The Engineering of Landfills
practical.engineering
practical.engineering
> 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.
It all sounds and reads like a fairytale but none of this is sustainable.
You’re gonna have a tough time finding any evidence that running a landfill requires 84MW of electricity.
[1] https://www.oregon.gov/deq/ghgp/Documents/ElectricGarbageTru...
There are plenty of hours in an year. You won't get any meaningful problem by complaining about the OP's approximations.
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#:~:....
just heat alone is the largest waste product in a car or truck
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
(But yeah, the original claim still seems orders-of-magnitude off; clearly BS.)
I know nothing about landfill engineering here, to be frank, simply being a grease for good online gearing.
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.
At least where I live, the garbage trucks have split compartments which means there's no additional trucks.
It’s a good thing we have electric motors, then. An additional benefit is that they are much less likely to wake you up when they get your bins at 5am.
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.
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.
These types of people exist, and in worryingly large numbers.
I can't find anything about "organic" gas, maybe your auto translate did a wrong thing?!
There might be some traces of it in the Internet archive.
[edit] there are traces here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210209184343/http://www.greenp...
It was prominently on their home page at some point, but I could not find it. I should have saved it.
If you mean "over the last 20 years", then no, they weren't even a governing party between 2005 and 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Federal_Republic_of_Ge...
You're perhaps talking about the downstream effects of sunsetting nuclear energy but even since then, the ratio of renewable energy has only increased. So what do you mean exactly?
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
They are also against fracking, which indirectly leads to more coal burning. Which is worse.
> [...] the ratio of renewable energy has only increased. So what do you mean exactly?
I would look at the CO2 emitted per Joule or something like that. Ie something that puts nuclear and coal into different baskets.
> Is that actually true?
> If you mean "over the last 20 years", then no, they weren't even a governing party between 2005 and 2021.
You don't have to be in cabinet to influence other parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens#Electio...
You don't even have to be in parliament to influence other parties.
As a rule we try to avoid putting landfills anywhere near someone's backyard, so it's not your usual hot topic for the zoning committee.
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...
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.
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...
I guess I consider myself an environmentalist, in that it's a relatively high priority to me to avoid causing unnecessary environmental destruction. I regularly take some effort to dispose of hazardous waste appropriately, etc, but I normally don't go around announcing my environmental priorities. It's not that I don't care, it's just that talking about it is usually not much fun, and is unlikely to help anything.
I think my attitude on the matter is pretty common in my area.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Capturing methane from compost should be easier than whole landfill. It also keeps the organics instead of losing them.
We can 'mine' landfills in the future, if that becomes economically viable.
> parts of Europe, Japan, the Nordics
The Nordics are a part of Europe.
DRY! :-)
> plastic decomposition
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.
By the end of this year, the world will be deploying 660GW of solar annually. Within 18 months, that figure rises to 1TW/year (based on current manufacturing ramp trajectories).
On the contrary, I’m unsure how you think we don’t have the clean power for this, not even accounting for the power you can generate from the syngas that is a byproduct of the process. The process is not energy positive, but it’s also not wildly net negative due to the energy content of the matter being gasified.
> Plasma gasification uses around 800 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of power per ton of municipal solid waste (MSW).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01968...
I've been trying to advocate for slowing climate change since about 2000. I've been to enough city council meetings, and seen enough government promises simply abandoned to know that this is a deeply naive way to just "expect" the world to suddenly become rational.
Let's stop the actively bleeding artery that is actively killing us before we even start to worry some efficiency gains we could get by asking the surgeon to do two things at once.
This is the difference between an environmentalist and an "environmentalist."
We need to fix climate change now. Get to carbon neutral now. Literally nothing else matters much.
I would prefer that focus and expense be used to target reducing GHG's in the short run.
It is literally (part of) a solution to the problem you're bringing up.
> Because solar isn't balanced and we haven't fixed the duck curve.
Well, landfill management is something you could (mostly) only run whenever you have excess (solar) power on the grid. So it's an excellent consumer for intermittent generators.
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 way to store that energy.
> it seems like landfills are far-and-away the best way to go until we are able to grapple with climate change.
