51–60 of 127 posts
> Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn't to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had "defiled a national park". No good deed goes unpunished--wild that the competitor company successfully sued them.
Turning degraded land back into fertile land is actually very feasible and not as hopeless as it may seem. A lot of the damage people have done to landscapes in recent centuries is still reversible. There are a lot of examples all over the world of people turning dried out and heavily eroded land back into fertile land with great bio diversity. Sometimes at small scale, and sometimes at very large scale. Often even j…
Often you don't even need seeds from neighboring land. The soil that remains often still has seeds sitting dormant waiting for conditions to return to healthy.
It's recently occurred to me how "valuable" today's trash is likely to be considered in the future. I'll focus on organics here but I think the plastics will be equally valuable, too. I have no idea what % of American households compost or live in places which offer municipal compost pickup but I imagine it's in the single digits. As evidenced by this article, compost is/can be an incredibly powerful agent of change:…
I worked for a time designing and building landfills. Nothing really rots in them typically as it’s really dry and don’t have good access to oxygen. Modern landfills are like giant plastic bags. This is to protect ground water. Decomposition as noted releases methane. Some landfills gather it in pipes and “flare” it )burn. They have to vent the gas as a full landfill is covered by a plastic cap to prevent water infil…
Practical Engineering put out an excellent video on landfills a couple years back, well worth the watch for the visualizations alone.
What really gets me is that: I scroll passed all the ads without even registering them (I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone). Surely almost everybody else also does. Surely anyone who clicks or seems to react to them in the data is a mistake. So why is there still money, however little, in showing them? Why do they even bother? Who is defrauding who here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We already mine landfills -- mostly for land reclamation but sometimes to recover resources. In the longer run, when there's been more compaction, settling, and densification (and changes in what things are valuable), and more need to reclaim land that was previously landfilled, we will do this more.
People sometimes build stuff on top of landfills.
Suppose this is the article to give that person who chides you for dropping an orange peel on a hike.
It depends on where the hike is: Dropping an orange peel in a humid, temperate, low-elevation place is vastly different than a desert, high-alpine, tundra or other environment where organics take a long time to decompose.
Honestly orange peels are incredible, the smell, the robustness. It reminds me of the joke of the plastic cup at Whole Foods filled with orange slices. If only there was a natural packaging alternative...
The whole compost thing can be a lot of hassle for people. For a simpler option, if you are lucky enough to have a decent garden area, find somewhere away from your house and just throw biomass there regularly. Coffee grinds, spent tea, leftover veg, etc. and watch what happens! Sometimes simple is best.
I just put food waste and some other compostable stuff outside -- in a pile, on the ground. Currently, that pile is in a place where autumn leaves tend to gather naturally.
And in that pile, it all composts. It turns last week's bean soup into next year's hot pepper harvest.
It's not zero-effort but it's very close. I'll have spent more time writing this comment than I have on any aspect of composting over the last several months.
Later on, to use it in the garden, I just... use it in the garden. I scoop aside the top layer with a shovel and take whatever is beneath it. The plants don't seem to care that the composting method is slow and lazy, or that a portion of it might be somewhat unfinished.
(Now, to be sure: Home-scale composting can have a great deal of optimization applied. Bins, aeration, deliberate introduction of red worms, careful management of moisture, temperature monitoring, whatever -- the sky's the limit. But I have enough hobbies, and I'm not trying to market it as a product or win a race here. This method keeps up with my household's output just fine and doesn't take up much room at all in my tiny-ass yard.)
Presumably the reason this article delays showing you the before/after photos is to get you to scroll and see more ads, since you'll probably just close the tab after. Which sucks, but, fine. What really gets me is that: I scroll passed all the ads without even registering them (I haven't figured out how to block ads on my phone). Surely almost everybody else also does. Surely anyone who clicks or seems to react to t…
Firefox + ublock origin + consent-o-matic saves the day for me.
They could not find the site and searched for it for years. A stark reminder that civilian use of GPS is relatively recent thing. The site was created in 1990s and GPS was opened for civilian use only in 1995 and gained equal accuracy by legislation in 2000.