July 11, 2020 • 41 mins
Well-planned landfills have only recently come into widespread use. Recently, waste managers have found that they work a little too well and now the landfill is being reinvented.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, everybody. Chuck here with your Saturday selects. Pick how
landfills work. J This is a good one everyone. Uh.
This is part of our I guess uh city works
uh suite of podcasts. And how things like landfills work
is super important and very interesting and not quite as
(00:20):
depressing as you might think a little bit. But it's
also kind of a marvel of engineering how these things
actually get pulled off. So take a listen, take a
re listen even how landfills work? Right now, welcome to
Stuff you Should Know, a production of I Heart Radios
(00:41):
How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
and this is Stuff you should Know. Hi, how's it going.
It's great? Good, Good to yourself. I found this topic
(01:07):
and I was starting to tell you before how interesting
I thought it was. Yeah, you went it's awesome. I
was like, stop, it's gold. So now I'm going to
say it. It's awesome. And landfills the concept of a landfill,
even though it ain't perfect, it's pretty neat. Yeah, And
even though we need to reduce the amount of trash,
(01:28):
especially Americans produce. Yeah, um, there is still going to
be trash in the world and it needs to be
dealt with. And this is way better than the old days. Uh,
when in like pre nineteen thirty New York City they
would dump their garbage in the ocean. And then between
nineteen thirty and we still do that. You realize, well,
(01:51):
New York City doesn't dump it right in the Atlantic Ocean, no,
but a lot of garbage is dumped in the ocean. Yeah. Well,
we talked about the Great Pacific Garbage back um. And
then between the nineteen thirties and the nineteen seventies they
had what they called dumps, which is a big hole
in the ground covered in rats and birds and that
you would just dump garbage to leach into everything. Yes,
(02:13):
which is messed up. And the e p A comes
along and I think the sixties, definitely the seventies and
was like, uh, we need to do something better about this.
But so the the idea of the landfill was born
in about the sixties, I believe. Well, well, the first
modern sanitary landfill was seven and frees Now, okay, that's right,
(02:36):
and it's like a National Historic Place or something. Yeah,
because it kind of kicked off the whole thing. But
it wasn't until the sixties and seventies that they started
passing law saying that, like every state really needs to
start doing the same thing, right And like you said
before that they just dumped their trash and a pit,
which people have been doing for millennia at least um
(02:56):
they were burning their trash also, and it sounds mine
ugglingly awful, and it is, especially from an environmental standpoint,
but they didn't have the trash problem that we have
now in the sixties. Since the nineteen sixties are trash generation,
municipal solid waste generation has um doubled, tripled, tripled, And
(03:21):
I was like, why is that? What's going on? Apparently
it's the advent of cheap packaging. Before styrofoam packaging, before plastic,
before aluminum cans that everybody just threw away. Everything was
wrapped in a T shirt that you could wear exactly,
and like when you weren't carrying around a slab of
meat in the T shirt from the butcher to your house,
(03:42):
you wore your T shirt so you reused it, right, No,
but no, you would you would have maybe, like, um,
do you remember when Sam the butcher brought Alice the meat.
BC Boys reference was just about to say, um, freshman
Stone driving around with two ft bald ft yeah, which
is I guess a really weird way of putting in
(04:03):
his barefoot. Well, it didn't rhyme bald feet anyway. He
would bring it to her wrapped in like white butcher's
paper and she would throw it away and it would
really not take up much space of the dump. It
would decompose. It wasn't like styrofoam, which lasts for fifty
thousand years, right, Yeah, And so starting about nine sixty, packaging,
(04:27):
especially very non biodegradable packaging, took off like a rocket.
Yeah you could still go to the butcher, though now
you can, and you get it in paper, but you
go to that big chain grocery store and it's going
to be plastic in styrofoam. So between nineteen sixty and
are packaging waste increased by eight That meant that we
(04:49):
had to do something. We had a lot more trash
and we had to take care of this trash and
ways that we had before. And so the modern landfill
based on that Fresno model uh boomed And fortunately that's
right but even now they're finding we went too far
in one direction. Yeah, now we need to adjust to
(05:11):
massage it a little bit, refine it, and we're we
were coming up with a new generation of landfills. That's right. So, uh,
if you're talking about a landfill, the goal of a
landfill is not to compost trash. And a lot of
people probably don't know this. Yeah, it's not to compost
trash such that it breaks down super quickly, uh and biodegrades.
(05:32):
It is the opposite of that. It is to keep
it as dry as possible in an airtight and and
just bury it, lock it away from the surrounding world.
That's right. And so that's what a landfill is, a
sanitary landfill, municipal solid waste or MSW landfill. Um, they
isolate the trash from the environment. They don't just dump
(05:53):
it on the dirt and let things leach in. And
this thus begins the landfill podcast Sarah. Lot of components
to that, but that's along and short of it. It's true.