Incineration ends up being quite profitable in isolation. Take stuff worth negative X$ per ton and turn it into a smaller pile of stuff still worth negative X$ per ton. Generating power is a useful side effect, but not the main reason.
The submission suggests that landfills ain't dug, but just piled high. Digging a hole costs more time, money and effort than not digging a hole.
I've yet to see a truly viable solution in this space that can economically compete; it would be nice to see it happen.
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
Figure 1 in the linked paper gives the raw numbers for where PET bottles end up. [1]
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...
The US east of the Mississippi and the far west coast has similar (lower, but not by much) population density. However there is a lot of space in Alaska and west of the Mississippi that almost nobody lives in and that brings down the density measures.
Another way of looking at it, is that your vision is not constructive, because you wave away the real solution as "not actionable". Parent does not propose concrete action, but neither do you. We can have meaningful discussion without everything having to be accompanied by a five-step plan.
For actionable reduction of waste, just look at how Europe has a comparable life style as the US, whilst using less resources and emitting less GHG equivalent. Not placing the EU on a pedestal. Just saying that reduction is not just possible, it's being done, as we speak. But it requires changes and is for sure a harder sell than "no need to change any habits, technology will save us".
Europe also doesn't tax "light trucks" as if they were bicycles nor force people into cars to survive.
The American mindset "I do what I do and you do what you do" worked in the 60s and 70s when people were unaware they're fucking the planet (as hard as they are), but I can't help but look down on wasteful people, they're subsidized by people doing their part (or continents doing their part)
Also, keep the set of allowed formules small.
This will serve two purposes, first, allow plastics to be actually recycled to a greater extent. Now, plastics are very much "mystery" items.
Second, it will reduce the amount of harmful and toxic additives in plastics.
Somehow we also need to stop producing so much junk, electronics which is not durable, packing material within packing material and so on. The externalised costs of so many things are huge, we need to somehow de-externalise the costs.
However what I couldn't find was how much overall waste consumers create vs other sources, just this:
https://discardstudies.com/2016/03/02/municipal-versus-indus...
And it seems to imply that consumer behavior has little direct effect on the overall amount of waste we humans produce. Like, how many people would have to stop drinking canned beverages to see a decrease in bauxite tailings? Probably an unrealistic amount.
This is not axiomatic. The gases from the incineration can be put into productive use (cf. Vienna heating and providing hot water off of their incinerator), and the harmful stuff can be filtered (cf. Vienna where the incinerator is in a dense urban area, and an architectural masterpiece).
In the US, the EPA has had regulations around this since the late 70's; it's a cost of doing business at this point, not a wild new theoretical rule framework.
Yeah, and the as-yet-unattainable perfect is still the enemy of the currently-attainable good.
What environmental issues need to be focused on right now?
1st world business pays 3rd world business to take their plastic for "recycling" (mandatory air quotes). The 1st world gets credit for being a responsible environmentalist. The 3rd world business then dumps the plastic in a river or other convenient but totally not enviro-friendly dumping spot.
It's sort of an open conspiracy at this point. Putting your plastic in the trash may be better for the environment overall.
REDcycle (effectively Australia’s lone large-scale soft plastic recycling effort) folded and it was a big brouhaha
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/jan/30/redcy...
Good job taking down that "waste is bad" straw person.
But what about the EU or the EPAs (or a range of other relevant institutions) waste management hierarchy?
It would appear you've just placed almost the entire waste management industry, its regulators, and related academia in the "don't know what they are talking about" pile, which seems somewhat bold.
It turns out, if you take a wide and varied group, put all of the ideas that any of them have in a bag and shake it up, then assign all those ideas to all of them, you can claim them idiots. Or bad faith actors.
When really it’s the cheap rhetorical trick that is the real sign of idiocy.
Say what you will about “tax and spend” liberals but it’s a sight better than political faction that spends even more but forgets entirely about the revenue end of the equation.
Of course taxes are not a revenue optimization problem to those pointing the above out. It is the tax and spenders that should be looking at the above and are not (other than childish claims that trickle down doesn't work)
I'd think it's the claim that trickle down does work that is childish. It's had forty years to prove itself, and American workers are still waiting.
