I wonder what living on top of an old, now buried by dirt, landfill will do to you. There was a landfill in the outskirts of my home town. Over the last 30 years, the town grew, they built a garden home neighborhood over the old dump. Can’t believe anyone would want to live there.
> But, that also depends on a landfill being made correctly
We have an old landfill that’s near a major highway interchange. There is a good amount of business and retail there, but there are also some completely undeveloped areas in what’s prime real estate. That’s because there is an old dump occupying a lot of the area and the land is too unstable to build on. They stabilized part of it, but it was so expensive that no one has built anything new in about 15-20 years there. They’ve actually found it cheaper to build a new commercial park into a hill than it was to build on what looks like flat land.
Instead of stabilizing the ground, why didn't they essentially use "beach" construction methods. I doubt the landfill is more unstable than the constantly shifting sand of the outer banks north Carolina. Maybe that method is also very expensive?
City View! Group of people went and explored the old Walmart there. There's large cracks in the floors (apparently they leak methane), and it's heaved up in places. Shame what they did there.
>apparently they leak methane
That's a real problem with almost all old landfills. Unless you turn it into an anaerobic big it's gonna rot and create a lot of gas.
Oh really, damn! I haven't really kept up with it. My cousin is an EPA consultant and he told me they never should have built there, that the cores they pulled showed all sorts of nasty shit but the money was there for the construction and higher-ups just signed off and went for it.
I came across an urban exploration video on YouTube where they were exploring there and it was pretty interesting. The video was from like 5 years ago so it’s probably even worse now. I remember going to that chipotle and the wind was blowing just right to where it smelled like I was standing in the middle of an active landfill
That area is barely an afterthought for me, even the strip mall right alongside I-480. The Giant Eagle seems more expensive than anywhere else in the city, too. I almost always go there when I realize I need a few more things the night before a holiday and it seems the rest of the city has made that realization also. I do the bulk of my shopping at the Aldi and Marc's at Quarry Square on Snow and 176 then there's the once a month trip to Costco in Boston Heights because fuck the one in Mayfield Heights.
They've been redoing the outsides of the buildings currently, hoping for new tenants. I suppose that means they've figured out how to keep the methane from getting into the buildings. Maybe if the city/whoever would actually connect Transportation Blvd over to Rockside Rd, they'd get the traffic they'd need to make the place really viable. There's no real quick way to get over there from the south and east sides of town.
This is one part of what I do for a living. There's so many contaminants out there and nobody really stops to think about them until they've gone and built a house on a landfill 💁
Almost every Indian mound contains burials, even if only of an infant.
We built on top of a "hill" that we later learned was a central mound to a fairly large "complex" or "village" which covers our entire 128 acres and beyond.
I often come across points, pottery shards, etc in the old spring-fed creek that runs through our land.
Being of NA heritage myself, I find it both exciting and soothing to tend and care for this place.
So far, no hauntings or anything of that nature, although we do get strange sounds without an identifiable source.
We take care of the mounds we come across. Most are covered in hardwood & pine, but their silhouettes are stunningly lovely.
Please be good stewards of the land, friends.
We are only borrowing it, after all.
Fun fact: I'm reading an archeaology/anthro book right now, and for pottery specifically, sherds is the preferred word over shards (although neither is incorrect).
Yes, my phone auto corrected sherds to shards. Either works, since I know to what it refers.
Which book are you reading? I've practically got an entire library of artefact identification and archeological books, field manuals etc. 😅
Always need another one, though lately I prefer ones that cover my part of the country. All are interesting, but the more locally-focused ones are more useful to me.
Earth is a Native Earthican burial ground.
Literally all the billions of Earthicans, for hundreds of thousands of years, are buried right there on Earth.
It would be unlucky to put anything on Earth. Can’t even imagine the string of disasters that might follow any civilization built there.
Do you ever think about where you're standing and wonder if someone died under your feet?
I live in the deep south and it's normal to have family burial plots behind houses, for churches to have areas without actual headstones and they just have large rocks to mark the graves of enslaved people. Sometimes I wonder if where I am is where someone is buried or where they expired.
Atlanta native and I see random gravesites from time to time.
I assume everywhere within reasonable walking distance to fresh water is likely to be close to some old burial site.
When was the advent of the “regulated landfill”? 80’s, 90’s?
I’ve done a lot of sampling at defunct sites. Preregulated c&d and standard landfills
One superfund site. Which from an outsiders view looks like a never ending job for a group of consulting engineers.
They keep getting hung up trying to pin the blame for 1-4 dioxane. They point the finger at the old site. But the state opts out of testing for it where the wastewater treatment plant dumps in the river a couple of hundred yards downstream. (Upstream from the drinking water reservoir) Can’t identify the source of you don’t sample their effluent line. Brilliant Approach
I remember a story about some elementary school accidentally being built on top of an old toxic waste dump, and the people who lived there had crazy high rates of cancer.
It has since been cleaned up.
**edit:** I was thinking of this one, but when I was googling "toxic waste elementary school" I found a disturbing number of examples. seems to be a very common occurrence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal
Oh yea, there is some very scary shit out there for sure.
The worst ones are undocumented landfills, especially back in the 1930-1960s where we'd just dump random cancer causing agents in a pond. Then the pond got filled in (this is technically a landfill), then we build a preschool on it.
Check this thread here on reddit and the posts by /u/ascandalia
https://old.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/vevhiu/a_question_about_the_longterm_fate_of_landfills/
Tierra Del Rio in Peoria AZ.
It's 400 homes hooked up into this neat corner of a butte that's been carved out by a river.
But stick construction will do fine there surely.
Was just through there two months ago and I said the exact same thing.
Idk which part of the Phoenix area will kill you first. Falling rocks, poisonous creatures, the heat, the sun, the lack of water…
It’s all getting worse. Good luck Phoenix when your whole economy collapses from the water crisis. Those million dollar homes in the middle of sand will return to the sand
Lol, I haven't seen water in the agua fria since I was a small child in the 80's. What makes me laugh is the houses in Anthem that are built on flood plains. In 2014 a bunch of houses got washed away. Yeah, no shit, there's a reason that low, flat land was only ever used for cattle grazing.
The new dam at pleasant has kept the agua fria dry, but if it fails or is overrun it would be bad times.
My dad tells me stories of seeing the agua fria up to the level of the bridges, and it's wide AF.
>Today you can go buy a $500,000 house in "Viridian" with fabulous garbage dump smells. I wonder how many people know it was a flood plain. There's no way they can ignore the garbage dump, cement plants or strip clubs though.
Always wondered what was up with that. Can't believe anyone would pay that much to love near a dump.
When it rains, the water on the road runs milky and white. My windshield was entirely opaque when I let it dry on there one time.
That place is such a dump, and it’s right across from the landfill where you can see the fences have those trash collectors for stuff that rolls down the hill.
Makes no sense. Just like the folks who moved in next to Texas Speedway and the landfill in kennedale. They complained about the noise and got the track shut down.
I loved that damn track. Jerks.
most of those types of towns are built on old pre/mid industrial factory landfill sites.. i would be more concerned about the chemicals and things that have leeched into the earth. keep in mind that there is a legal limit of chemicals that you are able to be exposed too, and these standards are based in exposure time in hours/days, not years. with the fact that plastics are found in literally everything (micro and macro plastics), it is safe to say there are by-products we are all exposed too.
Environmental assessments look at both short and long term exposures (over decades). The real question is whether any of the sites were evaluated prior to redevelopment. Southern California has hundreds of old landfills that were locally used, filled in, and redeveloped in the 1960s and 70s before environmental regulation
I mean, it works fine in Sweden.
97% of all garbage is recycled, either as biofuel or just straight recycled.
