Toxic underground fires spreading at California landfills | Hacker News Reader

Toxic underground fires spreading at California landfills

newstribune.com

77 pointstapper29 comments

Time to tax the generation that filled them for the costs of their choices. Unpriced externalities is a failure mode of unregulated market choices.

Or fine the operator for violating existing laws

The problem is that the statutory fines need to be setup so that they are actually a deterrent rather than a cost of doing business.

They need to be based on revenue and an exponentially growing cost per violation, directly related or not.

First offense: 25% of ALL TIME revenue (not profit)

Second offense: 50%

Third offense: 100%

Why 100%? Because they should be effectively put out of business if they get to their third offense. California has the third strike rule for people and crime, let's make it the same for corporations; they're people after all.

> The problem is that the statutory fines need to be setup so that they are actually a deterrent rather than a cost of doing business

Out of curiosity, how high are the fines now?

> Why 100%? Because they should be effectively put out of business if they get to their third offense. California has the third strike rule for people and crime, let's make it the same for corporations; they're people after all.

If you've already lost 75% of your all-time revenue, you're probably already out of business. Heck, a loss of 25% of all revenue ever is enough to knock most businesses out.

It'd be interesting to consider the unintended effects of such a law. Making sure you regularly pay out any spare cash as dividends to the owners seems likely, as it reduces the risk (meaning, if they get fined, they've already taken out of the business all that they can).

> California has the third strike rule for people and crime, let's make it the same for corporations; they're people after all.

A big practical difference is that corporations have limited liability. Because of limited liability, such laws are going to hit very differently than sending people to jail, because the owners can avoid much much more of the personal risk than an equivalent person could under Three Strikes.

One way to curb limited liability is to require a bond or insurance. Now you can be fined more than the net value of the company. And, you need to convince another party (who has $ on the line) to sell you the insurance at a reasonable price, they will have questions.

Fines? The business pays the fine, I want personal responsibility. Prison time.

Somewhat moot point but official website insists it is NOT a fire

https://chiquitacanyon.com/odor-mitigation/recent-updates/

>>Any odors coming from the Chiquita Canyon Landfill are related to an abnormal biotic or abiotic process (also known as a landfill reaction) taking place deep within a lined, but older and inactive portion of the Landfill waste mass. This reaction is not a fire or subsurface oxidation event within the waste mass, and is not related to waste disposal operations at the Landfill.

Thank your ancestors, who were to lazy to recycle and treat the rest in a thermic process upfront. It bet those landfills could have easily been only one third the size and close to non-toxic.

When generations cheap out, it's always one of the next who suffers. Pains me.

>Thank your ancestors, who were to lazy to recycle and treat the rest in a thermic process upfront. It bet those landfills could have easily been only one third the size and close to non-toxic.

My municipality is actively looking at how w're gonna get screwed over this right now as our landfill is slated to close in the mid to late 2030s.

There's plenty of idiots alive and affecting policy today who are why we can't come up with solutions. It's a giant goddamn circle of stupid.

Can't landfill it "because environment". Can't burn it "because environment". Can't have the local (because all this stuff is low margin and shipping eats margin) industry that could take a whole lot of this stuff as various feed stocks "because environment". Of course the lying assholes will be right there to tell you that they haven't literally banned X or Y, you just need to comply with requirements that they've carefully written so that there's not actually any suitable site for a new landfill or incineration/power operation in the whole state.

Clearly the only truly sustainable solution is one that doesn't involve listening to certain people.

There's a (relatively) much more sustainable solution right in front of us, commonly used in Europe, that nobody even considers in America because it costs more: burn it at a much higher temperature with specialized equipment (ensuring that combustion byproducts are themselves burned as well), use the resulting power for the grid, and compact the resulting ash in a well-managed landfill (which fills much, much more slowly vs. just throwing in garbage).

Also the ash doesn't catch fire underground

Modern incinerators still get a bad rap even compared to landfill

Can you link to any information about this process? I would think there's always some byproducts, other than just ash?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy_plant

From Wikipedia: "Waste-to-energy plants cause less air pollution than coal plants, but more than natural gas plants."

That sounds, uh, pretty good considering the input is garbage! GIGO doesn't apply when it comes to power generation, apparently.

This is clean burning? No outputs beyond h2o and heat to atmosphere?

Well, we'd still expect CO2.

(Do the SO2 and NO2 get scrubbed? And - what else?)

Edit: read the wikipedia link someone gave below. Yes, SO2 and NO2 and particulates are scrubbed. Older incinerators released a fair amount of dioxins, but this is reportedly improved in newer models.

Didn't they discover that a lot of forever chemicals make it past that ?

Besides that downside though it does sound fairly ideal

Recycling is mostly a lie. Plastic can’t really be usefully recycled. Glass would need to be sorted by color, which is infeasible. There is already more paper and cardboard than can be consumed. Clean aluminum and steel containers recycle well, but are not a lot of volume, and don’t burn.

Aluminum and steel are easy to extract from the waste stream, run the waste stream past a magnet to separate the ferrous metals, then run the waste stream past an eddy current separator to separate out the aluminum/copper/zinc.

Recycling household waste is dumb and a massive waste of resources. Burning the trash after extracting the metal would be optimal.

Isn't burying in a landfill better than burning considering the carbon sequestration considerations of burning what will likely be plastic products? At least with burying we are a little bit closer to putting the oil energy back under the surface of the earth vs having it around in the atmosphere.

If you capture the heat from the burning, e.g. to generate electricity, then that can save burning oil/gas/coal instead.

Furthermore, the landfill will usually also generate gasses like methane, which need to be burned off too.

Household waste recycling mostly works if you sort the materials at source. If you have separate bins for glass, metal, and paper+cardboard, all of them can be recycled economically. Plastic recycling only works for industrial waste, as you can't really expect consumers to identify and sort all the different types of plastic.

I agree, we have single stream where I live and just understanding the logistics of how single stream works it’s easy to see that single stream leads to a large portion of recycling material simply being discarded because of the reality of sorting

Strange. And why did paper and cardboard prices go up during COVID and recycling companies asked to _not_ put paper into the rest?

Your statements do not make sense.

Europeans seemed to manage to figure the problem out. It’s a cultural problem, not a scientific one. Because it requires gen pop to accept some sort of civic responsibility to do it properly, something Europeans have much more inkling to do

>Glass would need to be sorted by color, which is infeasible

A 16 year old with an Arduino can do the obvious part, what's the hard part that I'm missing? Scale/volume?

> Glass would need to be sorted by color, which is infeasible

Fortunately we have digital image sensors. Or we can just mix two batches of sand glass to get the desired tone.

The real problem recycling glass is everything that is not glass. Just a tiny dirt will start a crack in the bottle. If your bottle has some soil on it, dumping it with the non recycling lot is the more polite and correct behavior

> "In a worst case scenario, the hillside can liquefy and actually slide into the community," Assembly member Pilar Schiavo, D-Santa Clarita, said at a news conference last month.

Once again, proving that Idiocracy (2006) was prophetic, and not just satire.

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