Why would you say that it's unlikely? That's a very strange assumption to make - Hanlon has a whole razor about that. They're absolutely idiots. Or, put more politely and precisely, they're operating from intuition - "nature good, technology and/or human development bad" - without thinking about whether the ultimate consequences of what they're pushing for will properly advance their cause.
I'm sure you can find plenty of people who check one or more of those boxes, but I'm interested to know if there's anyone who checks enough of them to be self-contradictory.
If you can't point me to one person who holds all beliefs, then you're falling for the classic fallacy of treating a group of individuals as if they were a hive mind. See comments about how "HN" both believes in unrestricted capitalism and supports privacy regulations.
(Not to mention that Trump tower would seem to exclude him from being against high rises.)
It also doesn't matter what you think Donald Trump does or does not believe. He has a 4 year track record, and is on record making comments about what he will do if elected again.
Trump himself has regularly expressed skepticism over anthropogenic global warming.
I’m… genuinely not sure you can reconcile this with a claim of him being an environmentalist on any axis.
So we’re on the same page, Wiktionary defines that as: one who advocates for the protection of the environment and biosphere from misuse from human activity.
Anyway, the simple obvious solution (after reduce, reuse, recycle) is molten salt oxidation.
> Molten salt oxidation is a non-flame, thermal process that destroys all organic materials while simultaneously retaining inorganic and hazardous components in the melt. It is used as either hazardous waste treatment (with air) or energy harvesting similar to coal and wood gasification (with steam).
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.
Totally unrelated but since it’s from seashepherd I can’t help adding Paul Watson trial from extradition in Japan is tomorrow.
>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://tappwater.co/blogs/blog/how-many-people-consume-bott....
https://www.statista.com/statistics/505794/cds-per-capita-co...
> 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.
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.
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.
In my county, they are obliged by the contract to NOT bury the mixed recyclables. So they used to offload it to some companies that would then also promise not to bury them (pinky promise), and ship them to China. Contracts in China are then not so easy to follow and enforce and voila, problem is now somewhere else.
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.
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).
https://www.nrk.no/norge/fyller-ovnene-med-importsoppel-samt...
https://assessments.epa.gov/risk/document/&deid=361070
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...
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.
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.
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-...
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.
Source? This directly contradicts what the data in the above article, and that actually has sources backing it up.
True. The simpler and more exact statement is just: It is misleading. No need for a weaselly "somehow". Here's guessing that's not what you meant, but... Too bad for you, then.
Best way not to come off as a hot-headed zealot who's either ignorant of or intentionally twisting the truth is not to behave like a hot-headed zealot who's either ignorant of or intentionally twisting the truth.
All that said. I'm not sure which if you is correct.
Methane comes from organic waste mostly, most plastics do not degrade in a landfill environment.
> 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.
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.)
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_cities_b... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles
Realistically no one is going to build this super hole, it will be 1,000 smaller landfills built over 1,000 years.
While it's not a good idea to just chuck stuff into an abandoned mine, the effort to excavate a hole that size is doable for a single site operated by a single company employing 2000 workers over a century. It's pretty trivial in comparison to any other environmental problem.
Bingham Canyon is roughly cone shaped, not comparable to the rectangular prism described above.
To achieve comparable volume of the rectangular prism, you will need to dig a much deeper cone.
https://www.mining-technology.com/features/feature-top-ten-d...
Yeah, holes with sloped sides are easier to dig than vertical-walled ones. But you don't need to have them sloping all the way down to a deep point in the middle; for a shallow (comparatively, like this) hole you can just slope the walls down to the same flat bottom.
At a 45-degree angle, you could have the bottom of your 100-yard-deep pit be 35 miles - 100 yards across, and the opening 35 miles + 100 yards. Which would be a pretty negligible difference on the surface -- and, I think, make the volume a tiny bit bigger.
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.
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.
Why not nuclear/renewables?
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.
Electric heaters get you 100% efficiency. Heat pumps get you 400%+ efficiency.
It should also be mentioned that Swedish electricity generation is effectively 100% renewable already; it's mainly wind, hydro and nuclear. The co-generation plants mainly produce heating and only a small amount of electricity, more or less as a byproduct.
