Is there a rubbish pile model for 2050 or 2100

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D

Doug MacIVER

Minister of Fire
Nov 21, 2012
1,018
se mass
How many tonnes and how high will they be? Is this what happens when you give up sectors of industry and rely on others to take your garbage? Short history from landfill to recycle to export recycle to no place to put it! Tip of the problem shows up in a short year and one half.

I offer no solution, just think this is going to be a rapidly growing concern. If not, it should be! I can offer one consequence to my business, $$$$$$$$. Cost a 10yd dumpster up to $183.00/ pickup/ 3 to 6 times/mo, from $130.00 in that time frame.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/china-recycling-ban-pollution_n_5c6ef4f9e4b0e2f4d8a3e2d5
 
Europe has been dealing with trash issues longer than the US. Manufacturers of new products have to take into consideration life cycle of their packaging as they can be held responsible for the ultimate disposal costs unless the discarded product makes it into a established recycling stream. They also need to aggressively mark products with proper codes. Ultimately for the unrecyclable trash it pretty well universally gets burnt in far more complex trash to energy plants. Japan does the same. I think Sweden got to the point where they were importing trash to feed their trash to energy plants. Put in the right technology and these plants are close to zero toxic emissions. Many of the plants also are "mining" the trash stream delivered to them and still making a buck on certain recovered materials.

The rest of the story on how we got here is long but one big factor is mis-categorizing of trash as recyclables for shipment to other countries. Also factoring in was that a combination of social pressure and political factors that made legitimate landfill space in the US expensive or unbuildable leading to a steep cost for landfilling. Most remaining permitted landfills are owned by just few owners and in many areas there is no competition and they charge what they can. There was also an issue that there was a spate of poorly designed trash burners that got big incentives during the late seventies into the early 1980s that did have potentially hazardous exhaust plumes giving trash incinerators a non starter in much of the US.

With respect to trash to recycling, there was a profit to be made by greedy middleman taking a product that normally would have to be disposed in landfill for big bucks and converting it to recyclable that some other market wanted. The Chinese had little or no regulations being enforced with respect to trash disposal and the net result was that the Chinese and other "third world" countries decided that it was worth picking through the trash and using potentially dangerous and environmentally hazardous methods to recover materials. One of the reasons this trade worked is that there are shiploads of empty containers heading back to China after they drop off goods in the US so shipping it is cheap. China is now reportedly starting to crack down on illegal trash dumps and large scale environmental and health issues. Thus they are now cracking down on the trade dumping it back into the laps of the US producers.

Ground glass can be used quite effectively for road base, concrete and asphalt aggregate. All it take is a highway official to change a spec to allow it and require it. Asphalt is routinely recycled into new asphalt and major highway projects are recycling concrete for new concrete.

Plastics can be recycled into building products and burn well and most don't contain chlorine so no need to worry about Dioxins unless the recycling stream is poorly categorized.

There is steady market for recycled paper as long as it sorted well. Many folks don't realize that Bob Kraft of Patriots (and lately florida) fame owns recycled cardboard mills. The Chinese used to pay a premium for US paper as it had a high percentage of virgin fibers that could be recycled into newer paper. Unfortunately as Chinese printed paper and packaging has increased in the US the quality of the recycled fiber in general has declined.

Another scam that many communities accepted was zero sort collection. The landfill companies realized that recycling was cutting down on their volume so they moved into the recycling market by offering to build zero sort recycling plants. It sounds like a great thing to municipality, reduced pickup and processing costs plus they don't have to deal with selling the product. The problem with zero sort is the overall quality of the recyclables produced is lower as everything gets contaminated. If the markets go away they just deflect it to their landfill and adjust their rates to match. In my small town, employees do the pick up and if they see something that doesn't recycle they leave it in the bins. In the town next to me there is no pick up so everyone has to go to the transfer station. They have recycling volunteers who keep an eye on what goes in the bins and they keep a particularly close eye on newbies. They also have pay per bag trash disposal so the temptation is to try to slip it into the recycling bins.
 
