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Some years ago, Switzerland completely stopped using landfills. All garbage is incinerated. The resulting slag is then processed to reclaim nearly all metals as
by bradley13 3y ago
Some years ago, Switzerland completely stopped using landfills. All garbage is incinerated. The resulting slag is then processed to reclaim nearly all metals as well as some other important elements.
Of course, the burning creates CO2. However, you don't have to mine and refine metal ores, and the incinerators also generate electricity and district heating. So the ecological balance is actually pretty good.
As a final bonus, you don't have literal square miles of landfills that occupy land and eventually will leak lovely chemicals into groundwater. The slag is far less problematic, and there is a lot less of it to deal with.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoThe US has way too much space for incineration to become more cost-effective than just dumping it in a giant hole in the ground.
- ponector 3y agoCould be true for small cities. But try to find an empty space suitable for landfill near NYC.
- saalweachter 3y agoUp until 2001, it was inside NYC.
- mbiondi 3y agoAnd now they ship it down south to states who are happy to take it.
- eesmith 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000 > The Mobro 4000 was a barge owned by MOBRO Marine, Inc. made infamous in 1987 for hauling the same load of trash along the east coast of North America from New York City to Belize and back until a way was found to dispose of the garbage. ... > In 1987, the City of New York found that it had reached its landfill capacity. The city agreed to ship its garbage to Morehead City, North Carolina, where there were plans to convert it into methane.
- odiroot 3y agoTony Soprano might have an answer.
- Solvency 3y agoUntil you go to your local landfill and see the massive fuming hellscape spanning thousands of acres with mountains of garbage just laying there and mentally extrapolate how it will look even 10 more years from now.
- gruez 3y ago>and mentally extrapolate how it will look even 10 more years from now. I did some napkin math and concluded that it's a non-issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38407111
- rascul 3y agoIt can look like this https://freshkillspark.org/ https://freshkillspark.org/
- SteveNuts 3y agoThus, solving the problem once and for all!
- astrange 3y agoMy local landfill is at the southern end of San Francisco Bay and there really isn't anything notable about it.
- justinator 3y agoThe landfill here in town has a sledding hill, swimming pool, jungle gym, and a skate park. It was in the hinterlands of the town, but the town grew fast.
- sanswork 3y agoThe largest landfill in the US was only 700acres after almost 60 years in operation supporting LA.
- tempusr 3y agoor ~1 square mile or ~3 square kilometers
- kulahan 3y agoThe technology of landfills has massively improved over the years. It's not the old pile of garbage covered in birds forever; they turn them into parks and whatnot. It's probably worth looking up, because there's some cool scientific advancements behind it. I'm pulling this next sentence completely out of my ass, but I also imagine it would be convenient, once we develop bacteria to break this stuff down in an environmentally friendly way, to just pour it over these contained blocks of waste.
- ianlevesque 3y ago> once we develop bacteria to break this stuff down in an environmentally friendly way Sounds as mythical as plastic recycling to me to be honest.
- SpaceNoodled 3y agoMicroorganisms are already evolving to consume plastics. https://www.wsl.ch/en/news/searching-for-plastic-gobblers-in-alpine-soils/ https://www.wsl.ch/en/news/searching-for-plastic-gobblers-in...
- ianlevesque 3y agoYeah, people have also gotten mealworms to eat Styrofoam. My concern is more that the plastics industry successfully pushed plastic recycling heavily with marketing so that growth of their products would continue, even as said recycling was just dumping the material in developing countries where it mostly ended up burned or in the ocean. There can be a huge, huge disconnect between technically possible and what happens in the real world.
- kulahan 3y agoI'm mostly fantasizing about it because I've read about plastic-eating bacteria and radiation-powered bacteria, so it seems possible to do, like, anything. But yeah I fully admit it's probably mythical to some degree.
- manuel_w 3y ago
- lm28469 3y ago> Of course, the burning creates CO2 When burning trash CO2 is way down the list of things I worry about personally.
- ianburrell 3y agoWe need to reduce carbon emissions to zero in couple decades. Burning trash isn't an issue now, but we need to keep in mind that isn't really "green" when deciding to build more plants. The problem with burning trash is that it turns all of the carbon into CO2. Trash in landfill does produce methane which is worse greenhouse gas, but it sounds like landfill are starting to capture or burn methane. The best option is likely to separate biologic waste and compost it. That produces some CO2 but puts the remaining carbon back where can be used. Plastic doesn't degrade, paper can be recycled, which means most of the carbon is sequestered or reused.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago> The best option is likely to separate biologic waste and compost it. That produces some CO2 but puts the remaining carbon back where can be used. Plastic doesn't degrade, paper can be recycled, which means most of the carbon is sequestered or reused. There are also technologies that turn biologic waste and plastics back into a high-quality oil that has a variety of uses. On balance I don't know if this is better than direct burning for energy production, but for more robust plastic recycling it might be.
