Garbage Problems (Talking Trash)

In most of the world, including North America, we do one of two things with our ordinary garbage: burn it or bury it. Neither one is good for us or for the environment. Burning garbage in incinerators releases dangerous gases and dust (particulate matter) which contribute to global warming and pollute lakes, forests, oceans and cities half a world away from where they originated. Most incinerators in industrialized countries now remove large quantities of particles and pollutants, thus ensuring cleaner air. But the bulk of what they remove ends up in a landfill. This site concentrates on landfills, in part because this improvement in incinerator technology has increased the pressure on landfills, and in part because a much higher proportion of garbage in North America is sent to landfills than to incinerators. Burying garbage also causes both air and water pollution, and simply transporting it to the sites consumes an increasing amount of valuable fossil fuels, which produces more pollution. As a result, alternatives to the burn-or-bury option are increasingly attractive. Composting heads that list of alternatives.

Is Your Landfill Full? Space Issues

It might seem that yard waste and food scraps must be amongst the more benign things you could send to your local landfill. These things are not toxic; how could they contribute to pollution? As for space, how much can these things take up? Besides, unlike an old toaster they decompose, which means that they take up less space next year than they do when they're thrown away. All of this sounds perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, much of it is either wrong or misleading.

The Sad Saga of the Unwanted Garbage

Source: Wholistic Environmental Consulting, Ltd.

Garbage would not make most people's short-list of top comedic fare. But in the early spring of 1987 Johnny Carson made it part of his nightly monologue and the whole world laughed. The occasion was a barge loaded with over 3,100 tons of Long Island garbage which wandered the world for three months looking for a final resting place before finally slinking back home. There it languished for another three months while suits were filed and court injunctions handed down. The garbage was finally incinerated and buried in the same landfill it would have gone to had it never left New York. The Mobro 4000 and its hapless tug the Break of Dawn left Long Island on March 22, bound for Morehead, N.C. It's fragrant cargo was to be used for methane production. Brainchild of Alabama businessman Lowell Harrelson, the plan called for hauling plentiful Long Island garbage to less crowded environs, there to harvest methane and spread the composted waste on southern fields. Not such a bad idea perhaps, except that apparently little of it had been cleared with officials. The governor of North Carolina banned the barge from unloading, as did Florida, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana. The hunt for a dump then went international. News reports from the time carry accounts of the homeless barge forlornly circling Grand Isle, Louisiana, which measures under 8 square miles in area, including surrounding water. Cuba, Mexico and Belize all rejected the offer of Long Island trash. The barge eventually turned around and made its way back up the coast. The legal battle lasted nearly as long as the journey itself. A month into the Mobro's wanderings, EPA officials made arrangements to inspect the decaying load and help determine its fate. But the barge ducked the appointment, instead heading for Mexican waters. American officials were apparently concerned that the garbage might be dumped at sea, which would have violated US law. When the barge finally headed back north, environmental organizations sued. When it reached Long Island in July, Queens Councilwoman Claire Shulman sued to keep it from docking. New York State Supreme Court judges signed a restraining order halting plans to incinerate the garbage. In the meantime, charges that some of the garbage came not from Long Island, as originally advertised, but from New York City itself, some of it even from Manhattan, had made the load even

less palatable to potential dumping sites. Though it was supposed to contain primarily office refuse, rumors circulated that it might contain diapers and hazardous medical waste. The Coast Guard weighed in, insisting that the barge would stay put until the constituents sorted things out. When that dispute was resolved, local residents protested, burning effigies of city officials in the streets. The garbage was finally incinerated in early September and the ashes were buried in the Ipswich landfill, the one originally designated to receive them. The whole things would never have happened if Long Island hadn't been facing a landfill crisis. Because its garbage dumps were polluting groundwater, New York State passed legislation in 1983 ordering all landfills on the Island closed by 1990. Incinerators pollute the air, while trucking trash off the island costs twice as much as putting it into landfills. It's clear why Long Island officials jumped at an offer to take some of the stuff off their hands. The extended episode is widely credited with launching the modern age of recycling and of focusing public attention on the shrinking space available in landfills.

