[HN Gopher] The Engineering of Landfills
___________________________________________________________________
The Engineering of Landfills
Author : impish9208
Score : 241 points
Date : 2024-09-03 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (practical.engineering)
(TXT) w3m dump (practical.engineering)
| bko wrote:
| 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 designed ones play a huge role in making sure waste
| products don't end up in our soil or air or water. It's not
| possible to landfill waste everywhere... But my point is:
| landfills are a surprisingly low-impact way to manage solid waste
| in a lot of cases. I hope the future is a utopia where all the
| stuff we make maintains its beneficial value forever, but for
| now, I am thankful for the sanitary engineers and the other
| professions involved in safely and economically dealing with our
| trash so we don't have to.
|
| I love reading about landfills. I wish more environmentalists
| would be excited about engineering solving environmental ills and
| relied less on knee-jerk reactions.
| mikojan wrote:
| Landfills certainly require more power to operate than that gas
| scheme can provide later.
|
| It all sounds and reads like a fairytale but none of this is
| sustainable.
| darksaints wrote:
| 70k homes is about 84MW.
|
| You're gonna have a tough time finding any evidence that
| running a landfill requires 84MW of electricity.
| mikojan wrote:
| A single truck requires more energy to operate in a year.
| gruez wrote:
| Are you confusing MW (power) with MWh (energy)? There's
| no way that a truck uses more energy, unless it's running
| 24/7 or something.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| 84 Megawatts = 112645.86 Horsepower
| throwup238 wrote:
| According to [1] an electric garbage truck traveling
| 15,000 miles a year uses about 38,960 kWh. An 84 MW power
| plant produces 84,000 kWh every hour, or enough to power
| more than two trucks for an entire year. Even if we
| assume that the diesel equivalent uses a hundred times as
| much it's still a tiny fraction of what the plant in TFA
| produces.
|
| [1] https://www.oregon.gov/deq/ghgp/Documents/ElectricGar
| bageTru...
| rtkwe wrote:
| Couple issues with that comparison: 15k seemed low given
| I drive ~10k a year and I don't work a job that uses my
| car, so I checked refuse trucks drive on average more
| like 25k miles per year and there are many servicing a
| single dump. Also most garbage trucks are still diesel so
| you've got to 5-10x that power usage number and there's
| all the vehicles used to compact and move the trash once
| it reaches the landfill which are also (currently) pretty
| exclusively diesel powered (think bulldozers and soil
| compactors with some excavators thrown in).
|
| https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10309
| bluGill wrote:
| The point is this is free energy - all of the energy sent
| to the trucks is going to be done either way.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| So, you use more of that "enough energy to power them for
| an ear" that your power plant is outputting every hour.
|
| There are plenty of hours in an year. You won't get any
| meaningful problem by complaining about the OP's
| approximations.
| creddit wrote:
| A single truck requires more energy to operate in a year
| than 70k homes do!? I find this extremely difficult to
| believe.
|
| As far as I can tell, the EIA [1] suggests the average
| home uses 10,791 kWh a year. A gallon of gasoline
| contains ~33.7 kWh of energy per the EPA/Wikipedia [2].
|
| This would mean that a single truck would be burning
| 70,000 * 10,791 / 33.7 = 22,414,540 gallons of gasoline a
| year or 61,409 gallons a day. Seems like wild bullshit to
| me.
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3 [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent#
| :~:....
| weaksauce wrote:
| you should note that a gas engine does not convert all
| that 33kWh of energy into mechanical energy. a gasoline
| engine has about a 25% conversion into mechanical energy.
| https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml . diesel might
| be a bit better than a car but it's city driving by
| nature.
|
| just heat alone is the largest waste product in a car or
| truck
| creddit wrote:
| That's not relevant to the comparison in any way.
| weaksauce wrote:
| fair enough. misread your comment
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Only Soviets kept using gas engined trucks and buses past
| the 50s
| 8note wrote:
| A tank of gas is still a tank of gas, regardless of what
| it gets used for.
|
| Energy in = energy out + waste + energy stored
|
| The truck is barely storing anything on average, so what
| you've described is energy out and waste, but the
| calculations to compare the truck to the landfill was
| done on Energy in - the amount of gas that it needs to be
| filled with.
|
| For the same total job, you could raise or lower how
| quickly the truck goes through a tank of gas, but that
| variance has already been averaged out
| ericd wrote:
| A 500 hp semi truck engine running at peak power is like
| 350 kw, so 84 megawatts (84,000 kw) is more than 200 of
| those engines at full throttle at all times.
