From green spaces to basketball courts to golf courses — the possibilities are endless. Virginia Beach is home to one of the most famous landfill parks. The capped landfill is now home to man-made mountains, lakes, playgrounds, a skate park and paths for walking and biking.
Former landfills are often repurposed into landfill-gas-to-energy sites. There are also several solar panel fields installed on top of old landfills. New Jersey has taken on multiple solar projects, and uses what was once a municipal dump in Burlington County as a source of renewable energy. However, there are risks to building on a closed landfill that get in the way of adopting this as a widespread practice. As trash decomposes, the ground shifts and can become uneven, which poses a difficult challenge when dealing with intricate solar arrays.
But if an energy provider is willing to take on that challenge, installing solar or wind energy projects is a great way to benefit from these underutilized spaces. Environmental conservationists are advocating for landfills to be repurposed as wildlife habitats once they are no longer in use.
Before establishing a refuge, groups test different plots of soil on the capped landfill to see if they can support native plant life. They were environmental disasters , leaching contaminated liquid into the soil and groundwater, and releasing overwhelming amounts of methane into the air.
The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act changed all of that. Las Vegas may be the city of sin, but its home state Nevada is the land of garbage, with a whopping Idaho, North Dakota, and Connecticut are the only three states in the country with less than 10 tons of landfill waste per person — putting Pennsylvania, Colorado, and California to shame, with their average of 35 tons of landfill garbage per person.
Ohio, for example, is famous for accepting as much as 3. Landfill gas is a dangerous, virtually invisible concoction generated in the most natural way possible : the bacterial decomposition of organic material.
The result is half methane and half carbon dioxide and water vapor, with trace amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and nonmethane organic compounds, or NMOCs, which can cause smog if uncontrolled.
In the past, environmentalists have been more concerned by carbon dioxide emissions, but now, they are worrying about methane. For the first 20 years after it meets the atmosphere, methane is 84 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The population-heavy states of California and Texas are currently facing the greatest problem with landfill-produced methane, but the repercussions of this problem could eventually affect the entire world.
It can be hard to wrap our minds around the impact of our waste in terms of landfill gas and metrics that stretch into the billions. Your 4. The waste tally for a family of four is even grimmer. They figured it was million tons in , according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. For the same year, EPA estimated the figure to be million tons. The Yale team calculated that in , waste sent to landfills rose to million tons.
With million people, that comes to 1, pounds per person in that year, the last for which there are figures. Jon Powell at Yale's Center for Industrial Ecology said the amount is different because of the way his team calculated it: Adding up actual measurements instead of estimates based on what businesses told government indirectly. The EPA partially funded the study. Three outside experts said they trust the Yale numbers more than the EPA's.
However, Thomas Kinnaman, a Bucknell University professor who studies the economics of solid waste and recycling, added the findings don't matter much, because landfills have plenty of room to expand. Powell found that for every year's worth of trash filled on average in the United States, landfills add 2. If you made the pile feet deep as tall as a story building , it would cover more than 1, acres of land.
If you keep filling up this landfill for years, and if you assume that during this time the populations of the United States doubles, then the landfill will cover about , acres, or or so square miles, with trash feet deep. Here's another way to think about it.
The Great Pyramid in Egypt is feet by feet at the base and is feet tall, and anyone who has seen it in real life knows that it's a huge thing -- one of the biggest things ever built by man. If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger.
So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close.
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