101–110 of 333 posts
I 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 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…
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> 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% curre…
So it goes into the sky instead? That seems more sightly, but the CO2 emissions must be astronomical.
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.
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The plastic pollution in the ocean is from our soda bottles we shipped to developing countries.
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.
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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.
That's true, but NYC still ships trash all over the place: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/8714ca7999a64704b59721c... 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).
I 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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374
So 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…
I'd guess that it's cheaper to ship a lot of garbage to developing countries.
https://www.nrk.no/norge/fyller-ovnene-med-importsoppel-samt...
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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
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
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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.
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Landfills certainly require more power to operate than that gas scheme can provide later. It all sounds and reads like a fairytale but none of this is sustainable.
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.
At least where I live, the garbage trucks have split compartments which means there's no additional trucks.