "HN" both believes in unrestricted capitalism and supports privacy regulations.
What, 3 out of 4 isn't good enough for you? The high rise part of the comment is an example of "one of these things is not like the others" in that of course people all about the money will like high rises.
It also doesn't matter what you think Donald Trump does or does not believe. He has a 4 year track record, and is on record making comments about what he will do if elected again.
The Trump administration backed away from policies meant to reduce carbon emissions, and promoted policies meant to increase energy independence through increased reliance on and use of fossil fuels. The same administration also rolled back nearly 100 separate environmental regulations. It supported developing energy reserves on federally protected land, including national forests and near national monuments.
Trump himself has regularly expressed skepticism over anthropogenic global warming.
I’m… genuinely not sure you can reconcile this with a claim of him being an environmentalist on any axis.
I modified my original comment to replace "people" with "environmentalist" in the first sentence to clarify what I meant—you probably read it before I did that. Sorry.
Just so we’re clear, you’re asserting that Donald Trump is an environmentalist?
So we’re on the same page, Wiktionary defines that as: one who advocates for the protection of the environment and biosphere from misuse from human activity.
Fiscal conservatives in the US are against raising taxes, decreasing military spending, or cutting social security. They can be safely ignored since their stated actions can only be concordant if one assumes they are idiots.
It turns out, if you take a wide and varied group, put all of the ideas that any of them have in a bag and shake it up, then assign all those ideas to all of them, you can claim them idiots. Or bad faith actors.
When really it’s the cheap rhetorical trick that is the real sign of idiocy.
Actually most that I know are all in that bucket. The trick is that this raises the deficits which they then get to blame on the next Democrat in office. It’s a fun party trick.
Say what you will about “tax and spend” liberals but it’s a sight better than political faction that spends even more but forgets entirely about the revenue end of the equation.
The counter for that is that taxes change economic activity and so raising taxes doesn't bring in as much revenue as you would think because some activities are no longer worth doing (profitable) after paying higher taxes. (not to mention people looking for tax deductions).
Of course taxes are not a revenue optimization problem to those pointing the above out. It is the tax and spenders that should be looking at the above and are not (other than childish claims that trickle down doesn't work)
The gas is generated by the chemistry of the stuff that was put there. Moving the stuff there takes a lot of energy, but everything sitting there mainly just needs a pump and treatment system.
This is besides the point because environmentalists (who were carped at above) tend to seek to reduce the amount of trash that needs to be shipped off to somewhere.
reducing trash is useful. Recycling of trash is sometimes worse than throwing it in a landfill. There are many different plastics and many different grades of used paper so there is no one size fits all. People often want to think I recycle so I'm good - but effort is needed to reduce packaging and things that break early.
I think their point was the delivery of that garbage over time is subject to entropy, and from first principles probably took more energy consumption than a sustained 84MW over the time period the landfill is a viable source for energy.
I know nothing about landfill engineering here, to be frank, simply being a grease for good online gearing.
A single truck requires more energy to operate in a year than 70k homes do!? I find this extremely difficult to believe.
As far as I can tell, the EIA [1] suggests the average home uses 10,791 kWh a year. A gallon of gasoline contains ~33.7 kWh of energy per the EPA/Wikipedia [2].
This would mean that a single truck would be burning 70,000 * 10,791 / 33.7 = 22,414,540 gallons of gasoline a year or 61,409 gallons a day. Seems like wild bullshit to me.
you should note that a gas engine does not convert all that 33kWh of energy into mechanical energy. a gasoline engine has about a 25% conversion into mechanical energy. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml . diesel might be a bit better than a car but it's city driving by nature.
just heat alone is the largest waste product in a car or truck
A tank of gas is still a tank of gas, regardless of what it gets used for.
Energy in = energy out + waste + energy stored
The truck is barely storing anything on average, so what you've described is energy out and waste, but the calculations to compare the truck to the landfill was done on Energy in - the amount of gas that it needs to be filled with.
For the same total job, you could raise or lower how quickly the truck goes through a tank of gas, but that variance has already been averaged out
According to [1] an electric garbage truck traveling 15,000 miles a year uses about 38,960 kWh. An 84 MW power plant produces 84,000 kWh every hour, or enough to power more than two trucks for an entire year. Even if we assume that the diesel equivalent uses a hundred times as much it's still a tiny fraction of what the plant in TFA produces.
Couple issues with that comparison: 15k seemed low given I drive ~10k a year and I don't work a job that uses my car, so I checked refuse trucks drive on average more like 25k miles per year and there are many servicing a single dump. Also most garbage trucks are still diesel so you've got to 5-10x that power usage number and there's all the vehicles used to compact and move the trash once it reaches the landfill which are also (currently) pretty exclusively diesel powered (think bulldozers and soil compactors with some excavators thrown in).