| tomrod wrote:
| I think their point was the delivery of that garbage over
| time is subject to entropy, and from first principles
| probably took more energy consumption than a sustained 84MW
| over the time period the landfill is a viable source for
| energy.
|
| I know nothing about landfill engineering here, to be
| frank, simply being a grease for good online gearing.
| daedrdev wrote:
| The gas is generated by the chemistry of the stuff that was
| put there. Moving the stuff there takes a lot of energy, but
| everything sitting there mainly just needs a pump and
| treatment system.
| mikojan wrote:
| This is besides the point because environmentalists (who
| were carped at above) tend to seek to reduce the amount of
| trash that needs to be shipped off to somewhere.
| bluGill wrote:
| reducing trash is useful. Recycling of trash is sometimes
| worse than throwing it in a landfill. There are many
| different plastics and many different grades of used
| paper so there is no one size fits all. People often want
| to think I recycle so I'm good - but effort is needed to
| reduce packaging and things that break early.
| gosub100 wrote:
| 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.
| coding123 wrote:
| Maybe someone should write a book about virtue signaling
| and it's dangers.
| supportengineer wrote:
| It would be difficult to promote such a book by word-of-
| mouth.
| burnished wrote:
| The real danger is allowing corporate mouthpieces to
| pollute our discourse with propaganda and outright lies.
| gosub100 wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >extra diesel-guzzling truck
|
| At least where I live, the garbage trucks have split
| compartments which means there's no additional trucks.
| bluGill wrote:
| Still additional trucks as the truck cannot hold as much
| - one compartment will fill faster than the other.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Are you sure? The truck goes a couple of miles on 7 pounds
| of diesel, how much material is it able to recover in a
| couple of miles?
| barbazoo wrote:
| > 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 more garbage
| otherwise they won't pick it up. But I still find the
| engineering impressive.
| Iulioh wrote:
| Probably OP is thinking of NIMBYs.
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| That would be quite the strawman but whatever works for
| them.
| bko wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/climate/landfills-
| methane...
| barbazoo wrote:
| Studies researching the negative effects of landfills are
| the necessary first step in making them environmentally
| friendly. How else would we know what to do?
|
| Perhaps whatever you have in mind has to do with people's
| desire to keep more garbage out of the landfill in the
| first place? I don't know.
|
| > 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.
|
| I don't know what that's referring to but where I live, the
| vast majority of recycling does not leave the province. So
| I can't really empathize with the example, I'm aware of the
| trope though. Perhaps this is one of the things that's much
| different in the US and less so in other places.
| scoofy wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| How do you feel about plasma gasification to ensure robust
| destruction of anything non-inert? I love landfills too! But
| humans are various shades of tricky, lazy, cost adverse, and
| untrustworthy (think limited liability) as it pertains to
| long term custodianship and management of things bad for
| people and the environment.
|
| TLDR You must engineer around the human. Potentially harmful
| physical matter that requires waste management? Default to
| destruction vs storage, if at all possible. You have now
| defaulted to success instead of failure.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
| cogman10 wrote:
| The big problem with plastic waste is getting it to the
| landfill (or incinerator) in the first place.
|
| Once the plastics are captured, I don't see too much
| benefit in incinerating it beyond freeing up landfill
| space. But that's really not a major issue as you can
| always dig a deeper and wider landfill.
|
| In fact, a major downside of incinerating the plastic is
| you end up with greenhouse gasses as a byproduct.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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 solid waste (MSW) landfills are the third-
| largest source of human-related methane emissions in the
| United States, accounting for approximately 14.4 percent
| of these emissions in 2022. The methane emissions from
| MSW landfills in 2022 were approximately equivalent to
| the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from more than 24.0
| million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for
| one year or the CO2 emissions from more than 13.1 million
| homes' energy use for one year. At the same time, methane
| emissions from MSW landfills represent a lost opportunity
| to capture and use a significant energy resource.
|
| TLDR Whether landfills or gasification, you are paying
| the piper regardless for emissions. Don't trust the
| human, pull forward the disposal.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| ianburrell wrote:
| What has been successful in my city, Portland, is
| separating the food and yard waste. The food and yard
| wastes are composted. Composting produces methane, but
| there is a trial to capture the methane which is burned
| as natural gas.