And um, what what that's called. The whole idea behind
that landfill that was in reaction to that's one A
dry tomb is the industry lingo for it. It's and
(06:17):
it it was created in reaction to trash just being
allowed to seep into the groundwater and methane to leak
out in the air blow up. Apparently, houses that have
utility pipes that passed by old landfills, methane will get
into those utility pipes and like get in mixed in
(06:38):
with the electricity and when you go to plug in
your toaster and it sparks kaboom. Really. Yes, it's a
problem with old landfills because they were all idiots with
trash like up until the sixties, seventies, eighties, um, and
even still we have a big problem with trash, but
(06:59):
nothing like it is before. As far as taking care
of it, we're starting to really get a handle on it.
Americans produce four point six pounds of trash per day
per person. Yeah, and you know what's crazy is you'd think, well,
America is probably like as bad as it gets. Know,
the UK is America is like in the middle roughly
for trash generation, and the UK is the worst. They
(07:21):
produced per capita, They produced the most, and um they
also throw away the most. They have the lowest recovery rate. Um.
Although it's gone up I believe I think they had
like some sort of national initiative because it says here
that it went up from thirty one recovery rate, which
is like recycling and that kind of stuff, um, basically
(07:44):
diverting it from the landfill, to so it's actually better
than America as far as the resource recovery rate goes.
Canada is the worst. I'm sorry, Canada is the worst. Yeah,
that's hard to believe. I would think so too, but
it's true. The standout is Germany. Germany produces way more
trash per person than any other country per capita, but
(08:05):
they also have the highest recovery rate at like almost
of their trash gets diverted from the landfill. That's amazing.
Actually that's efficient. What what's the American number on that diversion?
It hovers about a third for at least a couple
of decades, now, maybe three decades, you could say Americans
(08:26):
diverted about they diverted about a third of their trash
from the landfill. You'd like to see that number get
better in three decades for sure, you know, and it's
always hovers around thirty and it should be a lot
better than that. You know, what that sounds like to me,
whoever is in charge of doing that study is just like,
let's just use last numbers. We can all live with that, right, Yeah, alright,
(08:50):
So if you want to landfill in your municipality, Um,
you're going to have to start with a proposal by saying.
You can't just go start Yeah, you gotta look around
and say we need to landfill everybody. So let's uh
do an environmental impact study and let's let's find an area.
Let's find a lot of acreage. Um. Because I think
(09:13):
they use the North Wake County Landfill in Raleigh, North
Carolina as a their go to example in this article.
So our how stuff works started two and thirty acres
of land, about seventy acres of which is the actual landfill.
So you're gonna need a lot of land, and you're
gonna have to do an environmental impact study to determine
a lot of things. How much land do you have, Yeah,
(09:34):
if there's enough of it? Sure? Um. What type of
soil you have and what bedrock is underneath it? Very important? Um?
How water flows over the surface of the site. Yeah,
does it flow right down into the river? Does it
not perfully? Right? Right? Exactly? Um. And then the uh,
the impact it's going to have on local wildlife. Sure,
(09:54):
and if it's an historic site, like an archaeological site, yeah,
you don't want a landfill on an archa a logical site.
What's funny is if you, um, if you go back
and look at the Fresh Kills landfill, which is one
of the biggest in the world New York, right yeah,
and it wasn't even the only one for New York.
It's closed now, right, yes, And the guy who created
the high line, James Corner, is um creating a park
(10:19):
there out of it, like a massive, massive park. Interesting.
I think like three times the size of Central Park.
Are they calling it Cancer Park? I think they're avoiding that. Okay,
I don't remember what it's called. I wrote a really
interesting New York magazine article about it now it really
well written and clever, um, where it's basically like, that's awesome,
that's awesome, this guy's got this great vision. And then
(10:41):
but it's a landfill, you know. I'm sure at the
end of the day it's still bared garbage exactly. Um. Alright,
So when we talked about the bedrock, that's really important
because if you have what would you really want to
try and prevent when you're building a landfill or operating
landfill is um leakage and seepage. That was like that
that was the big thing. When the e PA came along.
(11:03):
You started saying, like, you can't just bury your trash
anywhere there's groundwater, dummies, and like, as trash decomposes, it's
not just like old coca cola and banana peals. When
those things break down and start mixing together, some really
horrific stuff like ammonia gets produced, and that gets into
the groundwater and all of a sudden you're drinking ammonia.
(11:23):
That's bad for you. Yeah, that's called the it's called
leech eight is the liquid um or garbage juice is
in other words that that's a better way to say it,
because that defines it all in one go, right, and um,
the whole point of the of the dry Tomb landfill
was to do everything you could to prevent this garbage
that you're burying from reaching the the water table. Right,
(11:47):
So you study that bedrock. If it's too fractured, it's
not gonna work because it's going to seep into that junk.