A 500 hp semi truck engine running at peak power is like 350 kw, so 84 megawatts (84,000 kw) is more than 200 of those engines at full throttle at all times.
This is my argument against recycling. It is not sustainable to recover a tiny amount of energy when balanced with the extra diesel-guzzling truck traversing the neighborhood. All so we can think we're "making a difference" by keeping plastic bottles out of a landfill.
> It is not sustainable to recover a tiny amount of energy when balanced with the extra diesel-guzzling truck traversing the neighborhood.
It’s a good thing we have electric motors, then. An additional benefit is that they are much less likely to wake you up when they get your bins at 5am.
Exactly. Recycling shouldn't be implemented if it uses dirty energy. There should be accounting and accountability. Don't pretend an operation is green unless it really is.
I think people generally want to do what they feel is right. The problem lies in 1) the use of propaganda to force blanket solutions to what they pose as the problem and 2) not using evidence-based scientific methods.
for 1) various groups show heart-breaking images of wildlife suffering due to pollution, then work to mobilize the outrage into their solution. for 2), recycling programs should have had metrics, such as lbs of plastic "saved" from the landfill, energy saved from collecting cans, but also the counterpoints such as "tons of CO2 emitted by recycling trucks", and "dollars removed from poor people when local cash-for-cans businesses are shuttered". If the data show they emit more CO2 equivalent than they save, then they should concede that the program has failed. If the program needs a jump-start before it is "ecologically profitable", they should say so and agree to cancel the program if their goals aren't met by X date.
All the garbage produced in the U.S. for the next 1000 years could fit into a landfill 100 yards deep and 35 miles across on each side.
That is, landfills take a trivial amount of space.
Putting stuff in a landfill is way better for global warming since its not burned, the carbon is buried.
Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment. The plastic pollution in the ocean is from developing countries and things unrelated to our soda bottles.
Modern landfills (as this article describes) are really efficient and have basically no leakage to the environment. As mentioned, you can make beautiful parks on a closed landfill with no smell. Technology is amazing.
> Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment.
Here in Sweden less than 0.5% of household waste goes to landfill. Almost everything is burned in co-generation plants for district heating, with pretty sophisticated exhaust gas treatment. Unfortunately most of the plastic waste that goes into the recycling bins also end up there in the end, with only about 10% currently being actually recycled (mostly it's PET that gets recycled, AFAIK).
edit: My 10% figure is some years old; plastic numbers are actually much better now! These days it's about 35%. For glass, paper and metal the same figures are all around 80% though so plastic still has a long way to go.
What’s completely crazy about that is that there’s people spending serious money trying to build carbon sequestration systems while other people are turning an inert and stable form of carbon back into carbon dioxide in the name of sustainability.
Would you rather we'd burn peat (which is also sequestered carbon) instead? Because that's what we used to do. We need to stay warm in winter one way or another.
In the 1950's we thought that in the future we'd have nuclear cogeneration plants. There was one such plant (Ågesta) in commercial operation, but it closed in the mid 1970's.
edit: also, to your point about sequestration: it's in actual and literal fact the same people. The Stockholm municipal energy company burns a lot of waste (and also woodchips and other renewables) for district heating. That same company also recently closed a big carbon sequestration deal with Microsoft: https://carboncredits.com/microsoft-and-stockholm-exergi-str....
Hopefully in the relatively near future, heat storage systems (like the sand batteries talked about in [0]) can do long term storage of heat energy from renewables and heating can provided relatively carbon free through the winter. For now though, I'd agree that the burning is not that big a deal.
Investments in long range, high wattage cabling to connect grids might be useful. There's plenty of sun light further south.
Of course, you need to run the numbers to make sure it actually makes sense. Both economically and from a resource point of view. Cables ain't free to build nor maintain.
But there's probably a trade to be made with the carbon capture people to sell them trash plastic to bury (or to have them pay you to bury your plastic. No need to actually ship the actual plastic around.)
> long-range, high-wattage cabling to connect grids
As the parent comment is on Sweden... That's a major discussion in our current politics and energy development landscape.
Not south, though... but north. 60% of Sweden's energy production is from hydroelectric dams far in the north, but most populations are down south. So, expanding this connection is the most imminently useful infrastructure investment that could be made. But that wouldn't be enough if we also use that power for heating.
The problem is that Sweden's largest energy demand is heating cold, windless winters, while the rest of Europe is also cold. Burning stuff to be warm can only really be replaced by nuclear power, which Sweden has been politically opposed to. Burning trash instead of coal is a pretty decent upgrade from that perspective.
> Investments in long range, high wattage cabling to connect grids might be useful. There's plenty of sun light further south.
With the energy loss over the distance needed (you basically need southern Italy/southern Spain for any reliable sun during the Swedish winter), that becomes too expensive to be practical.
Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean can take out multiple countries at once, instead of Spain/Italy being able to rely on their northern neighbours in such a scenario.
> With the energy loss over the distance needed (you basically need southern Italy/southern Spain for any reliable sun during the Swedish winter), that becomes too expensive to be practical.
Can't be worse than that cable from Australia to Singapore?
> Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean can take out multiple countries at once, instead of Spain/Italy being able to rely on their northern neighbours in such a scenario.
That's what peaker plants are for. There's no reason to go for 100% purity. Getting to 99% renewables gets you 99% of the way.
Some numbers: Swedish electricity production in 2023 was 163 TWh. It's for all practical purposes 100% renewable or nuclear, with a mix of approximately 40/30/20/10 hydro/nuclear/wind/other, where "other" contains 2% solar and the rest is pretty much just electricity byproducts from district heating.
Also in 2023, district heating delivered a total of 53 TWh to customers. About two thirds of this came from waste and biofuels, specifically 47% renewable biofuels (mostly woodchips, bark and other forestry industry byproducts) and 20% waste. The remaining third came from an eclectic mix of inputs such as industrial waste heat (7,5%), heat pumps (5% net, that is after the electricity consumption has been subtracted), exhaust gas condensation (11%), biogas from landfills and compost (2%), fossil fuels (2,5%) and various other stuff. Turns out my info about peat was kinda out of date; it's been almost entirely phased out now.
Average CO2 emissions for the electricity generation was 41g CO2 equivalents per kWh, and for district heating about 55 g/kWh. Countries with less emissions than this do exist, for example Norway and Iceland are down around 30 g/kWh, but this is already better than almost every other country on the planet. US electricity generation for comparison averaged 369 g/kWh in 2023.
So: replacing all of the district heating with heat pumps would be an insanely huge project requiring a massive expansion of electricity generation, and it would have very low return on investment when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions. There is also the problem that heating energy demands are extremely uneven and unpredictable, both over the year and between years. You need a significant amount of extra capacity for very cold days, and even averaged over the year the difference between an average winter and a cold one can on the order of 20%. Just burning stuff works great as a solution for this, it's easy to have capacity on demand. Air-source heat pumps also become much less efficient on very cold days when you need them the most, which is why they're not that popular for heating here (people prefer ground source heat pumps, but those have limitations in densely populated areas because the ground doesn't contain infinite energy).
Also, a side note: the heat generation in district heating plants is extremely efficient compared to electricity generation using combustible fuels. The average efficiency of the heat generation in these plants in 2023 was 96%, and that's before exhaust gas condensation is taken into account.
In other words: there's a reason we are doing things this way.
Which is one part of this story: landfills create a lot of natural gas which we can store and use on demand. Large farms also create natural gas as part of manure disposal process. (cities also create some as part of sewage treatment, but I'm not aware of any that harness it - human waste if not handled carefully is deadly)
How is peat a false alternative? It is literally what Swedes would burn if they didn't burn their waste. There exists no practical alternative atm. Sure it's worth working towards another alternative, but we also need to not freeze right now.
I mean if "heat" is the primary product burning this is kind of nifty. And producing electricity at the same time is a bonus. Letting wood etc. rot releases CO2 as well.
If we didn't burn waste we'd need to burn something else to stay warm in winter. Currently we supplement the waste with _mostly_ renewables, like byproducts from the forestry industry (e.g. treetops, wood chips, sawdust) and the olive oil industry (olive pits; we import this stuff from the Mediterranean region), but we burn a bit of peat too because there aren't enough reasonably priced renewables. Burning waste really isn't meaningfully worse than burning anything else.
After the combustion we're left with 15-20% by weight in slag; some of this is metal that is recovered and sent to recycling, but the rest is effectively gravel that is used in e.g. road construction and the like. There's also 3-5% by weight of toxic gases captured by the exhaust gas treatment. This is sent to a special facility in Norway that more or less puts it in landfill, although a very carefully managed one.
Nuclear was a thing in the 50's/60's but district heating isn't practical over long distances and nobody wanted nuclear plants in their suburbs.
Renewables we already do burn quite a bit of. But really, quite a lot of household waste is actually renewable too - cardboard packaging, food scraps that didn't end up in the compost, such things. So it's really not that bad.
Waste accounts for about 20% of the total energy required for heating in Sweden.
That is already a thing, and it's being expanded. The Stockholm municipal energy company is already operating what they claim to be the world's largest heat pump facility with a capacity to extract 225 MW of heat from treated wastewater. It first opened in 1986 and has been incrementally expanded over the years. Both the hot and the cold sides of the heat pumps are used; the cold side goes into the district cooling system and is used in e.g. datacenters. Still, this facility has both heat pumps, biofuel furnaces, and as a backup for the rare extremely cold days, resistive water heaters.