|
| Capturing methane from compost should be easier than
| whole landfill. It also keeps the organics instead of
| losing them.
| concordDance wrote:
| Interesting point I hadn't thought of! Had previously
| thought that obviously things should go straight in the
| ground to avoid CO2 emissions and hadn't thought about
| decomposition.
| scoofy wrote:
| 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 to go
| until we are able to grapple with climate change.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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.
| gregmac wrote:
| 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| 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
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| My town uses the same trucks for both.
| Goonbaggins wrote:
| 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
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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. It's unlikely they are, so one must
| assume they are enemies.
| trallnag wrote:
| Why are landfills like this still a thing? Why not burn
| everything and only dump what's left?
| digging wrote:
| Assuming incineration has lower externalities than
| landfills[1], you're... expressing surprise that a cheaper,
| suboptimal technique is ever used?
|
| [1] I don't know if that's true.
| abracadaniel wrote:
| Some places do. Waste to energy plants are a thing. One of the
| big challenges is running a large, stable, chemical reaction on
| unknown fuel. It's difficult to burn things hot enough to
| reduce potentially dangerous compounds while also having
| variable input. Then, the gasses need to be monitored to avoid
| dangerous compounds reforming as the exhaust cools.
| SargeDebian wrote:
| And sometimes people throw things in that explode.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > It's difficult to burn things hot enough to reduce
| potentially dangerous compounds
|
| And that's before accounting for people illegally tossing
| things that contain heavy metals (such as batteries).
| briffle wrote:
| My county has one that does 90% of our garbage, and its not an
| easy problem. The key part is scrubbing the smoke to get rid of
| the polutants, and then cleaning the ash to also get rid of
| things like mercury.
|
| The only way they can seem to make a buck is to charge high
| rates to dispose of 'medical waste' that helps with costs.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Curious: why medical wastes?
|
| 90% : Sweden or Japan ? https://sensoneo.com/global-waste-
| index/
| briffle wrote:
| Marion County, Oregon..
|
| Medical waste is 'biohazard' waste (think blood, guts,
| needles, etc) So they can't just throw most of that in a
| landfill, it has to get burned. They charge a premium
| partly because they can, and partly because most of that is
| from outside our county.
|
| https://www.co.marion.or.us/PW/ES/disposal/Pages/mcwef.aspx
| cm2012 wrote:
| Landfills are cheap, plentiful, easy and pollute much much less
| than burning.
| nobodyknowin wrote:
| And in the US we have plenty of open land to place them.
|
| I understand places like Japan wanting to find alternative
| means
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Because some things release Very Bad Chemicals(tm) when burned.
| Better to just bury them.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Often it's just as bad or worse to bury them because they
| will work their way into the water table and then it's gg for
| decades
| daedrdev wrote:
| The article is about how much engineering modern landfills
| in first world countries use to avoid that problem.
| bluGill wrote:
| People are not careful about what they throw away. Batteries,
| lead, and so on end up in trash. When you burn it those get
| released to the atmosphere, sometimes in a form that is even
| worse chemically than what we started with.
|
| We do burn trash, but as the other reply said, it is expensive
| because you have to somehow account for all that.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Since our city started collecting green waste separately, it's
| interesting to see what goes into our garbage. It's basically
| non-recyclable soft plastic, cat litter, and dog poo bags.
| blitzar wrote:
| The big shift for me was when I moved to an area with seperate
| food recycling. The general rubbish is much cleaner, although
| probably more toxic in a landfill, as it is just the soft
| plastic or anything soiled.
| nuz wrote:
| My youtube recommends and HN feed are just merging these days
| with this and nilered being top the other day
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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 environment. The plastic pollution in
| the ocean is from developing countries and things unrelated to
| our soda bottles.
|
| Modern landfills (as this article describes) are really efficient
| and have basically no leakage to the environment. As mentioned,
| you can make beautiful parks on a closed landfill with no smell.
| Technology is amazing.
| blitzar wrote:
| The plastic pollution in the ocean is from our soda bottles we
| shipped to developing countries.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| IIRC, ~30%[0] of ocean plastic came from fishing nests. They
| are huge, break often and it's easier and cheaper to throw
| aboard an old one than bring it onshore for recycling. (edit)
| 0: 46% https://www.seashepherdglobal.org/latest-news/marine-
| debris-...
