Chemical reactions fuel crises at LA County's two largest landfills
phys.org
phys.org
This one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill is near radioactive material that were illegally dumped.
This is why we need a more focused and funded EPA.
Neighborhoods are built on highly contaminated areas hoping nobody will notice. There are so many disasters just waiting to happening or happening silently.
We need ways for citizens to own and access tools for analysis. So they can get more focused analysis by certified organizations.
Seems like their explanation (high heats melting plastic pipes and degrading the landfills' ability to pump out gases, leading to runaway anaerobic decomposition) is sufficient to explain what happened here?
My bet - "No Evidence Whatever". But most people don't know what happens if you build a big pile of oily rags. Let alone about the fire hazard created if you pile up green hay.
Kinda like the Fukushima sea walls (which were there, just not high enough).
Given how ubiquitous and common battery usage is, why on earth is it SO DIFFICULT TO RECYCLE THEM?
My garbage is collected once a week, green waste too, recycling every other week, but regular use stuff like batteries is NEVER picked up I have to take it somewhere.
I'm sorry but if we actually cared about preventing these things from making it into landfills, we'd make it as easy as possible for people to recycle them.
Also, "take it somewhere" isn't that bad when "somewhere" is home depot, which has a battery disposal bin.
Why not?
> Also, "take it somewhere" isn't that bad when "somewhere" is home depot, which has a battery disposal bin.
I think you underestimate how lazy people are. Lets not leave the health and safety of our landfills up to something as risky as human laziness.
If we're serious about this, mandatory bi-yearly pickup of hazardous material (batteries, paint, solvents, etc), with awareness campaigns seems reasonable.
Push it down as a requirement on garbage companies and then monitor it through them.
Because weekly pickup is expensive to run.
In most places you pay for your weekly pickup one way or another. There’s no way people are going to vote for or approve an additional weekly pickup charge for something they dispose of very infrequently.
There are many stores with battery drop offs. If you really want to make a dent, put the battery recycling drop offs in grocery stores and put signage around it.
Routine pickup would be more hassle: You’d need to figure out the bins, the pickup method, the scheduling, etc. It’s really terrible for anything that isn’t both large and steady, like your waste bin.
I have a lot of battery powered devices, but it would take me a year to fill even a grocery bag with discarded batteries (with the exception of the occasional car or UPS battery swap every couple of years). But I generally use rechargeable batteries.
Just have some hardware stores keep a bucket labeled “recycle your batteries here” and the recycler can make monthly visits.
Even the municipal recycling center, where I sometimes take bags full of paper or plastic bottles, refuses to take batteries.
The local Batteries+Bulbs store is the only place left near me. For how long?
It should be FAR far easier to do.
There are only two ways to prevent this:
1. The waste management system should put everything on a big conveyor belt and filter out toxic/dangerous waste so that the consumer doesn't have to care about special handling.
2. Those materials should be outlawed from being used in consumer tech.
The last time I left some out, I could swear I saw the driver just pick up the recycle bin with the baggie of batteries on top and dump it in with all the rest of the recycling (so why put the baggie on top?). For the 2-3 times a year I do this, it would only take about 30 seconds to hop out and grab the baggie by hand to store it separately. Maybe they sort it out at the recycling facility, but I've also been told that almost all our recycling ends up in the landfill anyway.
And in some other places any contaminated recycling (oil, food residues etc) is redirected to landfill/incinerators.
Many retail stores accept lithium batteries for recycling. You might already be going to a store every few weeks or months that accepts them.
(This is also why "electricity is more environmentally friendly than burning fuel" is not necessarily true).
Almost any larger battery has a resale value and you could reuse instead of recycle.
Around my area in Metro Detroit there are battery stores all over that will buy used batteries. It might be only a dollar for some random laptop battery while car batteries etc are basically the core price of $50-$60 per.
At the very least, there is value in the raw metals as scrap.
that's exactly how it works in Germany. By law batteries must not go into household trash and retailers are required to take back used ones free of charge.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/waste-resources/pro...
Why is that sad? It takes more energy to extract aluminum from bauxite with electrolysis than it does to recycle used aluminum. Same with steel. Depending on the source, 30-50% of aluminum and steel made in the US is from recycled stock.