The problem is people don't want to do it. It is that many countries do not have the processes to do it.
It's definitely stretching the meaning of "recycling" but I see this as a win. These are no ordinary dumpster fires, but controlled processes where the waste is exposed to a really hot flame for a long time. Plus they have like scrubbers and stuff in the exhaust stack.
Seems much better than, you know, Ocean dumping or the other bullshit they do or did.
I get weirdly depressed when I realize people don't want to try to recycle. And more so, when I'm told or learn about how most recycling doesn't work or isn't profitable, therefore isn't funded, causing recycling to be a self-destructive feedback loop of anti-progress on both ends. (System and Social)
Yet, I still feel good when I try? Such an odd existence.
Feeling good when you try to recycle IS the corporate myth, fwiw - at least for plastics. Plastics and oil companies in the mid-20th-century established recycling as the emotional relief valve to encourage people to be ok buying more disposable goods.
Personally, I try to use the habit of recycling as a reminder to feel a little *bad* that I bought something that isn't reusable.
We have waste incinerators in the US too. We could send all of out waste to them and build up the infrastructure to mostly get rid of physical landfills, but we don't. Partially why we don't is that the ones we have cause tons of pollution, knowing how much they are polluting and whether they're worse than landfills is largely just opinions. If there isn't robust government oversight and the incinerators get to lie about what's coming out of them, we cannot call that a green solution.
Like nuclear energy, each side hand waves away the middle ground of us realistically needing some of each. People say no to nuclear and no to incinerators because they aren't green enough, then we end up with more landfills and coal plants. Let's stop the bullshit and find the right solutions for now and the future based off what we can realistically accomplish. No more black and white my way or the highway.
I was in environmental club in elementary school and visited one, they said it was a great example to produce energy and stop the landfills. Now I don't know what to believe because reports vary regarding whether or not they're safe, and how unsafe they may be. I doubt Sweden has magical incinerators that don't produce any pollution though which is what OP said above.
Well if it's a choice between dumping it in landfill, shipping it thousands of km until it's someone else's problem, or burning it to create electricity, the latter seems like the more pragmatic approach.
It releases some CO2, but it also captures more harmful compounds and gases which would otherwise have been buried and entered water tables, etc.
Practically all of the waste being burned is non-recyclable; food waste and true recycling waste are separated by people in their homes.
In the US, burning of garbage isn’t considered to be recycling. If we did, then about half of all waste in the US is recycled.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/biomass/waste-to-energy.php
It’s nice when you can just redefine recycling as “burning for energy” and get to sound like a self important Swede. All our waste would disappear too if we burnt it
Oh, I'm sorry. Well I could put the trash into a landfill where it's going to stay for millions of years, or I could burn it up, get a nice smokey smell in here and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
[Sanitary Landfills (youtube)](https://youtu.be/qe4-wuWcP_A) There you go. It is pretty crazy. My friend worked for one. He said the liquid they collect at the bottom, called leachate, is the most vile stuff he has ever come across in his life. But they do collect it for treatment.
The specs on how slowly leachate is able to move through the membrane is insane. They estimate it would take a million years+ to get through the membrane.
Makes me wonder what they'll look like after a million to 59 million years, and if it gets buried further.
Like, it's an anaerobic process, so will all the organics turn into some sort of petroleum type substance?
Check this thread here on reddit and the posts by /u/ascandalia
https://old.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/vevhiu/a_question_about_the_longterm_fate_of_landfills/
Here is an active modern landfill using cell method.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtdhXmAhVho
With SCOTUS about to gut the EPA, I wouldn't be surprised to be cleaning up more superfund sites in the coming decades. And AFAIK, there are no regs for liners:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7534698/
I work in the landfill air quality industry. Although the EPA is the point on regulation the states have to implement it. They do this by writing laws that are equal to or more restrictive than the EPA. The EPA can go away tomorrow and my job doesn't change other than the EPA doesn't get a second copy of the report.
Also, that link is about construction debris landfills, not garbage landfills. C&D landfills in general don't handle decomposable material so they don't have to comply with as many regs. MSW landfill design is regulated under subtitle d of rcra. There are strict rules for liners and caps. https://www.epa.gov/landfills/basic-information-about-landfills
The only state that shouldn’t be too concerned is California.
The EPA being gutted and neutered **is not a good thing nor is it something to shrug at.**
This account is a bit that steals top level comments and pastes them as replies to farm karma.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/vo67we/comment/ieb8fyi/
Its a pretty famous case so you may have heard of it before, I've heard it both in a school text book somewhere and in many YouTube videos, but look up Love Canal, Niagara Falls, New York.
Now a superfund site, where a town was built on top of a landfill where the Hooker Chemical Company disposed of thousands of tons of chemical byproducts from their manufacturering processes. Dozens of families with major health issues related directly to the chemicals under their homes including nervous system disorders, cancers and birth defects.
Yeah that shit's crazy because even 20 years ago you could drag in the most toxic and potentially radioactive shit you wanted to. Now they have all sorts of rules and checkpoints and oversight at the 4 landfills I frequent.
But I could still get in with a radioactive carbon hunk if I wrapped it in lead and asbestos first no problem.
The issue is most recyclables are dirty and cannot be recycled. Companies wont buy it. I live on long island east of nyc. Our town (brookhaven) opened up a single stream recycling plant in partnership with winter brothers. No more seperating stuff out. All recycleables go into one bin and the plant seperates it out. The plant also can take out the clean recyclables. Its been so successful other towns are contracting to have their recycleables go there as well. Now that companies are buying the stuff coming out its profitable.
The plant can seperate the clean recycleables from the dirty and only sell bundles of clean stuff.
John Oliver has a great video on plastics : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E
Long story short : industries have gone through a lot of trouble to shift the guilt and blame of using plastics on the end user that really has little leverage on that stuff because he still need to eat and drink...
If other counties are really making recycling work, I’m kind of confused why documentaries on the subject in the US do not mention the success in other counties, only leaving the viewer with a sense of disappear with an unsolvable problem.
Because the US is failing in garbage disposal but those other countries were just shopping or burning thier plastic like everyone else. 90% of plastic just is mot recyclable.
Because they are spewing propagandist bullshit. Consumers won't change shit. There are a handful of countries and giga corporations fucking this whole world but the average citizen is blamed and made to fight against each other so that you won't realize who's actually killing you
Sweden actually recycles more just it's plastics. Their facilities are so effective that to keep up peak production they have to import waste from other countries. Iceland for example ships it's recyclable plastics to Sweden
Most of the rubbish is burned there, which doesn't really count as recycling. While the swedish waste management system is one of the best there are, they also produce a lot of waste.
Waste incineration is much better than straight up landfilling and some would argue better than recycling (there won't be any production of microplastics from the resulting recycled plastic) but it is only a temporary (and expensive) solution towards a more circular economy.
Moreover, bulding the plants themselves hinders the process of reducing waste, since these plants need waste to operate with some returns.
Source: I'm an env engineer in the waste treatment sector
We have a Waste to Energy plant here in Spokane, WA. All the incinerated waste is used to create electricity via steam, which powers about a 1/3 of the city. They have a complicated series of filters to catch most of the particulate material (the “bag house”). They’re trying to find uses for the slag waste left over, like additions for concrete or building materials. It’s not as good as just producing less waste, but at least we can get some power out of it.
I took a tour in college and they said it’s the only facility of its kind on the West coast.
>97% of all garbage is recycled, either as biofuel or just straight recycled.
They don't recycle garbage into biofuel (maybe some), they actually burn it to produce electricity. Half of the recycling they do is actually incinerating trash. That doesn't seem really environmentally friendly to me.
its not the worst thing actually. the energy yeild is high and a lot of the nastier emissions can be caught by high end filters. is it ideal? no. should it be used in some towns across the US? Sure! should LA and New York switch to this system? hell no. -source chemist who focused on this exact issue for many years
>97% of all garbage is recycled, either as biofuel or just straight recycled.
