Why Isn't Landfill Mining More Popular?
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Of course, the burning creates CO2. However, you don't have to mine and refine metal ores, and the incinerators also generate electricity and district heating. So the ecological balance is actually pretty good.
As a final bonus, you don't have literal square miles of landfills that occupy land and eventually will leak lovely chemicals into groundwater. The slag is far less problematic, and there is a lot less of it to deal with.
Land area is a non-issue. Google says Switzerland produces "80 to 90 million tonnes" of garbage per year. Assuming that garbage has the same density of water, and a landfill is 10 meters deep, a 1 sq mi landfill will last 287 years. Moreover, Wikipedia says Switzerland has 15,940 square miles of land, so that will only take up 0.006% of the country's land area.
>eventually will leak lovely chemicals into groundwater
this is a non-issue in modern landfills because they're designed with various mechanisms to prevent that from happening (eg. lining).
That said, of the 90 million of waste, 60-70 million is construction waste, and just 6 million tons is municipal waste. On the other hand, I'm not sure you can just assume that waste has the same density as water; from a cursory glance it seems to about 1/3.
https://www.bafu.admin.ch/bafu/en/home/topics/waste/in-brief...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28volume+of+90+million... (sorry I was all out of napkins)
You're right, looks like I forgot to convert liters to tons.
>On the other hand, I'm not sure you can just assume that waste has the same density as water; from a cursory glance it seems to about 1/3.
is this before or after compaction? Intuitively speaking, most things I throw out would sink in water. A garbage bin/trash bag might float because it has a bunch of air, but presumably that will all get pushed out when buried 10 meters deep.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%281+square+mile+*+1...
A sq mile is 1609x1609 = 2,588,881 square meters
Times 10m, 25,888,810 cubic meters
A cubic meter of water weighs 1000 Kg
They just used a different grade of material and pocketed the difference.
The chemicals area leaching now into the groundwater. Any researchers reporting on that are sued. Even police is used for intimidation.
Country is Germany.
It is probably much less dense.
>Moreover, Wikipedia says Switzerland has 15,940 square miles of land, so that will only take up 0.006% of the country's land area.
I do not think many landfills are located in mountains and Switzerland is fairly mountainous. The available livable and arable land is a fraction of its total land area.
Especially on long time scales.
I'm pulling this next sentence completely out of my ass, but I also imagine it would be convenient, once we develop bacteria to break this stuff down in an environmentally friendly way, to just pour it over these contained blocks of waste.
Quite frequently, if you have moths . Like it used to be a major problem before the insect apocalypse and we used to kill them with poisob
https://larryniven.net/puppeteer/puppol.shtml
>The Puppeteers mistook the City Builders to be the Ringworld's engineers and become suddenly afraid to encounter so powerful a species. The Puppeteers examined the Ringworld's superconductor material and created a technophytic bacterium to seed the Ringworld and destroy the superconductor. The strategy was to follow the probes with trading ships and come to the profitable rescue of the City Builders. However, the Puppeteers soon realized that the City Builders could not possibly have created the Ringworld, and discovered several Pak artifacts. The Puppeteers feared the Pak above nearly all other threats.
>The Conservatives took control of the government and the Ringworld project was abandoned.
Puppeteers don't colonize. They trade, and destroy threats, but the Conservative majority doesn't actually want to own or operate the Ringworld. (Remember, they're flying through space on a rosette of five planets... with over a trillion puppeteers crowded onto just one of them, and the other four covered with automated farms. Elbow room isn't something a herd animal values.)
Sounds as mythical as plastic recycling to me to be honest.
https://www.wsl.ch/en/news/searching-for-plastic-gobblers-in...
Hope I remember correctly.
When burning trash CO2 is way down the list of things I worry about personally.