It doesn't sound enigmatic. It sounds like anaerobic respiration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_respiration
> ... In aerobic organisms undergoing respiration, electrons are shuttled to an electron transport chain, and the final electron acceptor is oxygen. Molecular oxygen is an excellent electron acceptor. Anaerobes instead use less-oxidizing substances such as nitrate (NO3), fumarate (C4H2O24), sulfate (SO24), or elemental sulfur (S). These terminal electron acceptors have smaller reduction potentials than O2. Less energy per oxidized molecule is released. Therefore, anaerobic respiration is less efficient than aerobic.
In short, heavy rainfall in the last year combined with decades of organic waste disposal in the landfills (think yard trimmings, discarded food, and other organic matter) have resulted in an enormous, uncontrolled underground anaerobic respiration problem in Southern California.
The other dump with the water intrusion has that biological problem, but the one that’s almost burning probably isn’t.
I can just imagine my mitochondria right now pointing to the electron transport chain and saying "shit's on fire, yo"
The reaction may have started when oxygen entered the well system, which is designed to pump out landfill gases like methane.
The waste is hauled in, and they are getting paid for this.
If the waste management companies would acquire plasma burners they could charge for the service of picking up garbage AND sell the electricity because of the sheer amount of energy recuperated from the incinerating of the waste.
> The conversion efficiency from MSW to Electricity can be as high as 40%, with the remaining energy being recovered in the form of heat and exported as steam (~50% and the inherent heat losses. Of the electrical energy produced by the reactor, 1/3 is being used by the plant for internal consumption and 2/3 exported to the power grid. Table 2 shows some examples of the form of energy output and quantities that can be exported from a WPC gasification plant processing MSW.
So why aren't we doing it? The landfill is there. And even if you need a new one, there is plenty of space.
The burner has a larger startup cost.
Can this be used for something useful? Collect the heat and use it to heat nearby houses? Hot water, etc.
PVC which was used for the gas collection system systems at ~200F, hardly a high temperature. Melting occurs at about 350F. However, garbage fires are a fairly common occurrence, which begs the question why PVC, which itself produces very toxic pyrolysis and combustion products, was used in the first place.
I found that visual both gross and hilarious - in a tragic kind of way. It highlights how dumb some parts our modern world are. To think we can dump 7000 tons a day into a hole and figure that'll be just fine! And that's just one landfill... I don't have any solutions to offer, but just wow ;-)
In 100 years, almost all of it will be rotten or eaten or otherwise recycled.
It's the extremely nonreactive but probably toxic chemicals like PFAS which are terrifying.
Also, we’re talking about a tiny quantity. A single square mile filled to one meter = 1600x1600 = 2.5 million tons assuming density of 1. That’s an entire year of 7000 tons a day.
EDIT: that was snarkier than intended, my apologies.
It took about 3 billion years for microbes to learn how to consume lignin. They'll learn to process plastic eventually, but without human intervention it won't be within the span of human civilization.
I read they’ve found microbes eating plastic already. [0]
We’re also working on helping their evolution along. [1]
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/plastic-eating-microbes-fro...
[1] https://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2023/november/plasti...
A couple of years ago, it was common practice to simply ship garbage to a third-world country (!) and have them deal with it - I'm totally 100% sure they scrupulously recycled every ounce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada–Philippines_waste_dispu...
Someone on here once suggested shooting nuclear waste into the sun, but apparently aliens would immediately be able to tell we did that from the absorbtion lines, in addition to the impractical delta-V involved.
In my neighborhood we have three different trucks. Garbage, recycling, and compost. The garbage and compost come weekly but recycling is every other week.
oder complaints started the day these facilities started operations, make no mistake! Chemistry was the high-tech of eighty years ago.. no way that these mysterious chemical reactions are "new" to this skeptics eye
there are large new sources of money coming into play and yes, play is the operative word
The Los Angeles area waste management practices have been outrageous since the earliest days ! Military plus Movie biz -- multiple scandals and huge, unkept areas.. many links available on request. Lastly, isn't this phys.org, the ad-ridden re-hash site of press releases? seasons greetings
The Chiquita Valley site has open working portions and closed areas, most recently re-licensed in 2004 for 15 years. There have been oder complaints for years, but increasing in the last three years; notable that there was a drought followed by quite a lot of rain. There is a land developer that wants to build 200 homes nearby, and the County seems to be in favor of it mostly. An October 2023 County review of the site and enforcement actions, did not mention any active heat or fire, just problems with oder generally. The US EPA is taking over the response now. Contradictory signals are coming from different local government agencies, and the list of involved agencies is lengthy.