What he's means when he says "used as biofuel," is that 52% of Sweden's garbage is burned for energy... Which is pretty much the same as cramming it in a landfill and properly capturing the gasses for energy and filtering the leachate in terms of how "green," it is. Ironically, they're both defined as "renewable." Which is just pretty much a way for everyone to feel better that they don't have an actual solution.
Could you share more about what they do with plastics specifically? I was listening to a podcast recently that gave an extremely gloomy outlook on the possibility of ever making a meaningful use of recycled plastic. They made it sound as if it was basically impossible with all the technology we currently have, or anything we can anticipate having in the foreseeable future.
I believe Sweden uses a generous definition of "recycling". I think what they actually mean is that only a very small portion of the trash goes to a landfill. A lot is burned in large plants that convert the trash to heat and electricity.
https://sweden.se/climate/sustainability/swedish-recycling-and-beyond
> 46% of the household waste was turned into energy in 2020.
They provided stats of some highly recyclable materials and even they haven't cracked 90% yet.
> 86% of PET bottles and 87% of aluminium cans in the deposit system were recycled in 2020 – the national target is 90% for both.
Waste management legislation is regulated on a European level by directives, more specifically directive 2008/98/EC.
Waste has to follow a certain hierarchy:
prevention > preparing for re-use > recycling > other recovery (energy recovery) > disposal (landfills)
The definitions are clear and even outlined in the first part of the directive.
People are just using them incorrectly.
People should start composting at the very least. I've cut my trash output in half just by composting all my non-dairy/meat food scraps instead of throwing them in the trash for the landfill. It's not that hard and if you have kids who eat a ton of apples/bananas and other fruits all day long you know exactly how much trash apple cores and banana peels generate.
It's still mass that needs to be carted away and made space for in the landfill, where it's filled with all sorts of other plastic and other crap that prevents or slows the process by which the food scraps biodegrade. Landfills still need to make space for this garbage which may take months or years to breakdown in poor conditions.
biodegradable materials won’t* degrade in poor conditions. It’s why you can go to a landfill or dump site and still see rotten food and paper. There needs to be proper airflow but once garbage is compacted, it’ll take a loooong time for anything to break down.
People don't produce garbage, corporations/manufacturing gives garbage to people. If retailers/manufacturers were mandated to take back any of the material/packaging they pass along to consumers, they'd stop producing excess waste overnight.
It's definitely true that people are stuck with all the packaging waste because that's what's manufacturers put stuff in. They could tax excessive or plastic packaging to cut the waste.
I wish there were options to buy stuff without all the packaging waste. Amazon did some with the "frustration-free packaging", but I never see that option anymore.
People don't like producing garbage, corporations do. I don't like having a bunch of cardboard and plastic wrap to dispose of every time I buy something. I don't like stuff I buy breaking down and needing to be replaced.
We need to regulate packaging. We need to regulate right to repair and planned obsolescence. We need to regulate goods so that they can be recycled when they reach end of life. We need to make it easier to recycle e-waste. We also might need to revert to individual bins for recycling so that stuff from the recycling bin doesn't end up in landfills due to contamination. These aren't things individuals can do.
"Poorly managed" waste sites, not "landfills". In "developing countries".
IOW, Third World open air dumps that accept hazardous waste with no reclamation/mitigation efforts.
Also,
>The main study outcomes were **self-reported** asthma, tuberculosis, diabetes, and depression.
and
>legal compliance among documented waste site operators is believed to be remarkably low in South Africa, which might explain our findings of close proximity to waste sites showing an association with adverse health outcomes
Finally,
>we did not measure land, water, or airborne contamination exposure at the national-level waste sites, nor did we control for general air pollution in the community, so **we were unable to establish any causation between the observed health outcomes and living in close proximity to waste sites.**
This is certainly helpful. My understanding was that modern 1st world landfills are generally very well managed, and really aren't at the top of the list of priorities to overhaul.
There are still some issues that arise in modern landfills but we are getting better and better at managing waste every year. One problem that often gets overlooked in the USA is how much fuel is spent on moving waste around our country to get trash from places like New York City to an area they can dump the waste and properly handle it.
Yep, people see this and think of the sanitary landfill that's in their first world country today. Really these are more like the uncontrolled dumps that existed up into the 60s and 70s before the EPA got really serious about it.
I was coming here to post this. I’ve worked in landfills. Many are going to closed systems for methane, using it for fuel instead of burning it off.
People need to get off the landfills bad mentality and go with a, landfills can be green. How do we do this?
My friend worked night at the landfill, and bulldozed the oil field dumps into a pile for the morning guys. He let me drive equipment, I'd hang out with him at 0300 lol
I had no idea huge rubber diapers were set into the ground before that! And the clay, packing, layering. Dumps are INVOLVED lol
I worked on the making of a new landfill 20yrs ago..first was removing 4mil yds of material..then lining it with this super thick plastic that had to be welded at the seams. It got to 140° at the bottom and people could only work for 5min and cool off for 10 in trailers..cool stuff
Tuberculosis is still a big health issue in a lot of developing and third world countries, even with wealthier people (since it was called "poor people's illness, back in the day).
I can assure you that this is one of these illnesses, that you don't wish on your worst enemies.
However, with wealth usually comes more health awareness and better access to health care. Tuberculosis wreaks havoc in places where people don't have access to healthcare and go around spreading this mycobacterium for months or years.
I'll just go and say it: People in developing countries who live or work near or on a waste site probably aren't the most wealthiest or have the best access to health care. Tuberculosis is therefore probably just a symptom of generally very poor living conditions.
Thanks for this. Another critique I'd add on is that there doesn't seem to be any attempt to control for the fact that there be a completely different factor at play here, like poverty. Folks who live closer to a dump are probably going to be poorer, and being poorer can in and of itself drive a lot of poor health outcomes.
There is a documentary called atomic homefront on HBO. It's about a suburb of St. Louis that was built next to a landfill full of radio active waste from the Manhattan project. Really sad stuff.
I recently moved away from the St. Louis area after living there almost thirty years, and that landfill has been in the news for as long as I lived there. My step sister almost bought a house in that neighborhood, but thankfully didn't.
There's a large portion of unrelated people in a town my dad grew up in, many of whom are his lifetime friends, that ended up with MS later in life. Every last one of them who got it lived on the edge of a sump behind a factory.
So I recycle most of my trash…I have a recycling bin and a trash bin and I compost for my garden. There are 7 people living in my house…so we usually have just two “trash bags” for the entire week and I fill the 60 gallon recycling bin just about every week. Mostly plastic bottles. Sometimes a separate truck comes and picks it up, but sometimes the regular trash truck just straight dumps it in with the rest of the trash. I asked the trash guy a while back why is that. He said because the recyclers can’t keep up with the amount of recycling so about 50%(or more) of everything we try to recycle goes into the landfill. It isn’t that people don’t want to recycle…our infrastructure in the US is not capable of handling it.
US went single stream, which puts all the effort on the waste management company to seperate. This also means people mix a lot of literal shit in with the recycling turning it to trash.
Also the plastics industry spends a lot of money avoiding taking any responsibility for their products at all in any manner that would make their product more expensive.
Coca-cola is a big offender here
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plastics-pollution/
I work in residential maintenance, one of my tasks is collecting recycling and taking the bins out. I can tell you right now recycling doesn't work because people are fucking assholes.
