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The Engineering of Landfills

practical.engineering

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Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#191

Post by AndrewKemendo »

whycome wrote: post #55
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #50

I started a residential trash hauling cooperative this year after 7 years of planning Yall have no idea how much opportunity there is here

I've seriously wondered about this. Tell us more. Do you just act as a private middleman to get things to the dump? Do you sort or resell?

Yes it’s a private subscription based hauler like like Waste Connection, Waste Management etc…

However, we’re only ever going to do residential because the goal is to grow ownership of waste infrastructure to employees of the cooperative and cooperators, as well as homeowners with returns on their recycling and any other services

Eventually, the goal is to provide all community services, including banking and general services that you would expect a city to provide.

Currently none of the governments in the United States are functional enough to provide the services necessary at broad enough scale, so we’re bootstrapping it ourselves

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#192

Post by scoofy »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #184
scoofy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve. We're burning obscene amounts of nat gas, petroleum, and even coal currently. Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity.

Think when these plants would come online. Think when solar and storage will be up to speed on the grid. Skate to where the puck is going to be. Think in systems. To say no today because of current state today is irrational and ignores the data. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth within ~30-60 minutes to power all of humanity for a year, and an enormous global clean energy flywheel is coming up to speed (first solar,…

Yea, this is nonsense.

I've been trying to advocate for slowing climate change since about 2000. I've been to enough city council meetings, and seen enough government promises simply abandoned to know that this is a deeply naive way to just "expect" the world to suddenly become rational.

Let's stop the actively bleeding artery that is actively killing us before we even start to worry some efficiency gains we could get by asking the surgeon to do two things at once.

This is the difference between an environmentalist and an "environmentalist."

We need to fix climate change now. Get to carbon neutral now. Literally nothing else matters much.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#193

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #95
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #50

I 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…

Generally speaking waste collectors, totally exploit the labor force like this to largely their own detriment

To the point where they’re paying drivers helpers salaries in order to drive down their hourly wage to about five dollars an hour because they have no options

Really good commercial hauler drivers that do 20 yard rolloffs and have been doing it for a long time can make upwards of $50 an hour, but that’s because they know how to play the game

Our goal is To provide pathways to ownership for these collection routes for the driver and drivers helper themselves such that each of them can make collectively upwards of $300,000 a year and then own their own truck and route and everything that comes out of that

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#195

Post by AndrewKemendo »

Diederich wrote: post #59
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #50

I started a residential trash hauling cooperative this year after 7 years of planning Yall have no idea how much opportunity there is here

Wow, can you expand on that? Thanks!

See my other comments above, but basically were creating alternative infrastructure to the existing capitalist infrstructure starting with residential waste handling services in northern Virginia

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#196

Post by dylan604 »

lolinder wrote: post #189
dylan604 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donald Trump comes to mind

I'm not convinced Donald Trump believes anything at all, so I think he doesn't count. (Not to mention that Trump tower would seem to exclude him from being against high rises.)

What, 3 out of 4 isn't good enough for you? The high rise part of the comment is an example of "one of these things is not like the others" in that of course people all about the money will like high rises.

It also doesn't matter what you think Donald Trump does or does not believe. He has a 4 year track record, and is on record making comments about what he will do if elected again.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#197

Post by toomuchtodo »

scoofy wrote: post #192
toomuchtodo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think when these plants would come online. Think when solar and storage will be up to speed on the grid. Skate to where the puck is going to be. Think in systems. To say no today because of current state today is irrational and ignores the data. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth within ~30-60 minutes to power all of humanity for a year, and an enormous global clean energy flywheel is coming up to speed (first solar,…

Yea, this is nonsense. I've been trying to advocate for slowing climate change since about 2000. I've been to enough city council meetings, and seen enough government promises simply abandoned to know that this is a deeply naive way to just "expect" the world to suddenly become rational. Let's stop the actively bleeding artery that is actively killing us before we even start to worry some efficiency gains we could ge…

It’s not human rationality, it’s cold, hard economics (scoped to renewables and storage uptake). Climate change is already happening, and there is nothing you can do to stop it immediately, just as you will get killed stepping in front of a freight train. You can only build systems that can attempt to outrace it to slow it down (various efforts to achieve net zero in a domain), and then eventually reverse it (an efficient, scalable carbon sequestration solution to existing atmospheric carbon load, powered by clean energy) over the next ~100-150 years.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#198

Post by skybrian »

nobodyknowin wrote: post #90
khaki54 wrote: post #81

I 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.

It might even be sooner than that. Once oil gets too expensive to pull out the the ground, mining plastic from landfills and decomposing it back to the hydrocarbons might end up big business. The natural gas/ ch4 production follows a pretty well known curve, at about 40-50 years it's nowhere near as potent. And with the push to keep organics out of the modern landfills that might get even worse.

Energy has a lot of dark horse candidates and it's hard to pick winners. But one that sounds interesting to me, though it's still early, is pulling carbon directly out of the air using solar energy [1].

On basic principles, it sounds a whole lot easier than mining landfills? But that's assuming the capital costs can be lowered enough. (Solar costs keeps dropping, they figure out the other costs.)

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/01/terraform-industries-conve...

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#199

Post by alphanumeric0 »

cm2012 wrote: post #9

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…

Landfills are the third largest source of atmospheric methane (https://www.epa.gov/land-research/quantifying-methane-emissi...) from human activities, a greenhouse gas worse than CO2.

Methane has a GWP of 27-30 over 100 years (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...), meaning it is 27-30 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#200

Post by LordDragonfang »

scoofy wrote: post #182
toomuchtodo wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve. We're burning obscene amounts of nat gas, petroleum, and even coal currently. Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity.

A substantial portion of the duck curve problem is overproduction at no-peak hours. Plasma gasification can take that excess strain off the grid and put it to useful work, while even providing a by-product that you can burn in the event that all of your renewables are underperforming, reducing the risk of relying on renewables.

It is literally (part of) a solution to the problem you're bringing up.

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