"Trash is an inescapable element of the human condition."
It is an inescapable element of the current consumerism economical model, but it should'nt be of the human condition.
The Engineering of Landfills
91–100 of 333 posts
Re: The Engineering of Landfills
#92I 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.
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.
Re: The Engineering of Landfills
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it goes into the sky instead? That seems more sightly, but the CO2 emissions must be astronomical.
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 real…
Neat, thanks!
Re: The Engineering of Landfills
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe someone should write a book about virtue signaling and it's dangers.
The real danger is allowing corporate mouthpieces to pollute our discourse with propaganda and outright lies.
Re: The Engineering of Landfills
#95I started a residential trash hauling cooperative this year after 7 years of planning Yall have no idea how much opportunity there is here
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.
Re: The Engineering of Landfills
#96Why are landfills like this still a thing? Why not burn everything and only dump what's left?
Landfills are cheap, plentiful, easy and pollute much much less than burning.
And in the US we have plenty of open land to place them.
I understand places like Japan wanting to find alternative means
Re: The Engineering of Landfills
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: The Engineering of Landfills
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 da…
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
Only Soviets kept using gas engined trucks and buses past the 50s
Re: The Engineering of Landfills
#99I found this interesting: > 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 des…
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.
Re: The Engineering of Landfills
#100So many people misunderstand landfills. 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 en…
> 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. Damn, I had to think about this for a second, but you are right. How the hell did I not realize this before? Can you please popularize this more? Maybe compress into a pithy phrase.
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