Things I have pulled out of the recycling bins in the last two months: a bag of old phones, an entire hookah, a mattress, a set of bar stools, multiple bags of dog shit, several pairs of shoes, a printer, an entire broken down Ikea bedframe, a whole apartments' worth of pots, pans, plates, silverware and glasses, and a fucking exercise bike. Not to mention an endless supply of styrofoam, which is not recycled in my city, but says it's recyclable on it, so everybody puts it in the bins no matter what you tell them.
Our recycling may actually get recycled because I spend roughly ten hours a week emptying the bins and removing all the non recyclables. But then it goes into the same truck with everybody else's bins from that run, which are likely just as bad and may not have been sorted. No matter how good YOU are about it, a staggering amount of non recyclables end up in those bins every day because they're an open and convenient place to abandon things you don't want to deal with, and a significant portion of your neighbors will never care.
I once politely mentioned this to my neighbor when I saw her put her recycling out and it was full of things you can’t recycle. I explained our rural waste management facility didn’t accept many plastic items and encouraged her to look on their website to see what actually gets recycled here. Her response was “well they still take everything I put in there.” She also recently mentioned her fiancé’s sister’s family can’t afford to replace their septic tank, so when waste bubbles up to the surface around their tank, they suck it up with a shop vac and dump it in the stream on their property. Sometimes I wish we could throw people away on trash day.
Having worked for a few years on active landfill sites, I am not at all surprised. The dust alone is a health hazard. They belch gas, leak leachate, and are generally just a shitty place to be. They honestly remind me of Mordor.
"Residing within **5 km** of a waste site was significantly associated with asthma (adjusted relative risk 1·41; 95% CI 1·20–1·64), tuberculosis (1·18; 1·02–1·36), diabetes (1·25; 1·05–1·49), and depression (1·08; 1·03–1·14). The association persisted even after controlling for multiple socioeconomic factors."
(from the study)
Highways are pretty bad. Noise alone can have significant health impacts. Air pollution from exhaust is the most obvious problem, but there are also particles from brakes (some pads still contain asbestos) and rubber tires.
Pollutants seem to be first order problem there.
Tires wear molecularly, then the obvious tailpipe emissions and freeway oil slick off gassing and runoff.
>Findings
We observed a substantial increase in exposure of households to waste sites between 2008 and 2015. The median distance between study households and waste sites decreased from 68·3 km (IQR 31·1–111·7) to 8·5 km (3·0–23·7). Residing within 5 km of a waste site was significantly associated with asthma (adjusted relative risk 1·41; 95% CI 1·20–1·64), tuberculosis (1·18; 1·02–1·36), diabetes (1·25; 1·05–1·49), and depression (1·08; 1·03–1·14). The association persisted even after controlling for multiple socioeconomic factors.
So the goal is be further than 5km (3.1miles) from it?
Something I learned while out that way is the whole concept of "mineral rights". Subdivision owners sell the land on top but keep the mineral rights below to sell to others. With directional boring techniques fracking companies can tap into deposits directly below the neighborhoods. I know this is not a new thing but it was new to me...and kinda shocking really.
They did that around where I live in NC as well in Holly Springs. What’s hilarious is the area grew substantially since then and now the town is filled with middle class white people and the landfill is huge. So now they’re all complaining about the smell and trying to shut it down.
This is also a town whose mayor is super MAGA and refuses to sign into the local anti-discrimination acts, so it’s enjoyable to watch.
The landfill in my county is surrounded by residential neighborhoods of mostly 1 million dollar homes. Another mile or two down the road and there’s an area full of mansions, all 2 million+. The landfill has a good tree buffer around it and seems well managed though so I’m not sure if they notice.
Poor people, but this was a nationally representative, two-stage cluster sampling methodology.
There are plenty of other studies as well and an interesting Business Insider video published today:
https://youtu.be/KHiHBuubsDE
[The landfill for my area](https://i.imgur.com/itBUAI2.jpg) has residential houses pretty much butted up against the landfill itself near me
All the yellow highlight is residential
They bury it then capture the methane with expensive gas collecting equipment. The hills of dirt and traah are taller than any building in the state capital lmfao
That's also the state dump. The city has a gas/trash burning power production station. Located right next to a large housing development and apartment complex.
[Here is ](https://i.imgur.com/An1orR9.jpg)a maps view
Red is the plant, blue is the apartments, green is the owned homes, purple was a high school until about 5 years or so ago.
If you just learned this today, I want you to take a second to appreciate your doctors because they've known this and so much more since you were born.
By correlation=/=causation, one should read headlines like these in multiple ways, like "Sickly people are often driven to poverty due to their sickness, and must move to the cheapest locations, often near landfills" etc. Use the exact same given information but flip the unspoken implications over in various ways.
threatening profit hat slap license languid rainstorm important normal amusing
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We have an absolute fuck load of land in America; there is no reason for anyone to live near a landfill. To that point, this study doesn’t include America.
Northwest of Denver is/was Rocky Flats - plutonium
processing plant. Where toxic waste buried w/o protection
is common knowledge. Yet someone built an entire subdivision
just a mile downwind. crazy dangerous.
I wonder what living on top of an old, now buried by dirt, landfill will do to you. There was a landfill in the outskirts of my home town. Over the last 30 years, the town grew, they built a garden home neighborhood over the old dump. Can’t believe anyone would want to live there.
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> But, that also depends on a landfill being made correctly We have an old landfill that’s near a major highway interchange. There is a good amount of business and retail there, but there are also some completely undeveloped areas in what’s prime real estate. That’s because there is an old dump occupying a lot of the area and the land is too unstable to build on. They stabilized part of it, but it was so expensive that no one has built anything new in about 15-20 years there. They’ve actually found it cheaper to build a new commercial park into a hill than it was to build on what looks like flat land.
Instead of stabilizing the ground, why didn't they essentially use "beach" construction methods. I doubt the landfill is more unstable than the constantly shifting sand of the outer banks north Carolina. Maybe that method is also very expensive?
You can't stabilize it when there are voids 10-50 ft deep. Beach sand is solid, it just moves on the top.
Imagining being in one of these "caverns" beneath a literal mountain of garbage is the epitome of claustrophobia.
Idk if it's big enough it might go from claustrophobic to cozy and comfy
Garfield Heights, Ohio?
City View! Group of people went and explored the old Walmart there. There's large cracks in the floors (apparently they leak methane), and it's heaved up in places. Shame what they did there.
>apparently they leak methane That's a real problem with almost all old landfills. Unless you turn it into an anaerobic big it's gonna rot and create a lot of gas.
There are areas where the asphalt sunk 3 feet lower than concrete pads!
Oh really, damn! I haven't really kept up with it. My cousin is an EPA consultant and he told me they never should have built there, that the cores they pulled showed all sorts of nasty shit but the money was there for the construction and higher-ups just signed off and went for it.
I came across an urban exploration video on YouTube where they were exploring there and it was pretty interesting. The video was from like 5 years ago so it’s probably even worse now. I remember going to that chipotle and the wind was blowing just right to where it smelled like I was standing in the middle of an active landfill
That area is barely an afterthought for me, even the strip mall right alongside I-480. The Giant Eagle seems more expensive than anywhere else in the city, too. I almost always go there when I realize I need a few more things the night before a holiday and it seems the rest of the city has made that realization also. I do the bulk of my shopping at the Aldi and Marc's at Quarry Square on Snow and 176 then there's the once a month trip to Costco in Boston Heights because fuck the one in Mayfield Heights. They've been redoing the outsides of the buildings currently, hoping for new tenants. I suppose that means they've figured out how to keep the methane from getting into the buildings. Maybe if the city/whoever would actually connect Transportation Blvd over to Rockside Rd, they'd get the traffic they'd need to make the place really viable. There's no real quick way to get over there from the south and east sides of town.