No mines, no quarries because they probably already have broken
through the water table before they were abandoned. That's right.
But at the same time, you also need to be
able to say wells in various points, so you can't.
The bedrock needs to allow for that as well. It's
like you're really looking for a specific area. When we
(12:08):
talked about the water flow. Of course you don't want
it flowing near wetlands or any kind of rivers or streams.
That's a no brainer. Fresh Kills is an old marsh
land that they just filled the marshes and lakes in
with garbage. What did they name it? That is that
the area or like that, Kills is a Dutch word
for stream. Okay, because I was about to say that's
like the worst name for anything totally unless it was
(12:30):
a butcher. But it really means fresh stream, fresh kills, charcooterie,
fresh stream garbage dump. Yeah, that makes sense. Now what
does kill mean stream a Dutch word because you've heard
it like fowery means really yes, that would be fish stream.
That makes a lot more sense now fresh kills. I
(12:52):
wondered about that for years now, you know st alright, so, uh,
local wildlife, they're going to really study that to see
what kind of UM. You know, it can't be in
the area of a migrate my migratory route for birds,
or like a nesting area a k marsh like Fresh
Kills landfill. That's right. And then once you figured all
(13:16):
this out and they say, oh wait, wait, you skipped
over the historical or archaeological site. Well you already mentioned
that like Fresh Kills landfill. Okay, apparently I think it
was stated at all wrong. Huh. Henry David Thoreau said
that UM arrowheads were the surest crop to dig from
the ground at Fresh Kills before it was a landfill. Yeah,
(13:37):
so archaeological site, wet land and very close to UM,
the groundwater seeping right into it. Unbelievable. UM. And I
believe there was a large bunny rabbit population that they
just dumped it right on top of UM. So once
you figured out this is not Fresh Kills is actually
(13:57):
a great spot, you're gonna get your permits you and
raise your money. UM. This one in North Carolina costs
about nineteen million to build cheap. That seems a little cheap,
but I don't think that one's brand new. Yeah, that's
probably from the nineties, and then you probably have a
public vote because you're probably gonna be using public dollars
and no one will know that that vote takes place,
(14:19):
and you're going to get a landfill built. Boom. Yeah,
they just build it in the night. All right. So
let's take a little break here and we will talk
about building that landfill right for this. All right, So
(14:50):
you've got your permits, you've got your money raised, it's
time to build a landfill. Yeah, you shouted down the
old guy at the board of come a shioner's meeting.
Who objects, old man, McLean the tree hugger. Let's recycle
all our garbage, crack pot. So we will list the
(15:13):
basic parts of a landfill and then go over them
in detail. How's that sound. It sounds like a bulleted list.
You've got the bottom liner system, you've got the cells,
you've got the storm water drainage, you've got the leech
eight collection system a K garbage juice methane collection system,
and you've got the cap the covering. Actually, that's the
(15:35):
opposite of what you want to happen with the cap
covering system. You don't want to kaboom. So start with
the bottom liner man. Again, this is the original purpose
of all landfills that are in use today, unless they're bioreactor.
Although it's it's part of it. But this dry tomb landfill, Uh,
(15:55):
it's the main part is the bottom liner. So they
use a very thick like um sometimes a hundred million
millimeter thick, very sturdy like polyethylene liner synthetic plastic that
they line the whole place with, puncture resistant, strong able
(16:15):
to withstand a lot of trash being dumped on it.
And just to be a certain they'll often use some
sort of like um fabric matt that they'll lay down
first and then put the the the liner on and
then put another mat on top of that to help
prevent it from being punctured by rocks or garbage. Rocks
below or garbage above. Everything's trying to puncture this mat. Yeah,
(16:39):
it's a moisture barrier, right, But that liner is the
main component, the the initial component of the landfill. That's right. Next,
we have our cell, and a cell is basically the
day's garbage. Yeah, it's the day's garbage that you dump
in there. Um, you compacted airspace is is key. That's
where uh, the more airspace you have the more trash
(17:02):
you can bury, so they want to keep it as
compact as possible. And they do this by rolling over
it with bulldozers and flatteners and rollers and graters, and
they smush it down. And a cell is um, it's
a it's a it's a hole in the ground. Apparently
in the North Carolina landfill that how stuff works went
(17:22):
to back in the day. A cell is fifty ft long,
fifty ft wide, fourteen ft deep, and all the trash
is put in there. Like you said, there's heavy equipment
that rolls over and compacts it. And did you read
the Atlantic um article I sent you about Pointe Hills.
They said that there's an added benefit of compacting trash.