It should also be mentioned that Swedish electricity generation is effectively 100% renewable already; it's mainly wind, hydro and nuclear. The co-generation plants mainly produce heating and only a small amount of electricity, more or less as a byproduct.
Waste incineration has a more or less negligible carbon footprint if you look at the big picture.
People don't like it when you burn nuclear waste, burning windmills isn't very effective --- at least not the modern metal ones, and solar panels are going to be toxic if you burn them. :P
When it comes to plastics I like to think that it’s basically a product of oil and other oil related products are burnt all the time for energy.
The end goal should include a carbon capture step. They’ve looked into that here in Oslo, Norway, but it ended up much costlier than anticipated and at the moment it looks like it’s going to be very very drawn out.
Carbon capture at the source is usually not that terrible of an idea. Trying to capture carbon from the air around us is very challenging, but if the air is 80% CO2 to begin with it’s going to be much cheaper to capture half of it then trying to capture the same amount from regular air.
I heard that a good way to capture carbon on a bigger scale would be through burning trees and capturing the carbon. Store the carbon in a concentrated form, use the heat to produce electricity and when you chop down trees to burn you also make space for growing new trees. Sounds kinda slow though, and not exactly cheap either.
If you want power, it is better to make renewables. The problem with carbon capture is that more energy and more fuel to run the capture. It costs too much.
If you want to sequester the carbon, just cut down the trees and bury them. The problem is that there isn't enough trees on Earth to power civilization or sequester enough carbon.
It’s much better with renewables yes! In the freeze of the Oslo winter it’s a bit hard to capture enough sunlight to heat all the housing we have here. There’s not much wind either.
We have a lot of hydroelectric power, but that’s very dependent on how much it rained in the autumn. We are also starting to build out wind power, but it’s slow going.
We do import a lot of electricity from further south in Europe where there is more wind and solar.
I would love to have solar on my roof. The legislation is super complicated though since I live in an apartment and we would basically have to create our own communal energy company. We would also have to pay taxes on the electricity we produce and use ourselves. It’s somewhat simpler for people that own a house, but I’m not quite rich enough to own a house in Oslo.
There is also an increasing demand for our renewable electricity in the industry and especially with the data centres that are being built because of our cheap electricity.
Landfill leachate is quite terrifying. You end up with a bunch of reactions between whatever random assortment of garbage found itself on the same truck, and the resulting liquid is acidic enough to dissolve pipes as well as heavily contaminated with heavy metals.
I am fine with landfills, but they're one of those engineering marvels -- like bridges, microwave ovens, sky scrapers, aircraft, high voltage transformers, cranes, or motor vehicles -- that are about taking something inherently dangerous and letting us interact with it safely.
The supposed triviality of this size is not sitting well with me.
What’s described is a 100 yard deep hole. So about 27 stories. It’s 35 miles per side, so 35 x 35 = 1225 square miles in area. That’s bigger than any city in the mainland US[1].
It’s a 27 story deep hole that’s twice as big as Houston. Three times as big as the city of LA, and over half the size of the urban metropolitan LA area[2]. Four times the size of New York (or three times, if you include the water as well as the land).
This is not a trivial amount of land - and it gets worse if you were not to have it be (ridiculously!) one hundred yards deep.
I’m not arguing we’re about to run out of landfill space imminently, but calling this ‘trivial’ is not what I’d call it.
That's also just the volume of trash. It doesn't include all the support infrastructure present at each landfill or the buffer real estate so that it is not adjacent to any desirable real estate. It's not practical to have a single huge landfill serving the country, so these other factors get multiplied by every actual landfill site we build. Still there are scant few, if any, counties in the U.S. that are so strained on real estate they can't bury their garbage.
Why would you compare it to the size of a single city? Everyone doesn’t live in a single city and we’re talking about a landfill to take trash for 1000 years.
The largest open cut mine in the world, Bingham Canyon, is more than ten times as deep.
While it's not a good idea to just chuck stuff into an abandoned mine, the effort to excavate a hole that size is doable for a single site operated by a single company employing 2000 workers over a century. It's pretty trivial in comparison to any other environmental problem.
> To achieve comparable volume of the rectangular prism, you will need to dig a much deeper cone.
Yeah, holes with sloped sides are easier to dig than vertical-walled ones. But you don't need to have them sloping all the way down to a deep point in the middle; for a shallow (comparatively, like this) hole you can just slope the walls down to the same flat bottom.
At a 45-degree angle, you could have the bottom of your 100-yard-deep pit be 35 miles - 100 yards across, and the opening 35 miles + 100 yards. Which would be a pretty negligible difference on the surface -- and, I think, make the volume a tiny bit bigger.