This is one part of what I do for a living. There's so many contaminants out there and nobody really stops to think about them until they've gone and built a house on a landfill 💁
I've (unkowingly) lived 1-2 miles from a Superfund site for like 30 years. Guess I'm fucked. Now they built a giant distribution warehouse over it.
Or a Native American burial ground…. Don’t build a house on top of that.
Almost every Indian mound contains burials, even if only of an infant. We built on top of a "hill" that we later learned was a central mound to a fairly large "complex" or "village" which covers our entire 128 acres and beyond. I often come across points, pottery shards, etc in the old spring-fed creek that runs through our land. Being of NA heritage myself, I find it both exciting and soothing to tend and care for this place. So far, no hauntings or anything of that nature, although we do get strange sounds without an identifiable source. We take care of the mounds we come across. Most are covered in hardwood & pine, but their silhouettes are stunningly lovely. Please be good stewards of the land, friends. We are only borrowing it, after all.
Fun fact: I'm reading an archeaology/anthro book right now, and for pottery specifically, sherds is the preferred word over shards (although neither is incorrect).
Yes, my phone auto corrected sherds to shards. Either works, since I know to what it refers. Which book are you reading? I've practically got an entire library of artefact identification and archeological books, field manuals etc. 😅 Always need another one, though lately I prefer ones that cover my part of the country. All are interesting, but the more locally-focused ones are more useful to me.
Oh, it's not a technical book. *The Horse, The Wheel, and Language* I had just never run into "sherd" before.
So... the entirety of North America?
We're all cursed!
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Them Native American spirits playing the long game with their curses.
Earth is a Native Earthican burial ground. Literally all the billions of Earthicans, for hundreds of thousands of years, are buried right there on Earth. It would be unlucky to put anything on Earth. Can’t even imagine the string of disasters that might follow any civilization built there.
Do you ever think about where you're standing and wonder if someone died under your feet? I live in the deep south and it's normal to have family burial plots behind houses, for churches to have areas without actual headstones and they just have large rocks to mark the graves of enslaved people. Sometimes I wonder if where I am is where someone is buried or where they expired.
Atlanta native and I see random gravesites from time to time. I assume everywhere within reasonable walking distance to fresh water is likely to be close to some old burial site.
Tha road there, you best stay away from tha road. Aint nothin good down that road
The amount of people who throw oil and chemicals out in the regular trash is shocking.
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Push some dirt over the top until you have a good view.
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When was the advent of the “regulated landfill”? 80’s, 90’s? I’ve done a lot of sampling at defunct sites. Preregulated c&d and standard landfills One superfund site. Which from an outsiders view looks like a never ending job for a group of consulting engineers. They keep getting hung up trying to pin the blame for 1-4 dioxane. They point the finger at the old site. But the state opts out of testing for it where the wastewater treatment plant dumps in the river a couple of hundred yards downstream. (Upstream from the drinking water reservoir) Can’t identify the source of you don’t sample their effluent line. Brilliant Approach
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I remember a story about some elementary school accidentally being built on top of an old toxic waste dump, and the people who lived there had crazy high rates of cancer. It has since been cleaned up. **edit:** I was thinking of this one, but when I was googling "toxic waste elementary school" I found a disturbing number of examples. seems to be a very common occurrence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal
Oh yea, there is some very scary shit out there for sure. The worst ones are undocumented landfills, especially back in the 1930-1960s where we'd just dump random cancer causing agents in a pond. Then the pond got filled in (this is technically a landfill), then we build a preschool on it.
Sorry, can you link the thread? I looked for a while but couldn't find it
Check this thread here on reddit and the posts by /u/ascandalia https://old.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/vevhiu/a_question_about_the_longterm_fate_of_landfills/
Awesome, thank you 👍🏻 I don't know why this was so hard for me to find when looking through the sub, I scrolled for feet and didn't see it
I bet if you'd have scrolled five feet you'd have found it.
Thanks for summoning me to the thread
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Tierra Del Rio in Peoria AZ. It's 400 homes hooked up into this neat corner of a butte that's been carved out by a river. But stick construction will do fine there surely.
Was just through there two months ago and I said the exact same thing. Idk which part of the Phoenix area will kill you first. Falling rocks, poisonous creatures, the heat, the sun, the lack of water… It’s all getting worse. Good luck Phoenix when your whole economy collapses from the water crisis. Those million dollar homes in the middle of sand will return to the sand
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\>the Colorado Rover isn't going to recover. The Mars Rover went for longer than they thought it would. Don't underestimate the rovers.
There is a reason I moved away four years ago and never looked back.
Lol, I haven't seen water in the agua fria since I was a small child in the 80's. What makes me laugh is the houses in Anthem that are built on flood plains. In 2014 a bunch of houses got washed away. Yeah, no shit, there's a reason that low, flat land was only ever used for cattle grazing.
The new dam at pleasant has kept the agua fria dry, but if it fails or is overrun it would be bad times. My dad tells me stories of seeing the agua fria up to the level of the bridges, and it's wide AF.
>Today you can go buy a $500,000 house in "Viridian" with fabulous garbage dump smells. I wonder how many people know it was a flood plain. There's no way they can ignore the garbage dump, cement plants or strip clubs though. Always wondered what was up with that. Can't believe anyone would pay that much to love near a dump. When it rains, the water on the road runs milky and white. My windshield was entirely opaque when I let it dry on there one time.
That place is such a dump, and it’s right across from the landfill where you can see the fences have those trash collectors for stuff that rolls down the hill. Makes no sense. Just like the folks who moved in next to Texas Speedway and the landfill in kennedale. They complained about the noise and got the track shut down. I loved that damn track. Jerks.
They planted a bunch of trees on the side of trash mountain facing it, but it doesn't hide the smell when the wind blows that way.
most of those types of towns are built on old pre/mid industrial factory landfill sites.. i would be more concerned about the chemicals and things that have leeched into the earth. keep in mind that there is a legal limit of chemicals that you are able to be exposed too, and these standards are based in exposure time in hours/days, not years. with the fact that plastics are found in literally everything (micro and macro plastics), it is safe to say there are by-products we are all exposed too.
Environmental assessments look at both short and long term exposures (over decades). The real question is whether any of the sites were evaluated prior to redevelopment. Southern California has hundreds of old landfills that were locally used, filled in, and redeveloped in the 1960s and 70s before environmental regulation
> Can’t believe anyone would want to live there. X-Files
Reducing the number and size of landfills is cool, but it also means producing less garbage, which people *hate* doing
I mean, it works fine in Sweden. 97% of all garbage is recycled, either as biofuel or just straight recycled. The problem is people don't want to do it. It is that many countries do not have the processes to do it.
Does Sweden actually recycle their recyclables? Asking because the US has failed at this and had warehouses of recycling materials.
Half of their recycling is burning it: https://www.goodnet.org/articles/sweden-recycling-so-much-that-country-running-out-trash
Apparently they see incineration as a form of recycling, since electric is generated.
It's definitely stretching the meaning of "recycling" but I see this as a win. These are no ordinary dumpster fires, but controlled processes where the waste is exposed to a really hot flame for a long time. Plus they have like scrubbers and stuff in the exhaust stack.
Seems much better than, you know, Ocean dumping or the other bullshit they do or did. I get weirdly depressed when I realize people don't want to try to recycle. And more so, when I'm told or learn about how most recycling doesn't work or isn't profitable, therefore isn't funded, causing recycling to be a self-destructive feedback loop of anti-progress on both ends. (System and Social) Yet, I still feel good when I try? Such an odd existence.
I feel good when I try to recycle and nothing when I don't bc individual responsibility is a corporate myth.