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peakbagger said:
Europe has been dealing with trash issues longer than the US. Manufacturers of new products have to take into consideration life cycle of their packaging as they can be held responsible for the ultimate disposal costs unless the discarded product makes it into a established recycling stream. They also need to aggressively mark products with proper codes. Ultimately for the unrecyclable trash it pretty well universally gets burnt in far more complex trash to energy plants. Japan does the same. I think Sweden got to the point where they were importing trash to feed their trash to energy plants. Put in the right technology and these plants are close to zero toxic emissions. Many of the plants also are "mining" the trash stream delivered to them and still making a buck on certain recovered materials.

The rest of the story on how we got here is long but one big factor is mis-categorizing of trash as recyclables for shipment to other countries. Also factoring in was that a combination of social pressure and political factors that made legitimate landfill space in the US expensive or unbuildable leading to a steep cost for landfilling. Most remaining permitted landfills are owned by just few owners and in many areas there is no competition and they charge what they can. There was also an issue that there was a spate of poorly designed trash burners that got big incentives during the late seventies into the early 1980s that did have potentially hazardous exhaust plumes giving trash incinerators a non starter in much of the US.

With respect to trash to recycling, there was a profit to be made by greedy middleman taking a product that normally would have to be disposed in landfill for big bucks and converting it to recyclable that some other market wanted. The Chinese had little or no regulations being enforced with respect to trash disposal and the net result was that the Chinese and other "third world" countries decided that it was worth picking through the trash and using potentially dangerous and environmentally hazardous methods to recover materials. One of the reasons this trade worked is that there are shiploads of empty containers heading back to China after they drop off goods in the US so shipping it is cheap. China is now reportedly starting to crack down on illegal trash dumps and large scale environmental and health issues. Thus they are now cracking down on the trade dumping it back into the laps of the US producers.

Ground glass can be used quite effectively for road base, concrete and asphalt aggregate. All it take is a highway official to change a spec to allow it and require it. Asphalt is routinely recycled into new asphalt and major highway projects are recycling concrete for new concrete.

Plastics can be recycled into building products and burn well and most don't contain chlorine so no need to worry about Dioxins unless the recycling stream is poorly categorized.

There is steady market for recycled paper as long as it sorted well. Many folks don't realize that Bob Kraft of Patriots (and lately florida) fame owns recycled cardboard mills. The Chinese used to pay a premium for US paper as it had a high percentage of virgin fibers that could be recycled into newer paper. Unfortunately as Chinese printed paper and packaging has increased in the US the quality of the recycled fiber in general has declined.

Another scam that many communities accepted was zero sort collection. The landfill companies realized that recycling was cutting down on their volume so they moved into the recycling market by offering to build zero sort recycling plants. It sounds like a great thing to municipality, reduced pickup and processing costs plus they don't have to deal with selling the product. The problem with zero sort is the overall quality of the recyclables produced is lower as everything gets contaminated. If the markets go away they just deflect it to their landfill and adjust their rates to match. In my small town, employees do the pick up and if they see something that doesn't recycle they leave it in the bins. In the town next to me there is no pick up so everyone has to go to the transfer station. They have recycling volunteers who keep an eye on what goes in the bins and they keep a particularly close eye on newbies. They also have pay per bag trash disposal so the temptation is to try to slip it into the recycling bins.
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as always pts. well expressed. offers opportunities to restart domestic recycle efforts or energy efforts. I'm but one small manufacturer, multiply us by hundreds, thousands. It is occurring at a very fast pace.
We do repurpose our corrugated in packaging some of our cut product.. We also die cut it into gun range targets for local sporting clubs and gun shops. Some of our leather scrap is utilized in polishing chrome chain, some for small leather goods. Those opportunities are mostly gone and the balance ends up in the dumpster.
 
