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The Engineering of Landfills

practical.engineering

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Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#171

Post by kasey_junk »

renewiltord wrote: post #158
bko wrote: post #2

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…

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.

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.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#172

Post by kortilla »

renhanxue wrote: post #89
leoedin wrote: post #84

Earlier 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…

False choice. Don’t burn anything.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#173

Post by wk_end »

renewiltord wrote: post #158
bko wrote: post #2

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…

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.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#174

Post by kortilla »

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…

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.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#175

Post by Goonbaggins »

Mistletoe wrote: post #169
Goonbaggins wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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] [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13496

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-a...

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.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#176

Post by renewiltord »

wk_end wrote: post #173
renewiltord wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Fair. I've edited it.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#177

Post by yreg »

renhanxue wrote: post #124
yreg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we didn't burn waste we'd need to burn something else to stay warm in winter. Why not nuclear/renewables?

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…

I meant what's impossible about making electricity from nuclear/renewable sources and then powering electric heaters with that electricity?

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#178

Post by ARandomerDude »

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #159
gregmac wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

This is just corporate virtue signaling.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#179

Post by toomuchtodo »

scoofy wrote: post #166
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…

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…

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/opinion/solar-power-free-...

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).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01968...

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#180

Post by lolinder »

Iulioh wrote: post #36
barbazoo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Probably OP is thinking of NIMBYs.

Do you have a specific connection between landfills and NIMBYs, or are you just generally interested in NIMBYs in the abstract?

As a rule we try to avoid putting landfills anywhere near someone's backyard, so it's not your usual hot topic for the zoning committee.

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