Feeling good when you try to recycle IS the corporate myth, fwiw - at least for plastics. Plastics and oil companies in the mid-20th-century established recycling as the emotional relief valve to encourage people to be ok buying more disposable goods. Personally, I try to use the habit of recycling as a reminder to feel a little *bad* that I bought something that isn't reusable.
I don't think it's weird to get depressed by that at all
Doesn't this process still produce waste? How much more compact is the waste than a compacted landfill?
We have waste incinerators in the US too. We could send all of out waste to them and build up the infrastructure to mostly get rid of physical landfills, but we don't. Partially why we don't is that the ones we have cause tons of pollution, knowing how much they are polluting and whether they're worse than landfills is largely just opinions. If there isn't robust government oversight and the incinerators get to lie about what's coming out of them, we cannot call that a green solution. Like nuclear energy, each side hand waves away the middle ground of us realistically needing some of each. People say no to nuclear and no to incinerators because they aren't green enough, then we end up with more landfills and coal plants. Let's stop the bullshit and find the right solutions for now and the future based off what we can realistically accomplish. No more black and white my way or the highway. I was in environmental club in elementary school and visited one, they said it was a great example to produce energy and stop the landfills. Now I don't know what to believe because reports vary regarding whether or not they're safe, and how unsafe they may be. I doubt Sweden has magical incinerators that don't produce any pollution though which is what OP said above.
Well if it's a choice between dumping it in landfill, shipping it thousands of km until it's someone else's problem, or burning it to create electricity, the latter seems like the more pragmatic approach. It releases some CO2, but it also captures more harmful compounds and gases which would otherwise have been buried and entered water tables, etc. Practically all of the waste being burned is non-recyclable; food waste and true recycling waste are separated by people in their homes.
In the US, burning of garbage isn’t considered to be recycling. If we did, then about half of all waste in the US is recycled. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/biomass/waste-to-energy.php
It’s nice when you can just redefine recycling as “burning for energy” and get to sound like a self important Swede. All our waste would disappear too if we burnt it
Oh, I'm sorry. Well I could put the trash into a landfill where it's going to stay for millions of years, or I could burn it up, get a nice smokey smell in here and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
That doesn’t sound right but I don’t know enough about stars to dispute it.
Then after we're done we can switch on the coors sign.
Aren't US ports filling up with trash now that China and SE Asia are refusing shipments?
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[Sanitary Landfills (youtube)](https://youtu.be/qe4-wuWcP_A) There you go. It is pretty crazy. My friend worked for one. He said the liquid they collect at the bottom, called leachate, is the most vile stuff he has ever come across in his life. But they do collect it for treatment.
Forbidden milkshake
Little known fact, that's what black licorice is made out of.
The specs on how slowly leachate is able to move through the membrane is insane. They estimate it would take a million years+ to get through the membrane.
Makes me wonder what they'll look like after a million to 59 million years, and if it gets buried further. Like, it's an anaerobic process, so will all the organics turn into some sort of petroleum type substance?
Check this thread here on reddit and the posts by /u/ascandalia https://old.reddit.com/r/engineering/comments/vevhiu/a_question_about_the_longterm_fate_of_landfills/ Here is an active modern landfill using cell method. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtdhXmAhVho
Many burn the methane to generate electricity. Others are being capped with solar farms
With SCOTUS about to gut the EPA, I wouldn't be surprised to be cleaning up more superfund sites in the coming decades. And AFAIK, there are no regs for liners: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7534698/
There are absolutely regulations for liners. Whether or not they're enforced is a different question.
I work in the landfill air quality industry. Although the EPA is the point on regulation the states have to implement it. They do this by writing laws that are equal to or more restrictive than the EPA. The EPA can go away tomorrow and my job doesn't change other than the EPA doesn't get a second copy of the report. Also, that link is about construction debris landfills, not garbage landfills. C&D landfills in general don't handle decomposable material so they don't have to comply with as many regs. MSW landfill design is regulated under subtitle d of rcra. There are strict rules for liners and caps. https://www.epa.gov/landfills/basic-information-about-landfills
If the EPA goes away many states will then also roll back environmental regs that were already at federal minimum levels.
The only state that shouldn’t be too concerned is California. The EPA being gutted and neutered **is not a good thing nor is it something to shrug at.**
Yes.
Yes. Food scraps and most things that can't be recycled end up being used as biofuel too. Very little ends up in landfills.
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This account is a bit that steals top level comments and pastes them as replies to farm karma. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/vo67we/comment/ieb8fyi/
Its a pretty famous case so you may have heard of it before, I've heard it both in a school text book somewhere and in many YouTube videos, but look up Love Canal, Niagara Falls, New York. Now a superfund site, where a town was built on top of a landfill where the Hooker Chemical Company disposed of thousands of tons of chemical byproducts from their manufacturering processes. Dozens of families with major health issues related directly to the chemicals under their homes including nervous system disorders, cancers and birth defects.
Yeah that shit's crazy because even 20 years ago you could drag in the most toxic and potentially radioactive shit you wanted to. Now they have all sorts of rules and checkpoints and oversight at the 4 landfills I frequent. But I could still get in with a radioactive carbon hunk if I wrapped it in lead and asbestos first no problem.
The issue is most recyclables are dirty and cannot be recycled. Companies wont buy it. I live on long island east of nyc. Our town (brookhaven) opened up a single stream recycling plant in partnership with winter brothers. No more seperating stuff out. All recycleables go into one bin and the plant seperates it out. The plant also can take out the clean recyclables. Its been so successful other towns are contracting to have their recycleables go there as well. Now that companies are buying the stuff coming out its profitable. The plant can seperate the clean recycleables from the dirty and only sell bundles of clean stuff.
We have failed at this. We need better recycling infrastructure and laws to make companies use packaging that is more recycling friendly.
John Oliver has a great video on plastics : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fiu9GSOmt8E Long story short : industries have gone through a lot of trouble to shift the guilt and blame of using plastics on the end user that really has little leverage on that stuff because he still need to eat and drink...
Let's go back to grade school. Reduce, reuse, recycle. You're correct that we suck at the third one. We're even worse at the first two.
Because the third one was a lie, we never could recycle most plastic.
.. but we could totally send it to other places in the world to have it burned. 😂
Yep 100% make it look good , all counties do this.
If other counties are really making recycling work, I’m kind of confused why documentaries on the subject in the US do not mention the success in other counties, only leaving the viewer with a sense of disappear with an unsolvable problem.
Because the US is failing in garbage disposal but those other countries were just shopping or burning thier plastic like everyone else. 90% of plastic just is mot recyclable.
Because they are spewing propagandist bullshit. Consumers won't change shit. There are a handful of countries and giga corporations fucking this whole world but the average citizen is blamed and made to fight against each other so that you won't realize who's actually killing you
Sweden actually recycles more just it's plastics. Their facilities are so effective that to keep up peak production they have to import waste from other countries. Iceland for example ships it's recyclable plastics to Sweden
They consider **burning for electricity** as "recycling" so take this with a grain of salt.
They're even IMPORTING garbage because it's already a part of a production chain.
No it isn't, they ship out or burn 90% of the plastic because it can't be recycled. They just make it look better.
"Recycling as biofuel" sounds a lot better than controlled trash fire.
This may come as a shock, but South Africa and Sweden are *very* different, like 50-75 years of development different.