As well noted, Europe has addressed this issue head on and continues to make great progress. Germany went from about 50,000 landfills in the 1970s to about 300 today. No garbage is permitted at their current landfills without being sorted first. By changing from a linear economy of Take->Make->Use->Dispose to adopting the model of cradle to grave or preferably cradle to cradle model of a circular economy. This has dramatically reduced waste and GHG emissions, spurred innovation and jobs, reduced resource scarcity, and increased competitiveness. It has also relieved the taxpayer of the burden of paying for the disposal, cleanup and health hazards of unchecked waste creation.
 
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We need more incentives for households to recycle.The cost of pickup is quite high around here so thats one incentive. But most still sending everything to landfills. Since i started recycling i only make a few trips to the landfill a year vs weekly pickup before that. Probably 95% reduction in items sent to the landfill.
 
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Seasoned Oak said:
We need more incentives for households to recycle.The cost of pickup is quite high around here so thats one incentive. But most still sending everything to landfills. Since i started recycling i only make a few trips to the landfill a year vs weekly pickup before that. Probably 95% reduction in items sent to the landfill.
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well here is the last sentence from the article.
"The unfortunate thing in the United States is that when people recycle they think it’s taken care of, when it was largely taken care of by China,” said Gilman. “When that stopped, it became clear we just aren’t able to deal with it.”

my guess is you'll eventually see charges for your recyclables
 
Doug MacIVER said:
well here is the last sentence from the article.
"The unfortunate thing in the United States is that when people recycle they think it’s taken care of, when it was largely taken care of by China,” said Gilman. “When that stopped, it became clear we just aren’t able to deal with it.”

my guess is you'll eventually see charges for your recyclables
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This is where the Govt needs to step in and make it happen. A few small incentives to recyclers can make all the difference. Or some kind of support by industries and business. Its not rocket science.
 
Doug MacIVER said:
my guess is you'll eventually see charges for your recyclables
Click to expand...
It will be interesting to see how this works in a “free market” system. Anyone with kids my age has griped about the ridiculous packaging that surrounds every toy. Heck, I am near the point of having a construction dumpster delivered to my house for Christmas, every damn Barbie doll comes packaged with enough plastic ties and cardboard to fill a regular trash can. Don’t even get me started on the thermoformed packaging that has us almost cutting off our fingers to open.

If people have to start paying by volume to have that stuff hauled away, at what point does it start affecting product purchase decisions? We all hate the packaging, but as long as hauling it away remains free, few are allowing it to factor into their purchasing decision.
 
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One minor rant is milk carton type containers. They take up a lot of volume. I remember visiting my relatives in Montreal Quebec and milk came in plastic bags. They sure take up less room after use. Of course not sure which recycles better an empty mile carton with sour milk or soggy plastic bag.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/81468/why-do-canadians-drink-milk-bags

I am still a fan of paperbags over plastic ones. Paperbags stand up on their own and they tend to be 100% kraft fiber with few fillers so they burn hot when lighting a fire.
 
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BTW, Amazon is actively trying to simplify packaging. Most of the frustrating fancy packaging is set up for retail to prevent shoplifting and tag switching. Amazon is big enough and does not sell retail so they are trying to get their suppliers to reduce package weight and size to cut down on shipping costs. I have received a couple of items where it was the same product but packaged far simpler.

Good intent but expect the extra carbon used to ship it direct to my house offsets the carbon benefits of reduced weight but I appreciate the cardboard boxes as with my boiler design with storage I never have coals so I light a lot of fires. Our town like the cardboard boxes as I understand they still get a good price per ton. Not so happy with the plastic bubble wrap pouches they use with a lot of the USPS shipped products.
 
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peakbagger said:
One minor rant is milk carton type containers. They take up a lot of volume. I remember visiting my relatives in Montreal Quebec and milk came in plastic bags. They sure take up less room after use. Of course not sure which recycles better an empty mile carton with sour milk or soggy plastic bag.