|
| Totally unrelated but since it's from seashepherd I can't
| help adding Paul Watson trial from extradition in Japan is
| tomorrow.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Additionally, the top 10 rivers, 9 of which in Asia,
| produce an extremely high precent of land based ocean
| pollution
| immibis wrote:
| E.g. the bottles we sent them for "recycling"
| gruez wrote:
| That makes up a tiny amount of overall plastic waste.
|
| >I estimate that a few percent of ocean plastics could
| result from trade from rich countries. A figure as high
| as 5% would not be unreasonable.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
| aziaziazi wrote:
| For the sake of analogy: _or the sea food we buy from
| them_
| legulere wrote:
| I think the number comes from one study about the great
| pacific garbage patch and cannot be generalised to all
| ocean trash.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| You are very right:
|
| > Approximately 46% of the 79 thousand tons of ocean
| plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is made up of
| fishing nets, some as large as football fields, according
| to the study published in March 2018 in Scientific
| Reports
|
| While generalisations may be misleading, when people talk
| about ocean pollutions they often think about the
| patches.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| I'd guess that it's cheaper to ship a lot of garbage to
| developing countries.
| gruez wrote:
| Is it? Land is dirt cheap in the US. Surely it's cheaper to
| bury it locally than ship it half way across the world? Even
| for the plastic that's being shipped half way across the
| world, they're ostensibly done for recycling purposes (ie.
| they're buying the plastic waste), and the unrecycleable
| plastics end up being mismanaged.
| ngruhn wrote:
| I've heard, shipping a lot of garbage to China was quite
| common until the Chinese banned it. That was economically
| viable because China exports so much and many container
| ships would otherwise return empty to China.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| It was viable only because we were shipping "recyclables"
| that had to be "recycled" by contract, not pure garbage
| that could have just been buried. Sorting through that
| whole mess of "recyclables" was more expensive than
| shipping it to China and letting them just burn or bury
| it.
| gruez wrote:
| >Sorting through that whole mess of "recyclables" was
| more expensive than shipping it to China and letting them
| just burn or bury it.
|
| I thought they didn't bother and just buried it if it
| wasn't profitable.
|
| >GONZALEZ: Whoa. Oh, I've been doing that one wrong. So
| the city of Nogales went around to everyone's house this
| morning and picked up their recyclables. [...] And they
| brought them here. And where is all this going to go?
|
| >GALLEGO: Trash.
|
| >GONZALEZ: The recycling is going into the trash. I am
| watching pristine beer bottles and juice cartons and
| cardboard boxes get smushed into a pile of wet, gooey,
| dripping food waste and soggy diapers.
|
| https://www.npr.org/transcripts/741283641
| bluGill wrote:
| > I thought they didn't bother and just buried it if it
| wasn't profitable.
|
| The point is to cheat. Say you recycle and ensure that
| there are enough links in the chain nobody can follow it
| to the end and prove the stuff you ship to China wasn't
| recycled. China did recycle some stuff, but most of it
| wasn't. China decided to stop participating in that scam
| though.
| fragmede wrote:
| Right. you're not paying to ship it to China, you're
| subsidizing a boat and containers that are going back
| empty (or not going back) otherwise.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| We still ship scrap metal and other recyclables over.
|
| China, and other countries, put limits on such imports,
| as their recycling industries were not exactly
| environmentally friendly. Technically you can still
| import plastic waste into China, but with a very low
| contamination percentage that's hard to achieve.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Land close enough to cities to be reasonable to truck
| garbage to is less plentiful though and you have to factor
| in the costs of properly containing and processing that
| garbage.
| simmonmt wrote:
| That's true, but NYC still ships trash all over the
| place: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/8714ca7999a64
| 704b59721c...
|
| At the end of the day it has to go somewhere, and there's
| no room for it in the five boroughs, so they pay what
| they need to pay. And it's still cheaper than sending it
| overseas (otherwise they would).
| rtkwe wrote:
| NYC is a bit of a special case for a lot of things due to
| it's size/density and location. Most places don't ship
| their waste that far from it's origin because it's
| expensive.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| You are correct. In the US at least, land is dirt cheap.
| Transporting stuff is not cheap. For this reason, it's
| common for some US states to ship garbage to other US
| states for disposal, simply because geographically it makes
| economic sense.
| hmottestad wrote:
| In Oslo we import trash from the other European countries and
| then transport a bunch of our own trash to Sweden. Seemingly
| all because of some carbon emissions taxes in Norway.
|
| https://www.nrk.no/norge/fyller-ovnene-med-importsoppel-
| samt...