Waste incineration has a more or less negligible carbon footprint if you look at the big picture.
Modern heat pumps are really good (like 400%+ efficient), and run on electricity.
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.
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.
We have a lot of hydroelectric power, but that’s very dependent on how much it rained in the autumn. We are also starting to build out wind power, but it’s slow going.
We do import a lot of electricity from further south in Europe where there is more wind and solar.
I would love to have solar on my roof. The legislation is super complicated though since I live in an apartment and we would basically have to create our own communal energy company. We would also have to pay taxes on the electricity we produce and use ourselves. It’s somewhat simpler for people that own a house, but I’m not quite rich enough to own a house in Oslo.
If all the externalities get priced in, you can let people decide for themselves what they want and need.
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 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....
Of course, you need to run the numbers to make sure it actually makes sense. Both economically and from a resource point of view. Cables ain't free to build nor maintain.
But there's probably a trade to be made with the carbon capture people to sell them trash plastic to bury (or to have them pay you to bury your plastic. No need to actually ship the actual plastic around.)
With the energy loss over the distance needed (you basically need southern Italy/southern Spain for any reliable sun during the Swedish winter), that becomes too expensive to be practical.
Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean can take out multiple countries at once, instead of Spain/Italy being able to rely on their northern neighbours in such a scenario.
Can't be worse than that cable from Australia to Singapore?
> Not to mention now you have a domino dependence, where a few bad days of weather in the Mediterranean can take out multiple countries at once, instead of Spain/Italy being able to rely on their northern neighbours in such a scenario.
That's what peaker plants are for. There's no reason to go for 100% purity. Getting to 99% renewables gets you 99% of the way.
Unless you can wish natural gas into existence, that means keeping a lot of infrastructure and storage just in case.
Also in 2023, district heating delivered a total of 53 TWh to customers. About two thirds of this came from waste and biofuels, specifically 47% renewable biofuels (mostly woodchips, bark and other forestry industry byproducts) and 20% waste. The remaining third came from an eclectic mix of inputs such as industrial waste heat (7,5%), heat pumps (5% net, that is after the electricity consumption has been subtracted), exhaust gas condensation (11%), biogas from landfills and compost (2%), fossil fuels (2,5%) and various other stuff. Turns out my info about peat was kinda out of date; it's been almost entirely phased out now.
Average CO2 emissions for the electricity generation was 41g CO2 equivalents per kWh, and for district heating about 55 g/kWh. Countries with less emissions than this do exist, for example Norway and Iceland are down around 30 g/kWh, but this is already better than almost every other country on the planet. US electricity generation for comparison averaged 369 g/kWh in 2023.
So: replacing all of the district heating with heat pumps would be an insanely huge project requiring a massive expansion of electricity generation, and it would have very low return on investment when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions. There is also the problem that heating energy demands are extremely uneven and unpredictable, both over the year and between years. You need a significant amount of extra capacity for very cold days, and even averaged over the year the difference between an average winter and a cold one can on the order of 20%. Just burning stuff works great as a solution for this, it's easy to have capacity on demand. Air-source heat pumps also become much less efficient on very cold days when you need them the most, which is why they're not that popular for heating here (people prefer ground source heat pumps, but those have limitations in densely populated areas because the ground doesn't contain infinite energy).
Also, a side note: the heat generation in district heating plants is extremely efficient compared to electricity generation using combustible fuels. The average efficiency of the heat generation in these plants in 2023 was 96%, and that's before exhaust gas condensation is taken into account.
In other words: there's a reason we are doing things this way.
As the parent comment is on Sweden... That's a major discussion in our current politics and energy development landscape.
Not south, though... but north. 60% of Sweden's energy production is from hydroelectric dams far in the north, but most populations are down south. So, expanding this connection is the most imminently useful infrastructure investment that could be made. But that wouldn't be enough if we also use that power for heating.
The problem is that Sweden's largest energy demand is heating cold, windless winters, while the rest of Europe is also cold. Burning stuff to be warm can only really be replaced by nuclear power, which Sweden has been politically opposed to. Burning trash instead of coal is a pretty decent upgrade from that perspective.