(17:42):
Not just doesn't take up less space, it also kills
about fifty of the rats in there. Oh good. And
then at the end of the day, when the cell
is filled, they cover it over with about six inches
of dirt that they then compact. That kills the other
fifty of rats where the other half goes. And that
makes that type of landfill what's called the sanitary landfill,
(18:04):
which means rat free, because they're all dead, they're squished,
or they're suffocated by this process of compacting and covering
over and the By covering over this stuff every day,
you protected from being blown away by the wind, by
being carried away from by the rain. You protected from
being dug up by coyotes or trash scavengers. Right. Um,
(18:27):
and so that's what makes it a sanitary, dry tomb
landfill is what we've described so far. That's right. And
to get this thing as compact as possible, they're gonna
weed out things like that huge roll of carpet that
you took out of your uh, nineteen seventies bedroom, or
that mattress that has a you know, brown stained like
(18:48):
looks like the map of Asia from the sixteen hundreds, right,
because you raised that one Lady from Hell, raiser from
the dead. Yeah, so we're gonna take out all that
stuff and make it um you know, all the yard
ways to make it as compactable as possible. And then
um that is compacted at a rate depending on where
you are, about pounds for cubic yard. Yes, so boom,
(19:09):
flat dirt is over it now, and now we need
to worry about drainage. Yeah. Basically, once you created that cell,
you've just completed a portion of the landfill. Right, yes,
for the day, um, one day's trash. It's so weird,
it's like yours Tuesday's whole, right, sixty five days a
year and those well, those UM the Points Hills people
(19:31):
in that Atlantic article, we're saying that they in retrospect
figured out that they could have predicted the economic crisis
because about a little less than a year before it happened,
the UM they would fill up their days cell by
like one pm and closed. Now they stay up until
five and it's not even necessarily full. So they know
(19:52):
it's like a huge downturn in building materials and consumer waste. UM,
like a year or two before where the actual crisis
happened before they collapse. Well, you know what the the
old saying, if you want to know the state of
the country's economics, go to a landfill. It's a good thing.
That's what I think. Jimmy Carter first said that. So
(20:15):
you don't want liquids in that solid waste as much
as possible, So they test the solid waste for liquids,
and um, if it's not liquid, then it's fine to
go in the hole, right, So they put that in there,
and the other way that they want to keep liquids out.
And again, what they're doing is trying to prevent garbage
juice from forming. That's right, is to um have storm
raw storm, water, runoff, drainage going on, so all of
(20:41):
the First of all, you never want a flat landfill. Ever,
you want to mount it at least slightly. You never
want a plateau um, and so you want the water
to run off, and then when it runs off, you
want to collect it into pipes. You want to basically
create an eves system like you have on the roof
of your house, and then shoot it all down to
some concrete gulches or if French strains at your house
(21:04):
roos shepparls. What else? Uh gutters yeah, habitasher right, um,
and all that goes to a collection pond. That's right. Uh,
this is not the kind of thing you want to
swim in. What they wait for there is for um
the suspended particles to kind of settle on the bottom,
(21:27):
and then they will test the water for those the
garbage juice, and depending on how nasty it is and
riddled with chemicals, they'll go from there. They may um
treat it like regular wastewater. Well that depends like if
they if just the storm water shows some leech, they'll
send it to a leech a collection pond. If it's
(21:48):
if it turns out to just be normal stormwater, then
they'll let it flow out of there. That's trying to
like whatever river or whatever. Yeah, and sometimes it's gravity.
Sometimes they use a pump. It depends on the lay
of the land. But if it's leech, they have a
separate collect collection system for leachate. Yes, which is um
basically perforated pipes that are running through the cells and
(22:10):
the leach it is gonna happen, Like they try and
prevent it as much as possible, but there is no
hole in the ground where you're not gonna have any
garbage juice right exactly. Um, So they collect that garbage
juice as it's forming, and they run it out to
a separate collection pond that's the leech a collection pod.
And if you don't want to swim in the stormwater
collection pond, like you don't even want to look at
the leech collection pod. So again they let the particles settle,
(22:34):
they test the concentration of the leech a in the pond,
and then they send it either to an on site
uh water remediation system like a wastewater plant, or else
they send it to like the local city or county
wastewater plant for treatment. Yeah, boy, we gotta do one
in wastewater treatment at some point. You got to talk
about fascinating you poop in the water and eventually water.
(23:01):
It's pretty remarkable of what we've learned to do. Uh
you know yep. So Uh. The other big thing that
we mentioned earlier was methane, and that is a byproduct
that's a gaseous byproduct um of anaerobic decomposition. And about
fifty of your your gases coming out of this thing.
(23:22):
We're going to be a methane about carbon dioxide and
they say a little bit of nitrone, little bit of oxygen.
I guess not even enough to be a percentage point,
almost negligible. So methane is um can be dangerous and hazardous,
but it can also be very useful. So these days
they're finding ways to harness this methane and use it
as fuel, right, which is pretty great. Yeah, it is
(23:44):
very great, and actually there's a lot of money in
it they're finding too, especially if you go to the
trouble of building an on site power plant where you
just basically extract the methane from the landfill gas l
f G is what it's called. And then you burn
the methane. You pow. You can create electricity. Right, you
can power a turbine and boom, there's electricity being produced.