The problem with burning trash is that it turns all of the carbon into CO2. Trash in landfill does produce methane which is worse greenhouse gas, but it sounds like landfill are starting to capture or burn methane. The best option is likely to separate biologic waste and compost it. That produces some CO2 but puts the remaining carbon back where can be used. Plastic doesn't degrade, paper can be recycled, which means most of the carbon is sequestered or reused.
you will never reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero per person; people emit carbon dioxide just by breathing. but the quantity determines whether or not it matters
the amount produced by burning garbage is a few times bigger than breathing
https://dercuano.github.io/notes/underground-arcology.html#a... has some of my notes on garbage; the high bit is that, in new york, residential and commercial waste is about a tonne per person per year, mostly things like paper and plastic which burn to carbon dioxide and water. so you might emit two tonnes of the dioxide per person per year by burning their trash
as explained in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/underground-arcology.html#a... a person breathing produces about a kg per day or 400 kg per year, hopefully sourced from the air via plants. so, too, is most of the combustible garbage
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions explains that human carbon dioxide emissions are about 35 gigatonnes per year, about 4½ tonnes per person per year
now, probably people in new york throw away more garbage and burn more fossil fuels than average, so these numbers are maybe not as close as they appear; but the fossil fuels number doesn't make the potential garbage burnination number totally insignificant like i thought it would
This is a classic misrepresentation of the problem. Policy makers don't care about how much CO2 you emit as long as it stays within the bio capacity of the planet. I.e. is there a net accumulation of CO2 and yes, yes there is. The CO2 you breathe had to be captured by the plants in the first place and therefore doesn't represent a net accumulation. The CO2 emissions involved in the agricultural processes of the food you eat, however do represent a net accumulation since the fuels were dug out of the ground.
in particular, i said that your emissions from breathing are
> hopefully sourced from the air via plants. so, too, is most of the combustible garbage
the story is a little more complicated, though, because point-source carbon capture is feasible for trash incinerators (and, say, container ships) but not for people breathing, so trash incinerators could conceivably provide indirect atmospheric carbon capture by way of the trees and food that ended up in the garbage. i didn't want to get into these complexities, which is why i didn't go into more detail in my original comment
more importantly, though, i don't appreciate being called a fucking liar (even if euphemistically) because i disagree with you about something. people like you are why i always regret engaging on this site. please begin adhering to minimal norms of civility before you fucking comment again
There are also technologies that turn biologic waste and plastics back into a high-quality oil that has a variety of uses. On balance I don't know if this is better than direct burning for energy production, but for more robust plastic recycling it might be.
> The Mobro 4000 was a barge owned by MOBRO Marine, Inc. made infamous in 1987 for hauling the same load of trash along the east coast of North America from New York City to Belize and back until a way was found to dispose of the garbage. ...
> In 1987, the City of New York found that it had reached its landfill capacity. The city agreed to ship its garbage to Morehead City, North Carolina, where there were plans to convert it into methane.
or ~3 square kilometers
I did some napkin math and concluded that it's a non-issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407111
I also don’t see the “ecological balance” here. That usually refers to relationships among organisms in an ecosystem where one’s waste is another’s sustenance, but where does the generated CO2 go? Or did you mean a trade-off of pollution?
By ecological balance I was mostly referring to the emission of CO2. While that is an inevitable part of incineration, it is largely compensated by reclaiming the metals, plus using the incinerators to generate electricity and district heating.
As I recall, incinerators have a poor reputation in the US because unfiltered incinerators were used back in the 1940s and 1950s, causing serious pollution problems. Modern incinerators filter the flue gases and the results are clean enough that the incinerators are often inside cities.
Far better to transform them into even worse chemicals through exothermic reactions and send them invisibly through the air to all your neighbours.
This stuff can be done, but it's expensive. I also don't know how close to 100% it gets even if everything is done properly. And of course to fully remediate this all of the equipment has to be operating properly.