.
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I can remember when milk came in Glass bottles and was delivered to the house. Our milk box even had an insulated interior to keep it cold.
 
Seasoned Oak said:
I can remember when milk came in Glass bottles and was delivered to the house. Our milk box even had an insulated interior to keep it cold.
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We still get our milk in glass bottles, from a local farm. $1 deposit, metal carrier rack, the re-usable nipples, the whole works that most probably haven't seen since the 1970's. No delivery, tho.
 
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Ashful said:
It will be interesting to see how this works in a “free market” system. Anyone with kids my age has griped about the ridiculous packaging that surrounds every toy. Heck, I am near the point of having a construction dumpster delivered to my house for Christmas, every damn Barbie doll comes packaged with enough plastic ties and cardboard to fill a regular trash can. Don’t even get me started on the thermoformed packaging that has us almost cutting off our fingers to open.

If people have to start paying by volume to have that stuff hauled away, at what point does it start affecting product purchase decisions? We all hate the packaging, but as long as hauling it away remains free, few are allowing it to factor into their purchasing decision.
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Couldn't agree more. This will change when the cost of disposal is passed back to the manufacturer.
 
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[A local college is working on incinerators for the military.

https://www.thedailystar.com/news/l...cle_e063d49f-f858-540d-b23f-bd108a8e2f46.html[/QUOTE]

Rapid pyrolysis techology "breakthroughs" have been around for decades. Heat up trash indirectly without oxygen and combustible gases get formed. The hot gas can either be further treated with FIsher Tropsch process to make liquid fuels, cooled and cleaned up for direct combustion in an engine, or burned directly for heat. If there is chlorine mixed in with the waste, furans and dioxin can get formed but they can be scrubbed out with downstream equipment. Generally the ash is regarded as "special waste" although there are several technologies that are used to bind the potential toxins in the ash and get some beneficial reuse.A popular use is blending it in with concrete.

It rarely pencils out as a fuel producing device as much as its a waste reduction tool. The volume and weight going into the process is reduced by a roughly a factor of ten. If the waste input has high Btu content they can net out as a net energy producer but if its too wet or low Btu it needs supplemental fuel. Reducing volume and weight is not a bad thing. Its a lot easier to deal with the ash as its relatively inert and once landfilled there is no methane gas emissions like conventional waste.

I did a quick assessment once on a fairly large prototype system that had a great PR person as a part owner. It made the rounds of various cable TV shows but it was a better media show than an actual marketable technology. I did a similar assessment early in my career and think I still have the report somewhere. The physics do not change just the hype around it.

A large block of communities in Maine are rolling the dice with a new process to deal with trash. They had an older tech trash burner that was getting old and expensive to run partially because recycling programs were grabbing the hihg Btu wastes up front before it made it to the plant so they are betting 70 million on a new variation http://www.mainebiz.biz/article/201...$70m-waste-to-energy-plant-finally-ramping-up. Its at least a year late.
 
When I first started following the SUNY project, they mentioned that the idea was to make it small enough to fit into 2 shipping containers. This was so it could be dropped into a small, remote base. Their current trash disposal method was to dig a large trench, fill it with trash, then bury it. This way they could make electricity with it, cutting out 2 issues, fuel for generators and trash disposal.


Originally, they were suggesting scattering the ash and that it wasn't harmful. Given that it's an agricultural college, I'd tend to think they weren't into dumping poisons into the soil. That was the first article I've seen where they mention putting the ash into concrete.
 
There was big facility in NE Wisconsin built about 35 years ago to handle papermill and other wastes. They were making patio blocks with the ash and subsidizing the cost so they were cheaper than a standard block. That was before the big scare about PCBs in papermill waste in that area which led to years of litigation and river clean up. Not sure if any PCBs made it through the process but the association with papermill waste probably killed the concrete block issue. Flyash from coal plants has been used for many years as a concrete admixture but the bottom ash end up in lagoons that have an annoying tendency on occasion to burst and flood local rivers.