- kragen 3y agoi thought this was an order of magnitude problem, like when people react the same way to an epidemic that could kill a hundred thousand people or a hundred million, but it turns out to be a sensible thing to be concerned about you will never reduce carbon dioxide emissions to zero per person; people emit carbon dioxide just by breathing. but the quantity determines whether or not it matters the amount produced by burning garbage is a few times bigger than breathing https://dercuano.github.io/notes/underground-arcology.html#addtoc_26 https://dercuano.github.io/notes/underground-arcology.html#a... has some of my notes on garbage; the high bit is that, in new york, residential and commercial waste is about a tonne per person per year, mostly things like paper and plastic which burn to carbon dioxide and water. so you might emit two tonnes of the dioxide per person per year by burning their trash as explained in https://dercuano.github.io/notes/underground-arcology.html#addtoc_19 https://dercuano.github.io/notes/underground-arcology.html#a... a person breathing produces about a kg per day or 400 kg per year, hopefully sourced from the air via plants. so, too, is most of the combustible garbage https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions explains that human carbon dioxide emissions are about 35 gigatonnes per year, about 4½ tonnes per person per year now, probably people in new york throw away more garbage and burn more fossil fuels than average, so these numbers are maybe not as close as they appear; but the fossil fuels number doesn't make the potential garbage burnination number totally insignificant like i thought it would
- gruez 3y ago>you don't have literal square miles of landfills that occupy land Land area is a non-issue. Google says Switzerland produces "80 to 90 million tonnes" of garbage per year. Assuming that garbage has the same density of water, and a landfill is 10 meters deep, a 1 sq mi landfill will last 287 years. Moreover, Wikipedia says Switzerland has 15,940 square miles of land, so that will only take up 0.006% of the country's land area. >eventually will leak lovely chemicals into groundwater this is a non-issue in modern landfills because they're designed with various mechanisms to prevent that from happening (eg. lining).
- notfromhere 3y agoThere is no evidence that those mechanisms will last longer than the pollution from the landfill. Nor should we base plans on "nothing bad will definitely happen"
- avion23 3y agothis non-issue happened in a modern landfill near my hometown. They just used a different grade of material and pocketed the difference. The chemicals area leaching now into the groundwater. Any researchers reporting on that are sued. Even police is used for intimidation. Country is Germany.
- dmos62 3y agoI'm continually surprised by blatant corruption in first world countries. It's like I expect privilege to translate into integrity.
- lapphi 3y agoI think many of us get so used to modeling problems in closed systems that we have a blind spot about human behavior irl.
- kappuchino 3y agoCan you elaborate which town and landfill?
- morsch 3y ago
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y agoHow come the slag is far less problematic? You didn’t describe where it goes. I also don’t see the “ecological balance” here. That usually refers to relationships among organisms in an ecosystem where one’s waste is another’s sustenance, but where does the generated CO2 go? Or did you mean a trade-off of pollution?
- isk517 3y agoThe OP did say that the slag was processed to remove everything that can be reused. I would imagine whatever is left over heads to a landfill, but at that point it is at least mostly bath water.
- bradley13 3y agoThe slag is less problematic, because chemicals are destroyed by the burning process. You're basically left with ceramics, melted glass, bits of metal and a bunch of oxides. After the useful elements (mainly metals) have been removed, the remaining slag is buried. By ecological balance I was mostly referring to the emission of CO2. While that is an inevitable part of incineration, it is largely compensated by reclaiming the metals, plus using the incinerators to generate electricity and district heating. As I recall, incinerators have a poor reputation in the US because unfiltered incinerators were used back in the 1940s and 1950s, causing serious pollution problems. Modern incinerators filter the flue gases and the results are clean enough that the incinerators are often inside cities.
- bregma 3y ago> eventually will leak lovely chemicals into groundwater Far better to transform them into even worse chemicals through exothermic reactions and send them invisibly through the air to all your neighbours.
- Gud 3y agoIs this really what happens? My home country Sweden does the same thing, burning garbage, if that was really the case I doubt it would be allowed.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoIt depends on the temperature they burn at. You need pretty high heats to combust dioxins, for example, and from some very light skimming of the USA's standards I think you also need various filters and scrubbers for heavy metals (especially mercury which will boil away at these temperatures). This stuff can be done, but it's expensive. I also don't know how close to 100% it gets even if everything is done properly. And of course to fully remediate this all of the equipment has to be operating properly.
- singularity2001 3y agowhat happens to the remaining mess of thousands upon thousands of unknown and or toxic mixed chemicals?
- jbgt 3y agoThey are broken down at the incineration temperature of around 700C. Cement plants are also interesting because of the even higher temperatures of 1200C I believe.
- singularity2001 3y agoare you telling me all molecules and amalgams break down at 700C?
- audunw 3y ago> Of course, the burning creates CO2. A trash incinerator in Norway is working on extracting and storing that CO2. So they could end up being carbon negative in the long run
- jbgt 3y agoThere's also a company called Selfrag (selective fragmentation) which uses electrical current to break the conglomerate slag along mineral fault lines to be able to more easily extract the metals..