America's Hot Garbage Problem | Hacker News Reader

America's Hot Garbage Problem

bloomberg.com

66 pointspetethomas25 comments

Shoreline, where Google HQ is, was a garbage dump. All those low hills are garbage. At one time they had a methane collection system driving a small power plant, but there's no longer enough methane for that. Once there was a methane fire at a concert.

Palo Alto and Menlo Park had similar garbage dumps, and their hilly parks along the shore of the bay are also trash.

Pretty weird this long article never mentioned waste-to-energy (other than sucking methane out of landfills, which according to the article is making uncontrolled garbage fires more common). Garbage should burn, in modern incineration plants with strict emission standards. Landfills are unsustainable and should be considered a thing of the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38994374

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722984

Incineration produces ash that ends up in landfills. The volume is of course a lot smaller, but I think there will always be a need for landfills. In fact, my city just opened up a new landfill specifically for incineration by-products a couple years ago. And as people are producing more and more trash every year, demand for such facilities will likely continue to increase.

At least the ash won’t participate in uncontrolled burning.

  Landfills are unsustainable...

The largest landfill in the USA is the Apex Landfill, at about 3 square miles (7.7 km2) with an estimated capacity of ~1000 million tons. The entire country landfills some 150 million tons per year. That is, a single landfill in Nevada could take all of the country's trash for six years.

We could build landfills indefinitely. It is a logistics and political issue.

I'm everyone's problem

Maybe if you were hotter you’d blow up as the kids say and be more popular.

These are "sacrifice zones". See also: every superfund site, Hinkley CA, many spots in WV, Four Corners, most of Houston, Cancer Alley between NOLA and BRLA, and golf courses built on top of toxic fly ash.

This, and Flint MI, is why I have very little trust in many public institutions. At least in the US, there is a recurrent failure to abandon profitable aims even to save human lives. It is very much a reality of every person for themselves that does not square with the material wealth of the US.

> very little trust in many public institutions.

As opposed to...... the private institutions that created most of those problems?

publicly traded institutions, maybe?

This is a strawman. The OP didn't mention trusting private institutions over public institutions, just that you can't ever trust American public institutions to do the right thing for you before being dragged kicking and screaming. What the poster says is true. Living in the US is coming to terms with "every person for themselves" is reality, and that it "does not square with the material wealth of the US". You can trust public institutions to some extent more than private, but interacting with them is still all about fending for yourself. Being familiar with the American government and living in another country that treats its citizens much better (at least for daily operations and processes) opens your eyes to how bad it is. It's a horror how much money the US has while failing to invest the majority of profits back into raising standards for everyone. Dozens of countries do better with much less.

Well who else is there to solve the problem?

> It's a horror how much money the US has while failing to invest the majority of profits back into raising standards for everyone.

That's because of private institutions too. Regulatory capture is the reason we can't govern worth a shit in the US. The only remotely feasible way to solve environmental tragedy of the commons issues is through regulation.

To get there you have to be using a definition of "private institutions" which is coterminous with all of humanity. Regulatory capture regularly happens by government employees (i.e. public sector unions who want makework jobs), ordinary homeowners who want high housing costs at the expense of new buyers because they've already bought in, the AARP lobbying for massively expensive medicare expansions and other healthcare rules that disproportionately benefit affluent retirees etc.

The incentive of those groups to lobby for their own personal gain is inherent in their existence. If government employees or private homeowners or retirees exist then they'll want what benefits them over what benefits the general public. So the problem of regulatory capture is a problem of how to constrain the government from making rules at the behest of special interest groups.

I'm talking about business and industry. Neither government employees, their unions, nor the AARP are the forces lobbying to allow pollution of public resources -- the ones who are doing so are the polluters who directly benefit from it.

Governments are some of the largest polluters in the world. Any given special interest is lobbying for the thing they want at the expense of the general public.

Is there something that makes pollution different than e.g. professional licensing capture that increases the cost of trade services and therefore causes people to be priced out of making safety-related repairs? Or to put it the other way, any reason the likes of public transit systems should be able to operate whatsoever when they produce non-zero amounts of brake dust and CO2 instead of making everybody walk everywhere?

> That's because of private institutions too. Regulatory capture is the reason we can't govern worth a shit in the US

I think the ingrained "every person for themselves" attitude is more fundamentally a problem. Fix one expression of it and 10 more will turn up.

That's the long term result of constant propaganda by the same folks who are also working towards regulatory capture. The same groups who put up billboards and political ads begging the American people to bend over backwards for big business, because clearly any accountability is a restriction on freedom™. Somehow they've managed to literally convince people that, if you can't dump the acid mine drainage and waste frack water in a local river, everyone is going to lose their job and the power grid will go dark. If you convince enough people to believe this shit, you win regulatory capture.

The us is a large place with a lot of media so there is a lot of problems - but in proportion things are good, exposeure makes it seem bad but it is not.

if you don't hear about problems the correct assumption is that things are bad and the coverup is working. Assuming things are better elsewhere is bad. Unless you personally check it of course, which you cannot do and live a life

> golf courses built on top of toxic fly ash

Better than houses and playgrounds, am i wrong?

Seriously, this and ex-industrial sites are two types of land I believe golf courses should be built on.

Not pristine land, not protected nature sites.

It's interesting that by overdrawing methane (for energy), you introduce oxygen, which makes the compost pile too hot. I wouldn't have thought of that.

Lets build an aerobically bio-heated power station!

Sounds like a toothless regulator problem to me

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