| toast0 wrote:
| Oregon is a lot closer, and they accept a lot of trash from
| my state by rail. No need to put it on a boat.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Tires are a source of microplastics, as well.
|
| https://assessments.epa.gov/risk/document/&deid=361070
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...
| mikojan wrote:
| > Putting stuff in a landfill is way better for global warming
| since its not burned, the carbon is buried.
|
| Landfills release gas. Of course it is better than burning
| plastic but there is no environmentalist on earth demanding for
| plastic to be burned.
|
| > Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in
| landfills, not the natural environment.
|
| This is horrifyingly incorrect! Developed countries process
| only some of their trash themselves. The rest is shipped into
| poorer countries. It will end up in the natural environment.
|
| The UK ships off two thirds to other countries.
| gruez wrote:
| >This is horrifyingly incorrect! Developed countries process
| only some of their trash themselves. The rest is shipped into
| poorer countries. It will end up in the natural environment.
|
| No, you're incorrect.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
|
| >Many people think that rich countries ship most of their
| plastic waste overseas. But is this really true?
|
| >The short answer is no: many countries export some of their
| waste, but they still handle most of it domestically.
|
| >[...] When it comes to the fraction of plastic waste that is
| exported, the UK is one of the largest exporters. For
| context, the US exported about 5% of its plastic waste in
| 2010. France exported 11%, and the Netherlands exported
| 14%.[...]
|
| >[...] I estimate that a few percent of ocean plastics could
| result from trade from rich countries. A figure as high as 5%
| would not be unreasonable.
| mikojan wrote:
| > No, you're incorrect.
|
| Exactly what statement is incorrect?
|
| Adding to that:
|
| Statistics show that developed countries are shipping
| significant amounts of trash into poorer countries. But
| there is most likely an even higher number of unrecorded
| cases. Supply chains can be difficult to monitor even
| within the OECD, and an estimated third of shipments is
| illegal.[0]
|
| [0]: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/news/video-how-eu-
| tackling-...
| gruez wrote:
| >Exactly what statement is incorrect?
|
| Your original comment:
|
| >> Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends
| up in landfills, not the natural environment.
|
| >This is horrifyingly incorrect! Developed countries
| process only some of their trash themselves.
|
| I guess you can weasel out of this by claiming that >85%
| counts as "some", but it's misleading at the very least.
| Moreover, your statement was trying to refute "Almost all
| plastic waste in developed countries ends up in
| landfills, not the natural environment", which so far as
| I can tell is true, even if some small fraction gets
| exported to developing countries and end up mismanaged.
| mikojan wrote:
| In reality, a significant portion is exported to
| developing countries, where it often ends up mismanaged.
| Claiming developed countries handle "almost all" of their
| plastic waste without acknowledging this export is
| detracting from wrongdoings me and you bear
| responsibility for as citizens of relatively free and
| open democratic societies. It is not somehow misleading.
| It is morally reprehensible.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Landfills release gas. Of course it is better than burning
| plastic but there is no environmentalist on earth demanding
| for plastic to be burned.
|
| Methane comes from organic waste mostly, most plastics do not
| degrade in a landfill environment.
| breck wrote:
| > 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.
| jerf wrote:
| "How the hell did I not realize this before?"
|
| There was a concentrated effort to blow the problem of
| landfills massively, massively out of proportion in the 1980s
| and 1990s. I have not seen in active in a couple of decades,
| but the cultural detritus of the effort still floats around,
| and few people are terribly motivated to go correcting it
| since it's a dead issue.
|
| There have been some legitimate improvements in the space
| since then. A disturbing amount of Grady is talking about is
| relatively new, not something we've been doing for a century
| now.
|
| But the propaganda in the 1980s and 1990s was definitely
| around running out of space on Earth itself to store garbage
| itself because we're just generating so much. There's a
| picture I doubt I could dig up that has been injected into my
| brain of a field of garbage as seagulls fly over it and a
| lone backhoe in the distance tries to contend with the field
| of garbage. And, sure, the actual garbage dump isn't a
| pleasant place, though to be honest I was always sort of
| impressed with how little smell they tended to generate even
| in the 1980s. But there's a lot of unrepresentative places on
| Planet Earth to plop a camera. Give me a million dollars and
| I'll make a documentary proving Earth is uninhabited and
| uninhabitable. Chromecast's default photo screen saver is
| full of pictures of dozens of square miles of uninhabited
| wasteland that are very pretty colors due to the local
| chemical composition. But that's not a great way to
| understand the world in a proportional manner.