There's a quarry in the Chicago area, quite close to the city and visible from the interstate, that's over 100 yards deep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton_Quarry#/media/File:Th.... Digging such a deep hole isn't ridiculous at all. Also, as the video shows, landfills usually rise a significant height above the surrounding land (and are converted into a hilly park when finished).
There was a concentrated effort to blow the problem of landfills massively, massively out of proportion in the 1980s and 1990s. I have not seen in active in a couple of decades, but the cultural detritus of the effort still floats around, and few people are terribly motivated to go correcting it since it's a dead issue.
There have been some legitimate improvements in the space since then. A disturbing amount of Grady is talking about is relatively new, not something we've been doing for a century now.
But the propaganda in the 1980s and 1990s was definitely around running out of space on Earth itself to store garbage itself because we're just generating so much. There's a picture I doubt I could dig up that has been injected into my brain of a field of garbage as seagulls fly over it and a lone backhoe in the distance tries to contend with the field of garbage. And, sure, the actual garbage dump isn't a pleasant place, though to be honest I was always sort of impressed with how little smell they tended to generate even in the 1980s. But there's a lot of unrepresentative places on Planet Earth to plop a camera. Give me a million dollars and I'll make a documentary proving Earth is uninhabited and uninhabitable. Chromecast's default photo screen saver is full of pictures of dozens of square miles of uninhabited wasteland that are very pretty colors due to the local chemical composition. But that's not a great way to understand the world in a proportional manner.
Speaking for the US at the time, in a semi-rural area, the plausibility of this was enhanced by what you would find walking through a forest. People threw a lot more stuff just straight out of their cars on the roadway, dumped cars and mattresses in state forests, all kinds of things like that. Times have changed on that front. But even then, it was really only where the people were. Most land was not full of garbage. But, pretty much by definition, the people are where the people are, so it stood out, made it a lot easier to feel like we were drowning in garbage, when all we really needed to do was take a bit better care of where we actually lived.
(This comment is about land garbage. Oceans are a completely different beast for many reasons and I'm not speaking to the issues of plastic in the ocean.)
Is it? Land is dirt cheap in the US. Surely it's cheaper to bury it locally than ship it half way across the world? Even for the plastic that's being shipped half way across the world, they're ostensibly done for recycling purposes (ie. they're buying the plastic waste), and the unrecycleable plastics end up being mismanaged.
I’ve heard, shipping a lot of garbage to China was quite common until the Chinese banned it. That was economically viable because China exports so much and many container ships would otherwise return empty to China.
It was viable only because we were shipping "recyclables" that had to be "recycled" by contract, not pure garbage that could have just been buried. Sorting through that whole mess of "recyclables" was more expensive than shipping it to China and letting them just burn or bury it.
>Sorting through that whole mess of "recyclables" was more expensive than shipping it to China and letting them just burn or bury it.
I thought they didn't bother and just buried it if it wasn't profitable.
>GONZALEZ: Whoa. Oh, I've been doing that one wrong. So the city of Nogales went around to everyone's house this morning and picked up their recyclables. [...] And they brought them here. And where is all this going to go?
>GALLEGO: Trash.
>GONZALEZ: The recycling is going into the trash. I am watching pristine beer bottles and juice cartons and cardboard boxes get smushed into a pile of wet, gooey, dripping food waste and soggy diapers.
> I thought they didn't bother and just buried it if it wasn't profitable.
In my county, they are obliged by the contract to NOT bury the mixed recyclables. So they used to offload it to some companies that would then also promise not to bury them (pinky promise), and ship them to China. Contracts in China are then not so easy to follow and enforce and voila, problem is now somewhere else.
> I thought they didn't bother and just buried it if it wasn't profitable.
The point is to cheat. Say you recycle and ensure that there are enough links in the chain nobody can follow it to the end and prove the stuff you ship to China wasn't recycled. China did recycle some stuff, but most of it wasn't. China decided to stop participating in that scam though.
We still ship scrap metal and other recyclables over.
China, and other countries, put limits on such imports, as their recycling industries were not exactly environmentally friendly. Technically you can still import plastic waste into China, but with a very low contamination percentage that's hard to achieve.
You are correct. In the US at least, land is dirt cheap. Transporting stuff is not cheap. For this reason, it’s common for some US states to ship garbage to other US states for disposal, simply because geographically it makes economic sense.
Land close enough to cities to be reasonable to truck garbage to is less plentiful though and you have to factor in the costs of properly containing and processing that garbage.
At the end of the day it has to go somewhere, and there's no room for it in the five boroughs, so they pay what they need to pay. And it's still cheaper than sending it overseas (otherwise they would).
NYC is a bit of a special case for a lot of things due to it's size/density and location. Most places don't ship their waste that far from it's origin because it's expensive.
In Oslo we import trash from the other European countries and then transport a bunch of our own trash to Sweden. Seemingly all because of some carbon emissions taxes in Norway.