(24:05):
And actually at Fresh Kills, New York City gets ten
million bucks a year from a company that has exclusive
rights to extract the methane from this place. It's pretty great.
Ten million. That's not something it needs that UM and Lincoln,
Nebraska did a pilot study in two thousand and ten
and found that they could make about three hundred thousand
dollars a year from methane collection from their landfill. That's awesome.
(24:27):
So if you're a city that's trying to like figure
out ways to at least keep your landfill open, methane
collection I call my my worst days l f G.
Actually when I have landfill gas, it's the worst worst.
Uh So, then you've got your covering and your or
your cap is the final piece of the puzzle here
(24:49):
and UM it depends on what kind of a landfill
it is. Generally it's going to be covered with six
inches at least of compacted soil. And that's to keep
you know, rats and stuff out the ones that aren't
killed and getting back into the trash. But um, like
we said earlier, airspace is key. So like six six inches,
if they could find a way to make that one inch,
(25:11):
that would be much better. And so they've been experimenting
with that too, like UM paper or submit emulsions instead
that you just spray on top instead of that six
inches of soils like a quarter inch. Yeah, and then
all of a sudden you have five and three quarters
extra inches for trash, straight inches for more trash. That's
a lot man speaking about this, which we are right
(25:32):
now absolutely uh. And then eventually though, when you it
will have a permanent cap um some sort of polyethylene
cap on top. And so even after it's closed, that
points hills Um landfill outside of l A that was
the focus of the Atlantic article or fresh kills out
in New York when that when it's closed, you don't
(25:53):
just walk away from a landfill. You plant stuff on it. Well, yes,
you have to plant stuff on it because when you
cover it over with dirt, you want to plant something
with um, a low roots system that won't go into
the landfill, but we'll still hold the dirt and place
to prevent it from a roading. So like grass cut zoo,
not trees. I don't want to plant trees. But you
(26:13):
also have to stick around and leave some people behind
to monitor the groundwater for temperature changes. Change in temperature
suggests that it's um. There's leachate that's intruded. Yeah. Sometimes
you can see the leech seeping up through the ground,
and that means that there's you need to address an issue.
It looks like the Beverly Hillbillies thing where Jed shot
(26:36):
and missed that rabbit and instead oil comes up. That's
what leech kind of looks like, bubbles up. But you
have to keep an eye on this place for decades
and decades and decades. Yeah, I think they sit in
here like thirty years. It needs to be maintained and
monitored at least at least I think that's definitely in
the line. So we'll talk a little more about UM
(26:57):
operating a landfill and how to well, I guess alternatives
lamb fills is a way to put it. Yeah, right
after this, So Chuck, let's say you are Tommy Landfill
(27:30):
and you want to fulfill your birthright and open your
own landfill, Tommy Landfill. And you got everything all set.
You got the municipal bonds. Old man, what was it, McTavish, mcvain,
something like that, McLean McClean. He he's been shouted down.
You've got the place open. How are you going to
operate a day to day? Well, what you're gonna do
(27:50):
is it's gonna be open to a couple of different things.
It's going to be open to the um municipality that
collects the trash. Of course, it's gonna be open to
militian companies, construction companies, and many of them, including the
one I go to, is open to you and me. Okay, um, so,
let's say I'm doing work on my house, which I've done,
(28:11):
and I end up with a bunch of junk in
the back of my pickup truck. I think it's called
construction waste. Yes, construction debris, which I try and re
use as much as I can. But you still end
up with construction debris. Did we do like a green
Renovation episode? Once? Yeah? I think so, And um, I
will drive my truck out there to the landfill into
Cab County and I will drive up onto a platform.
(28:34):
Is the first very first thing you do with a
it's a way station. Does it make you go up
on two wheels? And then you drive through the landfills
just on two wheels, off the stuck carn um. Then
you drive up on the way station and they weigh
your truck or your car or whatever with full of trash.
You go dump it. There's gonna be various stations. Um,
(28:54):
there's like a recycling station. There's a here's where a
yard waste goes. Kissing boo, just a kissing booth. Uh,
there's a dunk tank, you know, the traditional Catholic school
carnival um at the one into Capp County there's actually
free mulch and um compost if you want to pick
(29:16):
up stuff, which is kind of neat. But then eventually
you will be directed to, uh, here is your dump
and I pull up my truck at dump it in
a big dumpster. Then that dumpster has then taken to
the cell. I imagine I don't follow the route, but
that's what's supposed to happen. Does it make that bugs
Bunny conveyor belt song? Yes, someone wrote in and had
(29:37):
a bunch of song was Powerhouse. Yeah, Powerhouse. If you
look up, was that the one that you were thinking, Yes, totally. Um.
I can't remember the composer's name, but it was the
twentieth century composer who I think it was a old man.