|
| Speaking for the US at the time, in a semi-rural area, the
| plausibility of this was enhanced by what you would find
| walking through a forest. People threw a lot more stuff just
| straight out of their cars on the roadway, dumped cars and
| mattresses in state forests, all kinds of things like that.
| Times have changed on that front. But even then, it was
| really only where the people were. Most land was not full of
| garbage. But, pretty much by definition, the people are where
| the people are, so it stood out, made it a lot easier to feel
| like we were drowning in garbage, when all we really needed
| to do was take a bit better care of where we actually lived.
|
| (This comment is about land garbage. Oceans are a completely
| different beast for many reasons and I'm not speaking to the
| issues of plastic in the ocean.)
| jrmg wrote:
| 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 of
| New York (or three times, if you include the water as well as
| the land).
|
| This is not a trivial amount of land - and it gets worse if
| you were not to have it be (ridiculously!) one hundred yards
| deep.
|
| I'm not arguing we're about to run out of landfill space
| imminently, but calling this 'trivial' is not what I'd call
| it.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_citi
| es_b... [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles
| cm2012 wrote:
| 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.
| breck wrote:
| Fair enough. Here it is visualized using Google Earth:
|
| https://x.com/breckyunits/status/1831080588406849585
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| That's also just the volume of trash. It doesn't include
| all the support infrastructure present at each landfill or
| the buffer real estate so that it is not adjacent to any
| desirable real estate. It's not practical to have a single
| huge landfill serving the country, so these other factors
| get multiplied by every actual landfill site we build.
| Still there are scant few, if any, counties in the U.S.
| that are so strained on real estate they can't bury their
| garbage.
| renhanxue wrote:
| > Almost all plastic waste in developed countries ends up in
| landfills, not the natural environment.
|
| Here in Sweden less than 0.5% of household waste goes to
| landfill. Almost everything is burned in co-generation plants
| for district heating, with pretty sophisticated exhaust gas
| treatment. Unfortunately most of the plastic waste that goes
| into the recycling bins also end up there in the end, with only
| about 10% currently being actually recycled (mostly it's PET
| that gets recycled, AFAIK).
|
| edit: My 10% figure is some years old; plastic numbers are
| actually much better now! These days it's about 35%. For glass,
| paper and metal the same figures are all around 80% though so
| plastic still has a long way to go.
| sitkack wrote:
| So it goes into the sky instead? That seems more sightly, but
| the CO2 emissions must be astronomical.
| renhanxue wrote:
| If we didn't burn waste we'd need to burn something else to
| stay warm in winter. Currently we supplement the waste with
| _mostly_ renewables, like byproducts from the forestry
| industry (e.g. treetops, wood chips, sawdust) and the olive
| oil industry (olive pits; we import this stuff from the
| Mediterranean region), but we burn a bit of peat too
| because there aren't enough reasonably priced renewables.
| Burning waste really isn't meaningfully worse than burning
| anything else.
|
| After the combustion we're left with 15-20% by weight in
| slag; some of this is metal that is recovered and sent to
| recycling, but the rest is effectively gravel that is used
| in e.g. road construction and the like. There's also 3-5%
| by weight of toxic gases captured by the exhaust gas
| treatment. This is sent to a special facility in Norway
| that more or less puts it in landfill, although a very
| carefully managed one.
| sitkack wrote:
| Neat, thanks!
| yreg wrote:
| > If we didn't burn waste we'd need to burn something
| else to stay warm in winter.
|
| Why not nuclear/renewables?
| renhanxue wrote:
| 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 required
| for heating in Sweden.
| toast0 wrote:
| People don't like it when you burn nuclear waste, burning
| windmills isn't very effective --- at least not the
| modern metal ones, and solar panels are going to be toxic
| if you burn them. :P
| hmottestad wrote:
| When it comes to plastics I like to think that it's
| basically a product of oil and other oil related products
| are burnt all the time for energy.
|
| The end goal should include a carbon capture step. They've
| looked into that here in Oslo, Norway, but it ended up much
| costlier than anticipated and at the moment it looks like
| it's going to be very very drawn out.
|
| Carbon capture at the source is usually not that terrible
| of an idea. Trying to capture carbon from the air around us
| is very challenging, but if the air is 80% CO2 to begin
| with it's going to be much cheaper to capture half of it
| then trying to capture the same amount from regular air.