Across most of North America, yard and food waste make up over a quarter of all the ordinary garbage we throw away. That's 25% by weight. In the U.S., that 25% is almost equally divided between yard waste (32.6 million tons, or 12.8% of all MSW) and food scraps (31.7 million tons, or 12.5%). And then there's all the other organic stuff that could be composted: all the clothing, towels, and bedding made of organic fibers, plus wood, old furniture and sawdust. Then there's paper, which at 83 million tons accounts for another 30% of municipal solid waste. As of 2006, the latest year for which figures are available, over 64% of the yard waste we throw away was recovered and composted, as was 54.5% of the paper and cardboard. Only 2.6% of food waste reached a compost heap. (See the EPA Fact Sheet on MSW for 2007.) In other words, well over fifty percent of our ordinary garbage could be composted, but most of it isn't. This ordinary garbage, or Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), is household and business trash as opposed to chemical or industrial waste. It's the stuff most of us put in our trashcans at home, at school, or at work, to be picked up and hauled away: paper, packaging, food scraps, old toys, old chairs, old microwaves, lamp shades, blue-jeans and books. It includes trash from offices and restaurants. In the majority of cases across North America, it ends up in a landfill. This is in spite of the fact that 24 states, at least one province, and hundreds of municipalities now ban yard waste from landfills. Landfills also accept certain types of commercial and even industrial waste which is one reason why the mix in them can become so toxic. Wet Garbage = Water Pollution Wet garbage, including yard waste which is 50 to 70 % water, adds to the toxic stew of chemicals -household cleaners, antiperspirants, nail polish, paint and so on -- that mix in a landfill. In old, unlined landfills, this leachate, diluted and made more mobile by rainwater, percolated down to the bottom of the fill. There, it would sink into the soil, spreading downwards and outwards in a characteristic brush-stroke shape known as a plume, contaminating soil and water as it moved. (See the Washington State U. Extension publication called "Fertilizing with Yard Trimmings" - PDF

format, pp.2-3.) Closing a landfill or capping it with cement does not stop its plume from advancing. Modern, sanitary landfills are usually lined to prevent such pollution and the leachate is drawn off and treated. However, it is naive to assume that a liner will never fail. In 1987, the EPA estimated that eventually any liner would leak (US EPA Federal Register, Aug 30, 1988, Vol.53, No.168). In 2000, a joint Canada/U.S. group working to monitor and reduce PCBs in the Great Lakes wrote that "landfill liners are temporary and chlorinated benzene in PCBs can cause leaks in certain liners." That it would not do so immediately isn't reassuring. The longer a landfill is capped and abandoned, the less likely it is to be adequately monitored and a leak detected. Organic Garbage = Air Pollution Air pollution may seem an unlikely consequence of landfills, but in fact it is a major problem. The primary culprit is anything organic such as yard and food waste. Waste at landfills is usually compressed to save space. Each day's deposit is covered with a layer of dirt to discourage insects and rodents and to help shed rain and thus minimize leachate. So far, so good. But the result is an almost oxygen-free environment. When organic materials decompose in such anaerobic conditions they produce methane, a greenhouse gas. Since composting produces carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas, it's reasonable to suspect that the compost/landfill choice is a classic six-of-one, half-dozen-of-the-other situation. The first produces carbon dioxide, the second produces methane. What's the difference between them? Is it really worth the time and effort to keep organics out of landfills? It does matter where the stuff degrades and how. CO2 is a major pollutant and a major problem. But methane is worse. According to the EPA, methane "remains in the atmosphere for 9-15 years" and "is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period." Methane is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide. As recently as 2003, the highest producer of methane was landfills (EPA). They're still one of the top three sources, the others being cows burps, or enteric fermentation, and leakage from the production of natural gas. Landfills have dipped to second place, largely because an increasing number of them have systems in place to collect the methane, which is either burned off or used to produce electrical power. In 2006, the EPA reports that US landfills emitted almost 6 teragrams of methane, equal to over six and a half million U.S. tons. This is equivalent to about 125.7 teragrams of CO2 in its effect on global warming or 138,560,531 tons. Flaring methane -- burning it as it is collected from the landfill -- may seem both wasteful and horribly polluting. And it is. But if you bear in mind that methane is so much more dangerous to the environment than carbon dioxide, then the practice that converts CH4 to CO2 appears in a different light. When do landfills stop producing methane? No one really knows. A number of sources now suggest that landfills continue to produce methane in dangerous amounts well past the point at which it is economical to collect it and long after the 30 year period that the EPA requires closed landfills be monitored.

Burning off the methane at landfills produces CO2, still a greenhouse gas, but not as bad as methane. In terms of making a long-term dent in global warming - quickly - landfill improvements offer one of the best opportunities around.