It was something something Quintet. Yeah, I can't remember the
guy's name, but anyway, look up to something something Quintet, powerhouse,
(29:58):
and then I think it starts about Oh my us
a minute and a half in you'll be like, yeah,
that's it, ye dat dude, d d D you know
what I'm talking about. Yeah. Absolutely, when I heard it, it
it was unmistakably looney Tunes. So I dump on my garbage, um,
and then I drive back out onto another platform, and
(30:18):
then they rewagh my truck. They do the math, and
then when they weigh it, um, they charge you a
tipping fee yeah, which is usually a per ton amount,
right yeah, and so you know it's not that much money.
Like I'll have a truck full of junk, go dump it,
and then it's like ten or twelve bucks. Of course,
it depends on how heavy the junk is, but in
(30:38):
my case, it was always you know, uh, light wood
and stuff like that. That I couldn't reuse nails. So
that's that's basically everything we just described as a dry
tomb landfill, right, that's right. But as as UM companies
like waste management and local municipalies have figured out, like, hey,
there's actually money in this rotting garbage. They've been looking
(31:02):
into ways to get more methane out of it. And
what they figured out is that you don't want a
dry tomb. You want to kind of moist a little
wet to moisture. Yeah, I was really surprised that this
isn't how it's done by now, because you can They said,
you know, what could take decades and a dry tomb
to break down, you can take just a few years
(31:24):
if you just add a little water, just a little
bit of water, Like there's already about ten to fifteen
percent moisture in a dry tomb, no matter how much
you try to keep it out, there's gonna be about
ten to They figured out that if you add another water,
you're going to greatly increase anaerobic um decomposition and it
can be leech aated. It's not like they have have
(31:46):
spring water exactly. It can be that stormwater you're collecting
it can be leech eight um, it can be gas
condensation from the gas that's coming off, and and basically
what you're doing is you're speeding up that anaerobic decomposition
that's already going on. So these things are breaking down
the organic stuff, the banana peals and the grass clippings
and all that stuff that's already in there. They're not
(32:08):
breaking down the styrofoam, at least not very quickly, so
that stuff is still going to be left behind. But
that's kind of that bury and walk awayte mentality as well. Still,
but at least the the density of your um landfill
is going to increase tremendously as all that other stuff decomposes,
and you're gonna have the added benefit of a lot
(32:29):
more methane production. Yeah, and a lot more methane and
a lot shorter time span. So what they've had to do,
because this is basically accelerated production, is create collection systems
that can handle They can't just throw the old methane
collection system in there that's used to collecting slowly, but
surely they have to do something collect a lot and
(32:49):
a little bit of time. Yeah, because they used to
collect the methane and that they would harvest it and
then burn it, which is sounds horrible because you're just
releasing all that stuff into the atmosphere, But it's better
than just vending it. Just vending methane. Methane is a
um much more potent greenhouse gas than even like c
O two like by far, so you don't want to
(33:12):
just vent that stuff, so you burn it off. But
even better is if you're going to burn it, at
least use it to power stuff. So by adding just
a little bit of water you can create this. You
can accelerate the anaerobic decomposition. And since the anaerobic decomposition
is what makes the landfill like a moving, living, evolving pile,
(33:33):
once that's done in ten years, you've got all the
methane you're going to get from it, the things that
can settle anymore, and you can walk away without monitoring
it for the next fifty years. Yeah. So the bioreactor
model seems like far and away the wave of the future,
right for sure. Um, I guess it's just a matter
of like building more of them. Yes, so we got
(33:54):
a couple of more things here before we close. For sure,
this is very interesting. One Neto thing that I didn't
I think I knew about Giant Stadium, but I didn't
know that. I just heard Jimmy Hoff was buried there. Well,
he might have just been in the in the landfill.
Apparently some sports arenas like Kemiskey in Chicago, Mile Haun
Stadium in Denver, Giant Stadium in New Jersey built on
(34:16):
landfills because they're cheap, cheap land and some speculation that
it might give athletes cancer. Yeah, apparently there are a
lot of Giants players are several um that came down
with cancer that one of the linebackers, Harry Carson, told
The New York Times, Um, it makes you wonder what's
(34:36):
going on around here, referencing the fact that it was
built on an old landfill. Yeah. And apparently there was
a game at Kemiskey Park in Chicago where there was
a I think a short stop like ran into a
piece of metal sticking up from the diamond and like
started like kicking away and didn't realized it was getting
(34:58):
bigger and bigger, and the ground crew came out and investigated,
and it was Jimmy hoffa right, It was a copper
cuttle from the landfill they had moved its way up.
Isn't that crazy? Yeah, so they had to dig it
up and then refill it. Unbelievable. I'm sure that was
a lovely break for the fans. Yes, because around so
fast moving that they needed they needed to breathe. Uh.