|
| I heard that a good way to capture carbon on a bigger scale
| would be through burning trees and capturing the carbon.
| Store the carbon in a concentrated form, use the heat to
| produce electricity and when you chop down trees to burn
| you also make space for growing new trees. Sounds kinda
| slow though, and not exactly cheap either.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| What is "carbon capture" exactly? How does the mechanism
| work? Does it take an energy input?
| ianburrell wrote:
| If you want power, it is better to make renewables. The
| problem with carbon capture is that more energy and more
| fuel to run the capture. It costs too much.
|
| If you want to sequester the carbon, just cut down the
| trees and bury them. The problem is that there isn't
| enough trees on Earth to power civilization or sequester
| enough carbon.
| leoedin wrote:
| 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.
| renhanxue wrote:
| 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
| (Agesta) 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 same people. The Stockholm
| municipal energy company burns a lot of waste (and also
| woodchips and other renewables) for district heating. That
| same company also recently closed a big carbon
| sequestration deal with Microsoft:
| https://carboncredits.com/microsoft-and-stockholm-exergi-
| str....
| MostlyStable wrote:
| 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
| bluGill wrote:
| I'd prefer you use wind to get the energy(or solar but
| there isn't much sun when you need heat) and burn
| nothing.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Note that western countries export waste to developing
| countries.
| dhosek wrote:
| 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 former teacher in
| Florida and he pointed out a hill a few miles away from his condo
| and explaining that the hill was actually a pile of trash.
|
| I think that at least some in the Chicago area are former
| quarries.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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
| FredPret wrote:
| I googled global waste per year. Looks like it's on the order of
| 2 billion tons per year. Leaving room for 100% growth, and
| assuming a density of 1 (less dense = more space required =
| worse), we'll need 4 billion cubic meters of landfill per year.
|
| That's a cubic mile of garbage!
|
| But that doesn't seem all that catastrophic either - if you
| spread it out to a hole 1m deep, it'll be 63 km on a side. 5m
| deep = 28km on a side. That's a lot, but it doesn't seem like the
| highest ecological priority. If it's practical to compress before
| dumping, it will be even less terrible.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| To get really controversial the highest environmental priority
| is atmospheric co2 and landfill space doesn't have a scratch on
| it in terms of harm.
|
| Plastics and other carbon containing substances buried
| underground sounds terrible at face value but the thing that
| should really make you worry is the amount of carbon released
| into the atmosphere. Atmospheric pollution can often coincide
| with the amount of trash you create but in general if your
| focus is on landfill rather than atmosphere you're focusing on
| something that doesn't have a scratch in levels of importance.
|
| In fact if we can find a way to landfill co2 rapidly in a net
| co2 negative way that may be our best hope right now
| (repeatedly growing and burying large amounts of biomass for
| example).
| flavius29663 wrote:
| Loss of biodiversity and microplastics pollution are even
| higher in my opinion.
| jenny91 wrote:
| Than global warming and CO2 emissions?!
| concordDance wrote:
| Geoengineering could maybe bring temperatures back down,
| but you can't just replant an old growth forest and out
| all the old plants, fungi and animals back.
|
| If microplastics are behind the fertility drop, reverse
| flynn effect or obesity crisis they would also be more
| important in the ~100 year timeline.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Good thing that landfills don't cause either.
| gosub100 wrote:
| A lot of that waste is organic and will degrade over time. And
| ultimately all that "garbage" was extracted from the earth in
| the first place. It's like that Monty Python quote "what did
| you start with? Nothing. What did you end with? Nothing. What
| have you lost? Nothing!"
| louwrentius wrote:
| 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.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| 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.
| ajb wrote:
| "trash is an inescapable fact of the human condition" Not really.
| There didn't used to be anything like as much. But what we did
| before wasn't necessarily better.
|
| Most consumer products were made of organics, like wood, cloth
| and paper; metals, and clay. Organics were burned or recycled,
| metals recycled (as now). Only broken clay was really waste.
|
| Cities didn't collect trash - they collected ash. In Britain
| waste collectors are called "dustmen" because that's what they
| used to collect. But that meant that people were burning trash in
| their homes, along with their coal or wood. Then, re-using your
| trash as winter fuel was a nice economy. Now we know that in-home
| combustion isn't very healthy.
| scoofy wrote:
| If you don't think humans used to make trash, I have plenty of
| shell mounds to show you.
| pchristensen wrote:
| And pottery shards.
| bredren wrote:
| Reminds me of this 2013 report on the earliest cat
| domestication (~3610 BCE):
|
| > The felid bones were found in an ashy matrix in three
| refuse pits, H172, H35, and H130, with animal bones, pottery
| sherds, bone tools, and some stone tools...