A trash incinerator in Norway is working on extracting and storing that CO2. So they could end up being carbon negative in the long run
Cement plants are also interesting because of the even higher temperatures of 1200C I believe.
and some can be left with perhaps a top platform added as nest sites.
I enjoy imagining that much of our oil was pumped into the ground long ago, to prevent run-away global warming.
tastes
Needs more blockchain
Compared to this I keep hearing the bullshit that reusing glass is not environmentally friendly and a PET flask has lower carbon footprint, etc. I say bullshit. Also we should transport and sell less water (either with added sugar and CO2 or without), we have those pipes in the ground/walls at most places in the developed world, which supply us clean drinking water. We should rather focus on providing clean tapwater to everybody where it is not available, instead of selling water for 100x price in small single use containers.
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. These are the priorities.
They also have the most over-packaged goods I have ever seen, individually wrapped sweets, cakes etc wrapped in a plastic box and given to you in a plastic bag (3 layers!) not being unusual. (There is now finally a plastic bag charge introduced last year.)
* Empty, Clean, and Dry
* When in Doubt, Find Out
* Keep Bags Out
https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/your-services/collection-a...
Here's an online tool to help people identify the various kinds of recyclables and direct them correctly. It isn't easy and I doubt few Seattle residents know all of these.
https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/your-services/collection-a...
If everyone started sorting and cleaning according to these rules the fraction of usable recyclables would increase a lot.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-...
How many hours have we (as a species) wasted sorting and meticulously managing our waste when the vast majority of it never gets recycled anyway? I'm asking the question as someone who cares deeply about the environment. I just think recycling is a fake solution invented by the plastic industry to alleviate the consumer guilt that comes with purchasing single-use plastics. If you don't like a bunch of waste in your landfills, buy fewer single-use products. The vast majority of what goes into the bin never gets recycled anyway.
You'll often see "rinse and replace cap" (some plastic bottles, some say toss the cap) or "rinse and insert lid" (metal cans).
I do feel like it's probably inefficient. I'm told not to rinse dishes because my dishwasher is better (which mine definitely is) but... I'm supposed to hand rinse garbage before recycling it?
Starting with Red Mars. Blue Mars is last in the trilogy.
Why not start at the end-product and manufacturing? Most of my trash is food or packaging.
Why not reassign the packaging cost back to manufacturers?, rather than making it a cost born by consumers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibili...
Think of how plastic packaging becomes waste, because it’s one-time use.
It's like diverting the flow of a tributary stream vs. diverting the Mississippi River.
The real concern is how much energy that would require, but luckily many landfills can capture the methane emitted by previous disposal and what better way to use it than power on-side sorting facilities.
My main point is that WM (and any other trash haulers, I know someone will say "WM isn't the only company - as if that adds any value to the conversation) is stagnating instead of innovating. Thinking ahead that within a decade or two, we might have a bacteria that eats plastic (and maybe even turns it into fuel!) or that burning more diesel (to pick up recyclables) might not be such a good idea. In other industries, they have real-time cameras that can sort tiny shards of broken glass (or grains of wheat!) to keep out contaminants. Theres no reason to think WM can't innovate similarly, they just have no pressure/incentive to.
You are so casual about throwing away an irreplaceable resource.
Like many conversations about the environment and taxation, many people seem happy to talk all day about how others can afford to pay and about how others should pay.
Personally, I worry about how costly those defuse costs are overall. How often do we save uneconomic resources by wasting aggregate large amounts of resources. The tradeoffs seem to be rarely counted. Only one side of the ledger is looked at.
In context Switzerland decided that all garbage is incinerated. Perhaps we should presume that Switzerland has done this because it is the most enviromentally friendly and least wasteful measure.
1. Maybe there is toxic material IDK who wants to touch that instead of some rock
2. The industry actors who would do it only regard landfills as shiny metal reserves, and don't want/can't get the other materials one might extract from it, raising cost floor
Aluminum was ridiculously expensive before the electrolysis method and municipal electricity.