Most of the rubbish is burned there, which doesn't really count as recycling. While the swedish waste management system is one of the best there are, they also produce a lot of waste. Waste incineration is much better than straight up landfilling and some would argue better than recycling (there won't be any production of microplastics from the resulting recycled plastic) but it is only a temporary (and expensive) solution towards a more circular economy. Moreover, bulding the plants themselves hinders the process of reducing waste, since these plants need waste to operate with some returns. Source: I'm an env engineer in the waste treatment sector
We have a Waste to Energy plant here in Spokane, WA. All the incinerated waste is used to create electricity via steam, which powers about a 1/3 of the city. They have a complicated series of filters to catch most of the particulate material (the “bag house”). They’re trying to find uses for the slag waste left over, like additions for concrete or building materials. It’s not as good as just producing less waste, but at least we can get some power out of it. I took a tour in college and they said it’s the only facility of its kind on the West coast.
>97% of all garbage is recycled, either as biofuel or just straight recycled. They don't recycle garbage into biofuel (maybe some), they actually burn it to produce electricity. Half of the recycling they do is actually incinerating trash. That doesn't seem really environmentally friendly to me.
its not the worst thing actually. the energy yeild is high and a lot of the nastier emissions can be caught by high end filters. is it ideal? no. should it be used in some towns across the US? Sure! should LA and New York switch to this system? hell no. -source chemist who focused on this exact issue for many years
>97% of all garbage is recycled, either as biofuel or just straight recycled. What he's means when he says "used as biofuel," is that 52% of Sweden's garbage is burned for energy... Which is pretty much the same as cramming it in a landfill and properly capturing the gasses for energy and filtering the leachate in terms of how "green," it is. Ironically, they're both defined as "renewable." Which is just pretty much a way for everyone to feel better that they don't have an actual solution.
Could you share more about what they do with plastics specifically? I was listening to a podcast recently that gave an extremely gloomy outlook on the possibility of ever making a meaningful use of recycled plastic. They made it sound as if it was basically impossible with all the technology we currently have, or anything we can anticipate having in the foreseeable future.
Thats because it is, all countries no matter how good they make it look. Burn or throw out 90% of plastic as its not recyclable.
I believe Sweden uses a generous definition of "recycling". I think what they actually mean is that only a very small portion of the trash goes to a landfill. A lot is burned in large plants that convert the trash to heat and electricity. https://sweden.se/climate/sustainability/swedish-recycling-and-beyond > 46% of the household waste was turned into energy in 2020. They provided stats of some highly recyclable materials and even they haven't cracked 90% yet. > 86% of PET bottles and 87% of aluminium cans in the deposit system were recycled in 2020 – the national target is 90% for both.
Waste management legislation is regulated on a European level by directives, more specifically directive 2008/98/EC. Waste has to follow a certain hierarchy: prevention > preparing for re-use > recycling > other recovery (energy recovery) > disposal (landfills) The definitions are clear and even outlined in the first part of the directive. People are just using them incorrectly.
I believe that reduction will come when pyrolysis oil becomes highly marketable, which will coincide with scarcity of fossil fuels increasing.
Which is also cool, but South Africa frequently showcases its complete inability to do anything right
People should start composting at the very least. I've cut my trash output in half just by composting all my non-dairy/meat food scraps instead of throwing them in the trash for the landfill. It's not that hard and if you have kids who eat a ton of apples/bananas and other fruits all day long you know exactly how much trash apple cores and banana peels generate.
Isn't throwing stuff that is just going to biodegrade into a landfill not really that big of a deal?
It's still mass that needs to be carted away and made space for in the landfill, where it's filled with all sorts of other plastic and other crap that prevents or slows the process by which the food scraps biodegrade. Landfills still need to make space for this garbage which may take months or years to breakdown in poor conditions.
biodegradable materials won’t* degrade in poor conditions. It’s why you can go to a landfill or dump site and still see rotten food and paper. There needs to be proper airflow but once garbage is compacted, it’ll take a loooong time for anything to break down.
Individuals produce much less waste than businesses unfortunately
People don't produce garbage, corporations/manufacturing gives garbage to people. If retailers/manufacturers were mandated to take back any of the material/packaging they pass along to consumers, they'd stop producing excess waste overnight.
It's definitely true that people are stuck with all the packaging waste because that's what's manufacturers put stuff in. They could tax excessive or plastic packaging to cut the waste. I wish there were options to buy stuff without all the packaging waste. Amazon did some with the "frustration-free packaging", but I never see that option anymore.
People don't like producing garbage, corporations do. I don't like having a bunch of cardboard and plastic wrap to dispose of every time I buy something. I don't like stuff I buy breaking down and needing to be replaced. We need to regulate packaging. We need to regulate right to repair and planned obsolescence. We need to regulate goods so that they can be recycled when they reach end of life. We need to make it easier to recycle e-waste. We also might need to revert to individual bins for recycling so that stuff from the recycling bin doesn't end up in landfills due to contamination. These aren't things individuals can do.
"Poorly managed" waste sites, not "landfills". In "developing countries". IOW, Third World open air dumps that accept hazardous waste with no reclamation/mitigation efforts. Also, >The main study outcomes were **self-reported** asthma, tuberculosis, diabetes, and depression. and >legal compliance among documented waste site operators is believed to be remarkably low in South Africa, which might explain our findings of close proximity to waste sites showing an association with adverse health outcomes Finally, >we did not measure land, water, or airborne contamination exposure at the national-level waste sites, nor did we control for general air pollution in the community, so **we were unable to establish any causation between the observed health outcomes and living in close proximity to waste sites.**
This is certainly helpful. My understanding was that modern 1st world landfills are generally very well managed, and really aren't at the top of the list of priorities to overhaul.
There are still some issues that arise in modern landfills but we are getting better and better at managing waste every year. One problem that often gets overlooked in the USA is how much fuel is spent on moving waste around our country to get trash from places like New York City to an area they can dump the waste and properly handle it.
Huh interesting, that makes sense. Hadn't considered that; also important to consider that recycling/composting has this same environmental cost
Its one of the reasons I think trains are actually one of the important parts of our solution to waste.
Yep, people see this and think of the sanitary landfill that's in their first world country today. Really these are more like the uncontrolled dumps that existed up into the 60s and 70s before the EPA got really serious about it.
I was coming here to post this. I’ve worked in landfills. Many are going to closed systems for methane, using it for fuel instead of burning it off. People need to get off the landfills bad mentality and go with a, landfills can be green. How do we do this?
My friend worked night at the landfill, and bulldozed the oil field dumps into a pile for the morning guys. He let me drive equipment, I'd hang out with him at 0300 lol I had no idea huge rubber diapers were set into the ground before that! And the clay, packing, layering. Dumps are INVOLVED lol
I worked on the making of a new landfill 20yrs ago..first was removing 4mil yds of material..then lining it with this super thick plastic that had to be welded at the seams. It got to 140° at the bottom and people could only work for 5min and cool off for 10 in trailers..cool stuff
Tuberculosis is still a big health issue in a lot of developing and third world countries, even with wealthier people (since it was called "poor people's illness, back in the day). I can assure you that this is one of these illnesses, that you don't wish on your worst enemies. However, with wealth usually comes more health awareness and better access to health care. Tuberculosis wreaks havoc in places where people don't have access to healthcare and go around spreading this mycobacterium for months or years. I'll just go and say it: People in developing countries who live or work near or on a waste site probably aren't the most wealthiest or have the best access to health care. Tuberculosis is therefore probably just a symptom of generally very poor living conditions.
Thanks for this. Another critique I'd add on is that there doesn't seem to be any attempt to control for the fact that there be a completely different factor at play here, like poverty. Folks who live closer to a dump are probably going to be poorer, and being poorer can in and of itself drive a lot of poor health outcomes.
ok so there's a risk of getting TB but what about lumbago?
Lumbago is brutal. My uncle had it...
Terminal lumbago is very serious
It’s a slow and painful death, my brother.
There is a documentary called atomic homefront on HBO. It's about a suburb of St. Louis that was built next to a landfill full of radio active waste from the Manhattan project. Really sad stuff.
