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The Engineering of Landfills

practical.engineering

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Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#141

Post by gregmac »

Mistletoe wrote: post #136
scoofy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#142

Post by toast0 »

dhosek wrote: post #13

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 for…

In Virginia, they have Mount Trashmore [1], although that's an abandoned landfill, not an active one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Trashmore_Park

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#143

Post by barbazoo »

fsckboy wrote: post #137
Iulioh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably OP is thinking of NIMBYs.

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.

That would be quite the strawman but whatever works for them.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#144

Post by cm2012 »

jrmg wrote: post #140
breck wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

It's trivial compared to the amount of space in the US and the timelines we're talking about.

Realistically no one is going to build this super hole, it will be 1,000 smaller landfills built over 1,000 years.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#145

Post by wahnfrieden »

gregmac wrote: post #141
Mistletoe wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#146

Post by breck »

jrmg wrote: post #140
breck wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

Fair enough. Here it is visualized using Google Earth:

https://x.com/breckyunits/status/1831080588406849585

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#147

Post by gosub100 »

coding123 wrote: post #58
gosub100 wrote: post #44

Earlier 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.

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.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#148

Post by nobodyknowin »

DylanSp wrote: post #86
nobodyknowin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). That was the concept anyway.

Got it, thanks!

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.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#149

Post by Nifty3929 »

louwrentius wrote: post #30

The video was informative for somebody that knows nothing about landfills. The topic not addressed however, is the insanity of all this waste being produced in the first place.

The waste is a consequence of all the good things we produce that enrich our lives. You may or may not find value in these items, but many others do.

The insanity is to look only at the “cons” side of the page, and not at the “pros” side, and to judge others for not sharing your values.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#150

Post by toomuchtodo »

cogman10 wrote: post #133
toomuchtodo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga... > Municipal…

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.

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