Methane has a GWP of 27-30 over 100 years (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...), meaning it is 27-30 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2.
I am fine with landfills, but they're one of those engineering marvels -- like bridges, microwave ovens, sky scrapers, aircraft, high voltage transformers, cranes, or motor vehicles -- that are about taking something inherently dangerous and letting us interact with it safely.
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.
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.
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.
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).
If microplastics are behind the fertility drop, reverse flynn effect or obesity crisis they would also be more important in the ~100 year timeline.
I think that at least some in the Chicago area are former quarries.
https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks-facilities/palmisa...
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.
> 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...
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.
> Cities didn't collect trash - they collected ash.
So is ash broken clay or is your first statement just incorrect?
Yall have no idea how much opportunity there is here
However, we’re only ever going to do residential because the goal is to grow ownership of waste infrastructure to employees of the cooperative and cooperators, as well as homeowners with returns on their recycling and any other services
Eventually, the goal is to provide all community services, including banking and general services that you would expect a city to provide.
Currently none of the governments in the United States are functional enough to provide the services necessary at broad enough scale, so we’re bootstrapping it ourselves
We’re opinionated that we need to organize in order to create the structures that support everyone living fulfilled lives.
Also seegull.org
To the point where they’re paying drivers helpers salaries in order to drive down their hourly wage to about five dollars an hour because they have no options
Really good commercial hauler drivers that do 20 yard rolloffs and have been doing it for a long time can make upwards of $50 an hour, but that’s because they know how to play the game
Our goal is To provide pathways to ownership for these collection routes for the driver and drivers helper themselves such that each of them can make collectively upwards of $300,000 a year and then own their own truck and route and everything that comes out of that
But, land is cheap in the USA, and the USA has a lot of land, so landfills win.
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.
This assumes that landfill is capturing and burning methane, because methane is worse than CO2.
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.
On basic principles, it sounds a whole lot easier than mining landfills? But that's assuming the capital costs can be lowered enough. (Solar costs keeps dropping, they figure out the other costs.)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/01/terraform-industries-conve...
that's one of the reasons I keep my trash in neat layers ordered chronologically
Which is why I like transcripts. It is apparently a ~17 minute video. Time to read (for me): 2½ min. I timed it.
I'll give 2min to learn about rubbish management, a subject I'm not particularly interested in. I won't give ⅓ of an hour to it though.
If you're making a video, provide a transcript.
Oxide Computer: this especially applies to you.
I would really like to write about what you guys are doing, because it seems fascinating. But it feels to me like it's 95% podcasts, videos, and online chats, and I just do not have time for that. (And I'm about 9 timezones away or something.) I try to produce 2 articles a day, and to do that, I read tens of thousands of words of info a day... Speech just isn't fast enough.
If it's not text, I simply can't cover it.
[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/
[1] https://docs.oxide.computer/
[2] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rfds-the-ba...
the landfill gas capture systems that burn it off or use it for power are not installed until fairly late in the life cycle of a cell. food has a fairly short half life which means that a lot of it will decay before capture, or even final cover, is in place
total methane from landfills is down (from ~160 to ~100 mmt co2e since 1990), but the portion of this from food is way up
The topic not addressed however, is the insanity of all this waste being produced in the first place.
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.
I think this attitude and choice of words shows such an agressive disregard for other views and opinions, it feels pathological
[1] I don't know if that's true.
And that's before accounting for people illegally tossing things that contain heavy metals (such as batteries).
The only way they can seem to make a buck is to charge high rates to dispose of 'medical waste' that helps with costs.
90% : Sweden or Japan ? https://sensoneo.com/global-waste-index/
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.
I understand places like Japan wanting to find alternative means
It is possible to design burners that ensure a complete combustion, but they are much more expensive than simple burners.
Upon a complete combustion, some things may still release volatile acid oxides, e.g. oxides of nitrogen or of chlorine, but those can be captured.
We do burn trash, but as the other reply said, it is expensive because you have to somehow account for all that.
It is an inescapable element of the current consumerism economical model, but it should'nt be of the human condition.