Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Engineering of Landfills

practical.engineering

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 333 posts

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#231

Post by scoofy »

philwelch wrote: post #227
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.

> Until those numbers are at-or-near zero, every ounce of renewable electricity needs to be offsetting dirty electricity. That’s not realistic. You can and probably will have a complete excess of renewable energy on bright and windy days that is well beyond electrical demand, and at the same time rely on baseload power during still nights. Energy storage helps even things out, and plasma gasification is one possible…

The more I read about plasma gasification, the more it seems entirely fine and beneficial. The infrastructure just seems fairly expensive.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#232

Post by scoofy »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #197
scoofy wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effi…

The more I read about plasma gasification, the more it seems entirely fine and beneficial. The infrastructure just seems fairly expensive.

I would prefer that focus and expense be used to target reducing GHG's in the short run.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#233

Post by scoofy »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #200
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.

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.

I've read up, and you have a good point.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#234

Post by mschuster91 »

scoofy wrote: post #99
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…

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.

> 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.

Thing is, we need to find out ways to remove, reduce and recycle plastics as soon as possible. The US may have enough place to place landfills without impacting anyone, but densely settled Europe does not - we're having the requirement that landfills can only take up 10% of residential waste by 2035, the rest has to be either burned or recycled by then. And for that, we need technology to actually recycle the plastic waste to be ready at industrial scale, so we need to focus on that right now. Sorting trash, separating modern multi layer plastics (sometimes a dozen layers of different materials!), recovering polymer source compounds, a lot of that is still open topics that need to be researched.

Additionally, landfills are already bad for the environment - Grady points out the issue in his video indirectly: the birds eat the food waste from all the packaging and end up distributing (micro)plastic waste across the environment surrounding the landfills, which then ends up in the groundwater and surface water bodies. Also the birds pick up and distribute pathogens from the decomposing waste.

Side note: we also need plastics recycling to reduce our dependency on fresh oil products used to manufacture them. Again, the US has it a bit easier due to self-sufficient domestic oil production, but Europe does not.

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdfs/news/expert/2018/4/story...

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#235

Post by mschuster91 »

bko wrote: post #87
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…

Search google news "environmentalist landfill" and find me one article praising the ingenuity of landfills https://news.google.com/search?q=environmentalist+landfills&... Here's one from 3 days ago. Garbage Lasagna’: Dumps Are a Big Driver of Warming, Study Says Don't gaslight me and tell me environmentalists applaud all solutions to environmental issues equally. They have their own solutions, and activists often for…

> They have their own solutions, and activists often force things like recycling at all costs, even though it means shipping it across the world on polluting boats and having some other country dump it in their rivers.

That's a side effect of (way too) lax regulations and the externalities of disposing of plastics not being paid for!

Germany and a few other EU countries for example force any introducer of "recyclable" packaging to pay into a system to fund recycling stream collection, sorting and disposals ("Grüner Punkt" [1]). Yes, it's not perfect, way too much of our plastics waste still is exported to poor countries, but the ban on that is already law that will come into force in a few years [2].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%BCner_Punkt

[2] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/plastikmuell-eu-einigt-sic...

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#236

Post by acec »

scoofy wrote: post #99
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…

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.

Waste is inherently problematic, regardless of how we manage it. While burning plastic for energy might seem like a solution, it's not ideal. We can generate clean electricity through other means that are cheaper and less polluting. Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climate change. Ultimately, the best approach is to minimize waste generation in the first place, as this prevents both environmental harm and the need for costly and imperfect solutions.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#237

Post by xnx »

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…

Piling our waste on/in the ground has 1000x less harmful side effects than the waste we burn and spray into the air from hundreds of millions different locations.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#238

Post by Sammi »

acec wrote: post #236
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.

Waste is inherently problematic, regardless of how we manage it. While burning plastic for energy might seem like a solution, it's not ideal. We can generate clean electricity through other means that are cheaper and less polluting. Burning waste still releases harmful toxins into the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions – even if it reduces landfill methane, which is a potent contributor to climat…

It does seem like we are producing an unnecessarily large amount of waste, but the last sentence does not come of as constructive to me, because it doesn't offer any concrete action we can take towards a goal of reducing waste. Instead if comes of as sidestepping the issue of dealing with the waste we have.

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#239

Post by Sammi »

xnx wrote: post #237
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…

Piling our waste on/in the ground has 1000x less harmful side effects than the waste we burn and spray into the air from hundreds of millions different locations.

Is there data to back this claim?

Re: The Engineering of Landfills

#240

Post by mrmlz »

MostlyStable wrote: post #97
renhanxue wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hopefully in the relatively near future, heat storage systems (like the sand batteries talked about in [0]) can do long term storage of heat energy from renewables and heating can provided relatively carbon free through the winter. For now though, I'd agree that the burning is not that big a deal. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZrM-IZlTE

We got that as well in Sweden - but we use water. Its part of the central-communal heating system that heats a large of the city.
Post reply on HN