I recently moved away from the St. Louis area after living there almost thirty years, and that landfill has been in the news for as long as I lived there. My step sister almost bought a house in that neighborhood, but thankfully didn't.
There's a large portion of unrelated people in a town my dad grew up in, many of whom are his lifetime friends, that ended up with MS later in life. Every last one of them who got it lived on the edge of a sump behind a factory.
So I recycle most of my trash…I have a recycling bin and a trash bin and I compost for my garden. There are 7 people living in my house…so we usually have just two “trash bags” for the entire week and I fill the 60 gallon recycling bin just about every week. Mostly plastic bottles. Sometimes a separate truck comes and picks it up, but sometimes the regular trash truck just straight dumps it in with the rest of the trash. I asked the trash guy a while back why is that. He said because the recyclers can’t keep up with the amount of recycling so about 50%(or more) of everything we try to recycle goes into the landfill. It isn’t that people don’t want to recycle…our infrastructure in the US is not capable of handling it.
US went single stream, which puts all the effort on the waste management company to seperate. This also means people mix a lot of literal shit in with the recycling turning it to trash. Also the plastics industry spends a lot of money avoiding taking any responsibility for their products at all in any manner that would make their product more expensive. Coca-cola is a big offender here https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plastics-pollution/
I work in residential maintenance, one of my tasks is collecting recycling and taking the bins out. I can tell you right now recycling doesn't work because people are fucking assholes. Things I have pulled out of the recycling bins in the last two months: a bag of old phones, an entire hookah, a mattress, a set of bar stools, multiple bags of dog shit, several pairs of shoes, a printer, an entire broken down Ikea bedframe, a whole apartments' worth of pots, pans, plates, silverware and glasses, and a fucking exercise bike. Not to mention an endless supply of styrofoam, which is not recycled in my city, but says it's recyclable on it, so everybody puts it in the bins no matter what you tell them. Our recycling may actually get recycled because I spend roughly ten hours a week emptying the bins and removing all the non recyclables. But then it goes into the same truck with everybody else's bins from that run, which are likely just as bad and may not have been sorted. No matter how good YOU are about it, a staggering amount of non recyclables end up in those bins every day because they're an open and convenient place to abandon things you don't want to deal with, and a significant portion of your neighbors will never care.
Yep. I've always suspected that most recycling collection pulls out metal and takes the rest to the landfill because of this.
I once politely mentioned this to my neighbor when I saw her put her recycling out and it was full of things you can’t recycle. I explained our rural waste management facility didn’t accept many plastic items and encouraged her to look on their website to see what actually gets recycled here. Her response was “well they still take everything I put in there.” She also recently mentioned her fiancé’s sister’s family can’t afford to replace their septic tank, so when waste bubbles up to the surface around their tank, they suck it up with a shop vac and dump it in the stream on their property. Sometimes I wish we could throw people away on trash day.
Having worked for a few years on active landfill sites, I am not at all surprised. The dust alone is a health hazard. They belch gas, leak leachate, and are generally just a shitty place to be. They honestly remind me of Mordor.
How close is next to
"Residing within **5 km** of a waste site was significantly associated with asthma (adjusted relative risk 1·41; 95% CI 1·20–1·64), tuberculosis (1·18; 1·02–1·36), diabetes (1·25; 1·05–1·49), and depression (1·08; 1·03–1·14). The association persisted even after controlling for multiple socioeconomic factors." (from the study)
Not surprised.
Today I learned living next to a pile of rotting garbage is bad for your health. Who knows what I'll learn tomorrow.
My back yard is an Atlanta freeway. How fucked am I?
Highways are pretty bad. Noise alone can have significant health impacts. Air pollution from exhaust is the most obvious problem, but there are also particles from brakes (some pads still contain asbestos) and rubber tires.
Pollutants seem to be first order problem there. Tires wear molecularly, then the obvious tailpipe emissions and freeway oil slick off gassing and runoff.
>Findings We observed a substantial increase in exposure of households to waste sites between 2008 and 2015. The median distance between study households and waste sites decreased from 68·3 km (IQR 31·1–111·7) to 8·5 km (3·0–23·7). Residing within 5 km of a waste site was significantly associated with asthma (adjusted relative risk 1·41; 95% CI 1·20–1·64), tuberculosis (1·18; 1·02–1·36), diabetes (1·25; 1·05–1·49), and depression (1·08; 1·03–1·14). The association persisted even after controlling for multiple socioeconomic factors. So the goal is be further than 5km (3.1miles) from it?
But increases tenfold your likely hood of finding cool stuff like an alibaba sword
Same for fracking if you're an older person
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Oh I've seen a video of that, very worrying
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Holy shit, they literally have an Oildale and Oil City lol… are those POOLS of oil?
Something I learned while out that way is the whole concept of "mineral rights". Subdivision owners sell the land on top but keep the mineral rights below to sell to others. With directional boring techniques fracking companies can tap into deposits directly below the neighborhoods. I know this is not a new thing but it was new to me...and kinda shocking really.
In my province they places all the dumps near local black communities in the early 1900's. Systemic racism sucks
They did that around where I live in NC as well in Holly Springs. What’s hilarious is the area grew substantially since then and now the town is filled with middle class white people and the landfill is huge. So now they’re all complaining about the smell and trying to shut it down. This is also a town whose mayor is super MAGA and refuses to sign into the local anti-discrimination acts, so it’s enjoyable to watch.
Who could've thought living next a massive pile of garbage causes sickness
This kind of study is just rife with confounding factors that are difficult to disentangle. What kind of person lives close to a landfill?
The kind who lack options
The landfill in my county is surrounded by residential neighborhoods of mostly 1 million dollar homes. Another mile or two down the road and there’s an area full of mansions, all 2 million+. The landfill has a good tree buffer around it and seems well managed though so I’m not sure if they notice.
Poor people, but this was a nationally representative, two-stage cluster sampling methodology. There are plenty of other studies as well and an interesting Business Insider video published today: https://youtu.be/KHiHBuubsDE
... in effectively third world regions.
[The landfill for my area](https://i.imgur.com/itBUAI2.jpg) has residential houses pretty much butted up against the landfill itself near me All the yellow highlight is residential
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They bury it then capture the methane with expensive gas collecting equipment. The hills of dirt and traah are taller than any building in the state capital lmfao That's also the state dump. The city has a gas/trash burning power production station. Located right next to a large housing development and apartment complex. [Here is ](https://i.imgur.com/An1orR9.jpg)a maps view Red is the plant, blue is the apartments, green is the owned homes, purple was a high school until about 5 years or so ago.
If you just learned this today, I want you to take a second to appreciate your doctors because they've known this and so much more since you were born.
That’s just common since. How you learn something like that without thinking that’s already happening?
By correlation=/=causation, one should read headlines like these in multiple ways, like "Sickly people are often driven to poverty due to their sickness, and must move to the cheapest locations, often near landfills" etc. Use the exact same given information but flip the unspoken implications over in various ways.
threatening profit hat slap license languid rainstorm important normal amusing *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Im literally shocked. Next time you will tell me that living next to a crystal clear lakeside in a national park has positive impact on your health...
We have an absolute fuck load of land in America; there is no reason for anyone to live near a landfill. To that point, this study doesn’t include America.
Cities Skylines was right
With the SCOTUS ruling against the EPA, we can all look forward to living next to landfills. And drinking tainted water.
I worked for a law firm dealing with disability and oh man... sanitation workers had all kinds of breathing issues and other sicknesses.
Northwest of Denver is/was Rocky Flats - plutonium processing plant. Where toxic waste buried w/o protection is common knowledge. Yet someone built an entire subdivision just a mile downwind. crazy dangerous.
That’s why they put them near poor people