IIRC, ~30%[0] of ocean plastic came from fishing nests. They are huge, break often and it’s easier and cheaper to throw aboard an old one than bring it onshore for recycling.
(edit) 0: 46% https://www.seashepherdglobal.org/latest-news/marine-debris-...
Totally unrelated but since it’s from seashepherd I can’t help adding Paul Watson trial from extradition in Japan is tomorrow.
Not only. If you go to a developing country in Asia, more likely than not you'll see that locals have no issues throwing thrash everywhere in nature because they're not conscient of the problems it causes.
> Approximately 46% of the 79 thousand tons of ocean plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of fishing nets, some as large as football fields, according to the study published in March 2018 in Scientific Reports
While generalisations may be misleading, when people talk about ocean pollutions they often think about the patches.
> Putting stuff in a landfill is way better for global warming since its not burned, the carbon is buried.
Landfills release gas. Of course it is better than burning plastic but there is no environmentalist on earth demanding for plastic to be burned.
> Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment.
This is horrifyingly incorrect! Developed countries process only some of their trash themselves. The rest is shipped into poorer countries. It will end up in the natural environment.
>This is horrifyingly incorrect! Developed countries process only some of their trash themselves. The rest is shipped into poorer countries. It will end up in the natural environment.
>Many people think that rich countries ship most of their plastic waste overseas. But is this really true?
>The short answer is no: many countries export some of their waste, but they still handle most of it domestically.
>[...] When it comes to the fraction of plastic waste that is exported, the UK is one of the largest exporters. For context, the US exported about 5% of its plastic waste in 2010. France exported 11%, and the Netherlands exported 14%.[...]
>[...] I estimate that a few percent of ocean plastics could result from trade from rich countries. A figure as high as 5% would not be unreasonable.
Statistics show that developed countries are shipping significant amounts of trash into poorer countries. But there is most likely an even higher number of unrecorded cases. Supply chains can be difficult to monitor even within the OECD, and an estimated third of shipments is illegal.[0]
>> Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment.
>This is horrifyingly incorrect! Developed countries process only some of their trash themselves.
I guess you can weasel out of this by claiming that >85% counts as "some", but it's misleading at the very least. Moreover, your statement was trying to refute "Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in landfills, not the natural environment", which so far as I can tell is true, even if some small fraction gets exported to developing countries and end up mismanaged.
I saw this article in another comment somewhere above. It makes an interesting point that recycled PET demand now outstrips supply and that is partly because curbside recycling is usually too contaminated to be useful. Instead, DRS systems which refund you like nickel per bottle generate much better streams, but they aren't widely implemented.
All that said. I'm not sure which if you is correct.
In reality, a significant portion is exported to developing countries, where it often ends up mismanaged. Claiming developed countries handle "almost all" of their plastic waste without acknowledging this export is detracting from wrongdoings me and you bear responsibility for as citizens of relatively free and open democratic societies. It is not somehow misleading. It is morally reprehensible.
True. The simpler and more exact statement is just: It is misleading. No need for a weaselly "somehow". Here's guessing that's not what you meant, but... Too bad for you, then.
Best way not to come off as a hot-headed zealot who's either ignorant of or intentionally twisting the truth is not to behave like a hot-headed zealot who's either ignorant of or intentionally twisting the truth.
I really enjoyed my time working at a medium sized landfill as their surveyor and civil tech.
The engineering discussion in the article is spot on. We chose to reinject most of our leachate as that helps with CH4 production, and more CH4 for us meant more micro-turbines running generating us $$$ under our power purchase agreement with the local utility.
The well field balancing was crucial as well, we had to not only try to extract lots of methane, but not pull too hard or else that's how you get an underground fire. Big trouble if that happens.
And even the stockpile balancing was hard! You couldn't run out of dirt before your closure date, cause now you gotta start importing! Lots of volume calculations for me.
Fun stuff. If I was to go deeper into civil (I'm a licensed surveyor now) I'd likely consult for landfills. Big money and extremely interesting work.
What sort of substances end up in leachate, and how'd that contribute to greater CH4 production in your landfill? I was hoping that the OP post/video went into more detail on the chemistry involved.
It wasn't so much the substances, more the moisture.
A wet environment is much better for ch4 generation (was my understanding).
So we had an area that we called "the galleries" where we would rotate injecting the leachate. To keep all that stuff underneath wet (this is in southern ca, a pretty dry environment).
Any time! I enjoyed the work, and I also got to work on closed sites which always made for pretty fun days as one was an isolated area and another was a golf course.
I googled global waste per year. Looks like it's on the order of 2 billion tons per year. Leaving room for 100% growth, and assuming a density of 1 (less dense = more space required = worse), we'll need 4 billion cubic meters of landfill per year.