The biomass power plants that I used to work on were strictly low grade wood or on a rare occasion clean ground wood, they had permits for land spreading and local farmers usually fought to get it. The plant in NC I converted to wood could burn railroad ties and even that ash tested clean enough for land spreading.

Ash from a trash burner usually makes good landfill material. In order to operate a landfill there usually has to be nearby source of gravel for stabilizing the waste and building temporary roads. My former employer's "state of the art" landfill had to keep strict records on what went into the facility and I believe that there was as much gravel in the landfill at one point as there was waste when they mostly processed wet pulp and paper mill biological sludge. They now use crushed glass and contaminated soil from industrial sites to displace gravel as there has not been a viable market for low grade glass for quite a few years and folks will gladly pay to haul contaminated soil to the landfill at reduced rate then having to clean it up. They process very little sludge these days and mostly import municipal wastes from elsewhere to cover the expenses so the local towns who now own it don't have to pay to get rid of sludge.
 
Our county is reviewing a waste to energy option as the massive landfill approaches capacity
 
begreen said:
Our county is reviewing a waste to energy option as the massive landfill approaches capacity
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I think it's a great way to clean up the old (and new) landfills.

I bet the waste could be further processed for valuable materials. It might not make sense now, but if there's a reduced landfill worth of ash it could yield concentrations of precious metals in excess of natural deposits. Especially older landfill sections from before recycling went into vogue.
 
In our landfills permit document there was a section that projected what happened when it was full.The speculation was that it most likely would be "mined" for materials and potential energy production.
 
peakbagger said:
In our landfills permit document there was a section that projected what happened when it was full.The speculation was that it most likely would be "mined" for materials and potential energy production.
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... and those supposed buried Atari ET games.
 
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The pulp mill I worked for had been a sawmill since the 1870s and pulp mill from around 1900. They had bark and sawdust piles all over town. In the late seventies, the mill built a bark boiler and discovered that if they burned fresh bark they had emissions issues but if they mixed it with old bark the unit ran fine. They harvested all the old bark and sawdust piles in the area over a thirty year period to the point where they dug up the local high school football field to harvest the bark under it. We eventually ran out of bark and knew where there was an old bark dump that was capped for another large facility that was worth hauling from. The problem is from a paperwork and liability perspective the owner would not let us touch it as once a landfill is capped its officially "safe" If they allowed us to open it up and we found some sort of waste in it they would have to deal with it.

I visited a biomass power plant in Maine a couple of times that was closed and for sale. It was built next to very large old sawmill that had been around for around 100 years. They built the plant around 1980 and ran it 20 years without having to by any wood, they just reclaimed the piles of bark, sawdst and slabs that were buried on site. The owner made a mint on the place. unfortunately they ran out of wood and lost some key subsidies at one point and that is why it was for sale. As far as I know its been sitting empty in mothballs for close to 15 years. The owners did not loose out but the local economy did.
 
Ashful said:
It will be interesting to see how this works in a “free market” system. Anyone with kids my age has griped about the ridiculous packaging that surrounds every toy. Heck, I am near the point of having a construction dumpster delivered to my house for Christmas, every damn Barbie doll comes packaged with enough plastic ties and cardboard to fill a regular trash can. Don’t even get me started on the thermoformed packaging that has us almost cutting off our fingers to open.

If people have to start paying by volume to have that stuff hauled away, at what point does it start affecting product purchase decisions? We all hate the packaging, but as long as hauling it away remains free, few are allowing it to factor into their purchasing decision.
Click to expand...

I hate how much waste goes into ordering stuff from Amazon, but I live so remote, that I can't get everything locally. My local transfer station doesn't take cardboard or paper unless it's 100 lbs. My county makes it very difficult to recycle anything aside from bottles and cans.
 
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