(35:22):
I read an article on Slate called go West garbage
can exclamation point, and the main gist of it is,
when are we going to run out of space? It's
a great question. You can't keep bearing trash right? Um?
Apparently you can, because what they're doing now is there
(35:42):
there are fewer landfills than ever before. They're making these
huge landfills. Yeah, in nine six there were close to
seventy dumps in the US, and by two thousand nine
there were just under two thousand. Decline in less than
twenty five years, and so essentially what they're creating of
these super landfills. Um, which is kind of cool, fewer landfills, right,
(36:08):
But what's the problem, Um, do you know stinkier landfills?
What the problem is is you're now trucking garbage sometimes
five miles away to dump in the landfill because your
state may not even have one. So then they're looking
at you know, how much c O two is used
to do that. Um, like, is it really greener to
(36:30):
have fewer landfills and truck your garbage on a train
or in a truck every day? Uh? And they basically
say they don't really know which is which is more
environmentally friendly. Um, in different states, apparently there's a lot
of money in it. Different states have way more room
than others. And then some states don't even want that stuff.
(36:52):
Of course in the Northeast, like Massachusetts are like, we
don't want landfills than our state, Rhode Island. Same way
they send a to Springfield, they send it to Kentucky. Well, no,
remember the Trash Commissioner episode. Yeah, he accepted other states
to waste. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Um, let me see,
Arkansas has enough capacity for more than six hundred years
(37:15):
of trash without any more facilities being opened. There you go,
We'll just send it all to Arkansas, whereas Rhode Island
only has twelve years remaining. New York State only has
twenty five years of capacity left. Send it to Arkansas.
So that's what they're doing. Um, Kentucky is ty dollars
per Ton making about six billion dollars a year, Ohio
(37:36):
twenty one billion dollars a year of available landfill spaces
because Ohio knows how to negotiate. That's right, the Buckeye State,
that's right. Don't tread on me White, that's New Hampshire Party.
I think it's either New Hampshire Vermont, one of those.
You know New Hampshire's is lived for your die right
and make their inmates make those license plates. Yeah. No,
(37:59):
don't tread on me was in a state motto. And
I think that was just flag with the cut up
snake right that the Tea Party adopted. Remember did they
adopt that? Yeah? So yeah. If you see a bumper
sticker with one of those flags on it, they're not
just like a history buff or anything. Yeah. Or if
it says who was John Galt? Yeah, and that that
that'll tell you something about the driver of that vehicle.
(38:20):
Was that a Tom Cruise movie? No, John Galt was
the main character, and Atlas shrugged. Oh yeah, I ran,
I'm thinking of Jack Reacher. If you want to know
more about landfills, you can type that word into the
search bar how stuff works dot com And uh, I
said search bar. So it's time for listener mail I'm
gonna call this, uh, very sad email, but uplifting at
(38:45):
the same time. Hey, guys, two weeks ago, my amazing
and wonderful father in law, Walter passed away. We had
to drop everything, my husband and son and I and
fly from Florida to Germany, where he lived. He's been
in my world for twenty four my fifty years, and
I was so sad. I felt like I was going
to throw up all the time. When we arrived in Germany,
walking through the front door of the family home without
(39:05):
him there was one of the hardest things I've ever
had to do. It was and is devastating. My husband
and youngest son and I sat in a dark days
for days, mixing the crying mixed with crying and feeling lost.
Always listen to podcasts while I run, though, which I
do every day, And after ten days of being there
in Germany, I finally decided to cue up one of
your podcast while running. It was Blood Types. I laughed
(39:28):
for the first time in two weeks out loud. Guys.
It was so nice to laugh again, and it really
opened the door for me. I realized that we as
a family are going through was so tough, but I
also started to realize that if I could laugh, then
I could heal. Uh. Yesterday, my husband and I, still
in Germany, decided to go uh to walk to the
nursing home where my aunt lives, which is two and
(39:50):
a half hours through the forest, up and down hills.
I love this family. By the way, walking to the
nursing home like that, we of course, brought our thirteen
year old son, Oliver, who has mon After about twenty
minutes of walking, I handed on my phone and he
listened to UH three Stuff you Should Know podcast along
the way and is now hooked. He loves you guys.
My husband and I had a badly needed quiet, get
(40:12):
in touch with nature walk as a result, and we
didn't have to listen to our sun moan at all.
Uh more, long walks are in his future as long
as I have you guys on my phone. And Oliver
also asked me along the walk, wait a minute, mom,
These guys get paid to do this. And when I
said yes, I saw a sparkle in his eye. I
(40:33):
love this email boom that is from Jennifer and Jennifer
that is awesome. I Uh those mean the most to us. Yeah,
I mean that was a great top not to email,
great email and there was more to it even I
had to leave out some of it from link Jennifer right,
Jennifer and Oliver her Son and she doesn't even anonymous
husband anonymous husband named not But yeah, thanks a lot, Jennifer.