That's a cubic mile of garbage!
But that doesn't seem all that catastrophic either - if you spread it out to a hole 1m deep, it'll be 63 km on a side. 5m deep = 28km on a side. That's a lot, but it doesn't seem like the highest ecological priority. If it's practical to compress before dumping, it will be even less terrible.
To get really controversial the highest environmental priority is atmospheric co2 and landfill space doesn’t have a scratch on it in terms of harm.
Plastics and other carbon containing substances buried underground sounds terrible at face value but the thing that should really make you worry is the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere. Atmospheric pollution can often coincide with the amount of trash you create but in general if your focus is on landfill rather than atmosphere you’re focusing on something that doesn’t have a scratch in levels of importance.
In fact if we can find a way to landfill co2 rapidly in a net co2 negative way that may be our best hope right now (repeatedly growing and burying large amounts of biomass for example).
Geoengineering could maybe bring temperatures back down, but you can't just replant an old growth forest and out all the old plants, fungi and animals back.
If microplastics are behind the fertility drop, reverse flynn effect or obesity crisis they would also be more important in the ~100 year timeline.
A lot of that waste is organic and will degrade over time. And ultimately all that "garbage" was extracted from the earth in the first place. It's like that Monty Python quote "what did you start with? Nothing. What did you end with? Nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!"
There’s some parkland adjacent to the La Puente Landfill (assuming I’m remembering the correct landfill along the 60). I remember going on a hiking trip in the foothills nearby back in the 90s and seeing (and smelling) the landfill in operation there. It occurs to me that I’ve not had that many cases where I’ve been able to directly observe a landfill. The only other instance I can think of was visiting a retired former teacher in Florida and he pointed out a hill a few miles away from his condo and explaining that the hill was actually a pile of trash.
I think that at least some in the Chicago area are former quarries.
I spent some time digging and did find a Chicago park that’s built over a landfilled quarry, although it’s all construction waste in the landfill and not household garbage.
"trash is an inescapable fact of the human condition"
Not really. There didn't used to be anything like as much. But what we did before wasn't necessarily better.
Most consumer products were made of organics, like wood, cloth and paper; metals, and clay. Organics were burned or recycled, metals recycled (as now). Only broken clay was really waste.
Cities didn't collect trash - they collected ash. In Britain waste collectors are called "dustmen" because that's what they used to collect. But that meant that people were burning trash in their homes, along with their coal or wood. Then, re-using your trash as winter fuel was a nice economy. Now we know that in-home combustion isn't very healthy.
Reminds me of this 2013 report on the earliest cat domestication (~3610 BCE):
> The felid bones were found in an ashy matrix in three refuse pits, H172, H35, and H130, with animal bones, pottery sherds, bone tools, and some stone tools...
A friend's family runs a small waste management business that specializes in composting food waste from restaurants and institutions. By far their biggest ongoing difficulty is maintaining driving staff. It's not a very attractive job and most of who they hire have criminal backgrounds and unstable lives. It's good for society that there's a job available for this group that most employers will not give a chance but it's also a difficult group to manage consistent staffing levels. Just something to keep in mind if you start expanding and need drivers.
Generally speaking waste collectors, totally exploit the labor force like this to largely their own detriment
To the point where they’re paying drivers helpers salaries in order to drive down their hourly wage to about five dollars an hour because they have no options
Really good commercial hauler drivers that do 20 yard rolloffs and have been doing it for a long time can make upwards of $50 an hour, but that’s because they know how to play the game
Our goal is To provide pathways to ownership for these collection routes for the driver and drivers helper themselves such that each of them can make collectively upwards of $300,000 a year and then own their own truck and route and everything that comes out of that
Yes it’s a private subscription based hauler like like Waste Connection, Waste Management etc…
However, we’re only ever going to do residential because the goal is to grow ownership of waste infrastructure to employees of the cooperative and cooperators, as well as homeowners with returns on their recycling and any other services
Eventually, the goal is to provide all community services, including banking and general services that you would expect a city to provide.
Currently none of the governments in the United States are functional enough to provide the services necessary at broad enough scale, so we’re bootstrapping it ourselves
See my other comments above, but basically were creating alternative infrastructure to the existing capitalist infrstructure starting with residential waste handling services in northern Virginia
John McCarthy (LISP) was fond of saying on USENET that future generations mining rare minerals from landfill would thank us for putting so many useful things into one mine site.
The problem is that burning trash produces CO2 from stuff, like plastic, that doesn't degrade in landfill. It is net positive CO2. The ideal is to sequester the carbon in landfill.
This assumes that landfill is capturing and burning methane, because methane is worse than CO2.
Yeah, would be a great way to consume free solar during the brightest part of the day.
Electricity in -> bulk chemical feedstocks out and no long distance transportation, handling and disposal costs.