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1311439110
| kemotep wrote:
| Tells are artificial hills that cities, temples, and forts
| were built on in Ancient Mesopotamia and other nearby places.
|
| Neo-Assyrian cities could have impressive fortifications 100
| feet tall rising high above the surrounding landscape.
|
| And all built by filling in the lower levels with trash and
| dirt and building on top of it.
| vel0city wrote:
| > Only broken clay was really waste.
|
| > Cities didn't collect trash - they collected ash.
|
| So is ash broken clay or is your first statement just
| incorrect?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I started a residential trash hauling cooperative this year after
| 7 years of planning
|
| Yall have no idea how much opportunity there is here
| whycome wrote:
| 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?
| Diederich wrote:
| Wow, can you expand on that? Thanks!
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| I'd also like to know more about what you do.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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 it's
| also a difficult group to manage consistent staffing levels.
| Just something to keep in mind if you start expanding and need
| drivers.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| I find it sad that the USA doesn't use more plasma burners [0] to
| get rid of waste.
|
| But, land is cheap in the USA, and the USA has a lot of land, so
| landfills win.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
| sitkack wrote:
| Yeah, would be a great way to consume free solar during the
| brightest part of the day.
|
| Electricity in -> bulk chemical feedstocks out and no long
| distance transportation, handling and disposal costs.
|
| The nice thing about plasma burners is that you can capture the
| resulting syngas and not just exhaust tons of CO2 into the
| atmosphere as with an incinerator.
| Rygian wrote:
| The Wikipedia page describes it as net positive in energy.
| Why consume solar?
| ianburrell wrote:
| The problem is that burning trash produces CO2 from stuff, like
| plastic, that doesn't degrade in landfill. It is net positive
| CO2. The ideal is to sequester the carbon in landfill.
|
| This assumes that landfill is capturing and burning methane,
| because methane is worse than CO2.
| nobodyknowin wrote:
| I really enjoyed my time working at a medium sized landfill as
| their surveyor and civil tech.
|
| The engineering discussion in the article is spot on. We chose to
| reinject most of our leachate as that helps with CH4 production,
| and more CH4 for us meant more micro-turbines running generating
| us $$$ under our power purchase agreement with the local utility.
|
| The well field balancing was crucial as well, we had to not only
| try to extract lots of methane, but not pull too hard or else
| that's how you get an underground fire. Big trouble if that
| happens.
|
| And even the stockpile balancing was hard! You couldn't run out
| of dirt before your closure date, cause now you gotta start
| importing! Lots of volume calculations for me.
|
| Fun stuff. If I was to go deeper into civil (I'm a licensed
| surveyor now) I'd likely consult for landfills. Big money and
| extremely interesting work.
| DylanSp wrote:
| What sort of substances end up in leachate, and how'd that
| contribute to greater CH4 production in your landfill? I was
| hoping that the OP post/video went into more detail on the
| chemistry involved.
| nobodyknowin wrote:
| 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.
| DylanSp wrote:
| Got it, thanks!
| nobodyknowin wrote:
| 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.
| khaki54 wrote:
| 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.
| nobodyknowin wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| We can make plastics from bio sources, or directly from
| elemental carbon. Oil is a lot cheaper, but we can do it. In
| WWII the Germans were running on synthetic gas. Last I
| checked you can buy synthetic gas - at about 5x the cost of
| standard pump gasoline. (synthetic gas has more energy per
| gallon so sometimes it is used in a race)
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Probably not. I can't imagine anything we currently landfill
| that we're in any danger of running out of. Even rare-earth
| metals are quite widely dispersed and readily available. It
| seems more likely that we'd divert e-waste to places where
| materials can be recovered long before mining old trash.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| they'll certainly mine them for archaeological information.
|
| that's one of the reasons I keep my trash in neat layers
| ordered chronologically
| quicon wrote:
| "Trash is an inescapable element of the human condition."
|
| It is an inescapable element of the current consumerism
| economical model, but it should'nt be of the human condition.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Anyone knows about an in-depth video, HN-level, on exactly how
| garbage trucks work?
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