The nice thing about plasma burners is that you can capture the resulting syngas and not just exhaust tons of CO2 into the atmosphere as with an incinerator.
Since our city started collecting green waste separately, it's interesting to see what goes into our garbage. It's basically non-recyclable soft plastic, cat litter, and dog poo bags.
The big shift for me was when I moved to an area with seperate food recycling. The general rubbish is much cleaner, although probably more toxic in a landfill, as it is just the soft plastic or anything soiled.
I wonder if in 100-500 years they will mine landfills for materials or elements that have become scarce. Or maybe they will just keep them as natural gas reactors.
Once oil gets too expensive to pull out the the ground, mining plastic from landfills and decomposing it back to the hydrocarbons might end up big business.
The natural gas/ ch4 production follows a pretty well known curve, at about 40-50 years it's nowhere near as potent. And with the push to keep organics out of the modern landfills that might get even worse.
We can make plastics from bio sources, or directly from elemental carbon. Oil is a lot cheaper, but we can do it. In WWII the Germans were running on synthetic gas. Last I checked you can buy synthetic gas - at about 5x the cost of standard pump gasoline. (synthetic gas has more energy per gallon so sometimes it is used in a race)
Energy has a lot of dark horse candidates and it's hard to pick winners. But one that sounds interesting to me, though it's still early, is pulling carbon directly out of the air using solar energy [1].
On basic principles, it sounds a whole lot easier than mining landfills? But that's assuming the capital costs can be lowered enough. (Solar costs keeps dropping, they figure out the other costs.)
There's a kids sci-fi novel called The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm that talks about this a bit. There are children searching for plastic in landfills because they've run out of oil to make new plastic. Plastic bowls and things are status symbols because of how expensive plastic becomes.
Probably not. I can't imagine anything we currently landfill that we're in any danger of running out of. Even rare-earth metals are quite widely dispersed and readily available. It seems more likely that we'd divert e-waste to places where materials can be recovered long before mining old trash.
I would really like to write about what you guys are doing, because it seems fascinating. But it feels to me like it's 95% podcasts, videos, and online chats, and I just do not have time for that. (And I'm about 9 timezones away or something.) I try to produce 2 articles a day, and to do that, I read tens of thousands of words of info a day... Speech just isn't fast enough.
The podcasts are more like 1% -- most of what we have done is via the written word; see our RFDs[0] or our docs[1]. (And at the risk of being too on brand, it is worth listening to our recent podcast episode on RFDs themselves.[2])
note that compost matters bc food waste degrades anaerobically in the deep layers of a landfill, but aerobically in compost heaps -- the greenhouse impact of composted food waste is very different pound-for-pound from a landfill
the landfill gas capture systems that burn it off or use it for power are not installed until fairly late in the life cycle of a cell. food has a fairly short half life which means that a lot of it will decay before capture, or even final cover, is in place
total methane from landfills is down (from ~160 to ~100 mmt co2e since 1990), but the portion of this from food is way up
Some places do. Waste to energy plants are a thing. One of the big challenges is running a large, stable, chemical reaction on unknown fuel. It’s difficult to burn things hot enough to reduce potentially dangerous compounds while also having variable input. Then, the gasses need to be monitored to avoid dangerous compounds reforming as the exhaust cools.
My county has one that does 90% of our garbage, and its not an easy problem. The key part is scrubbing the smoke to get rid of the polutants, and then cleaning the ash to also get rid of things like mercury.
The only way they can seem to make a buck is to charge high rates to dispose of 'medical waste' that helps with costs.
Medical waste is 'biohazard' waste (think blood, guts, needles, etc) So they can't just throw most of that in a landfill, it has to get burned. They charge a premium partly because they can, and partly because most of that is from outside our county.
People are not careful about what they throw away. Batteries, lead, and so on end up in trash. When you burn it those get released to the atmosphere, sometimes in a form that is even worse chemically than what we started with.
We do burn trash, but as the other reply said, it is expensive because you have to somehow account for all that.
> Another option is to put it to beneficial use to create heat or even electricity. The Puente Hills landfill I showed earlier has a gas-to-energy facility that’s been running since 1987, and even though the landfill is now closed, it currently provides enough electricity to power around 70,000 homes.
And towards the end
> Landfills seem like an environmental blight, but really, properly designed ones play a huge role in making sure waste products don’t end up in our soil or air or water. It’s not possible to landfill waste everywhere... But my point is: landfills are a surprisingly low-impact way to manage solid waste in a lot of cases. I hope the future is a utopia where all the stuff we make maintains its beneficial value forever, but for now, I am thankful for the sanitary engineers and the other professions involved in safely and economically dealing with our trash so we don’t have to.
I love reading about landfills. I wish more environmentalists would be excited about engineering solving environmental ills and relied less on knee-jerk reactions.