(40:56):
We appreciate you letting us know that that's a again
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to your favorite shows.
Hello, everybody. Chuck here with your Saturday selects. Pick how
landfills work. J This is a good one everyone. Uh.
This is part of our I guess uh city works
uh suite of podcasts. And how things like landfills work
is super important and very interesting and not quite as
(00:20):
depressing as you might think a little bit. But it's
also kind of a marvel of engineering how these things
actually get pulled off. So take a listen, take a
re listen even how landfills work? Right now, welcome to
Stuff you Should Know, a production of I Heart Radios
(00:41):
How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
and this is Stuff you should Know. Hi, how's it going.
It's great? Good, Good to yourself. I found this topic
(01:07):
and I was starting to tell you before how interesting
I thought it was. Yeah, you went it's awesome. I
was like, stop, it's gold. So now I'm going to
say it. It's awesome. And landfills the concept of a landfill,
even though it ain't perfect, it's pretty neat. Yeah, And
even though we need to reduce the amount of trash,
(01:28):
especially Americans produce. Yeah, um, there is still going to
be trash in the world and it needs to be
dealt with. And this is way better than the old days. Uh,
when in like pre nineteen thirty New York City they
would dump their garbage in the ocean. And then between
nineteen thirty and we still do that. You realize, well,
(01:51):
New York City doesn't dump it right in the Atlantic Ocean, no,
but a lot of garbage is dumped in the ocean. Yeah. Well,
we talked about the Great Pacific Garbage back um. And
then between the nineteen thirties and the nineteen seventies they
had what they called dumps, which is a big hole
in the ground covered in rats and birds and that
you would just dump garbage to leach into everything. Yes,
(02:13):
which is messed up. And the e p A comes
along and I think the sixties, definitely the seventies and
was like, uh, we need to do something better about this.
But so the the idea of the landfill was born
in about the sixties, I believe. Well, well, the first
modern sanitary landfill was seven and frees Now, okay, that's right,
(02:36):
and it's like a National Historic Place or something. Yeah,
because it kind of kicked off the whole thing. But
it wasn't until the sixties and seventies that they started
passing law saying that, like every state really needs to
start doing the same thing, right And like you said
before that they just dumped their trash and a pit,
which people have been doing for millennia at least um
(02:56):
they were burning their trash also, and it sounds mine
ugglingly awful, and it is, especially from an environmental standpoint,
but they didn't have the trash problem that we have
now in the sixties. Since the nineteen sixties are trash generation,
municipal solid waste generation has um doubled, tripled, tripled, And
(03:21):
I was like, why is that? What's going on? Apparently
it's the advent of cheap packaging. Before styrofoam packaging, before plastic,
before aluminum cans that everybody just threw away. Everything was
wrapped in a T shirt that you could wear exactly,
and like when you weren't carrying around a slab of
meat in the T shirt from the butcher to your house,
(03:42):
you wore your T shirt so you reused it, right, No,
but no, you would you would have maybe, like, um,
do you remember when Sam the butcher brought Alice the meat.
BC Boys reference was just about to say, um, freshman
Stone driving around with two ft bald ft yeah, which
is I guess a really weird way of putting in
(04:03):
his barefoot. Well, it didn't rhyme bald feet anyway. He
would bring it to her wrapped in like white butcher's
paper and she would throw it away and it would
really not take up much space of the dump. It
would decompose. It wasn't like styrofoam, which lasts for fifty
thousand years, right, Yeah, And so starting about nine sixty, packaging,
(04:27):
especially very non biodegradable packaging, took off like a rocket.
Yeah you could still go to the butcher, though now
you can, and you get it in paper, but you
go to that big chain grocery store and it's going
to be plastic in styrofoam. So between nineteen sixty and
are packaging waste increased by eight That meant that we
(04:49):
had to do something. We had a lot more trash
and we had to take care of this trash and
ways that we had before. And so the modern landfill
based on that Fresno model uh boomed And fortunately that's
right but even now they're finding we went too far
in one direction. Yeah, now we need to adjust to
(05:11):
massage it a little bit, refine it, and we're we
were coming up with a new generation of landfills. That's right. So, uh,
if you're talking about a landfill, the goal of a
landfill is not to compost trash. And a lot of
people probably don't know this. Yeah, it's not to compost
trash such that it breaks down super quickly, uh and biodegrades.
(05:32):
It is the opposite of that. It is to keep
it as dry as possible in an airtight and and
just bury it, lock it away from the surrounding world.
That's right. And so that's what a landfill is, a
sanitary landfill, municipal solid waste or MSW landfill. Um, they
isolate the trash from the environment. They don't just dump
(05:53):
it on the dirt and let things leach in. And
this thus begins the landfill podcast Sarah. Lot of components
to that, but that's along and short of it. It's true.
And um, what what that's called. The whole idea behind
that landfill that was in reaction to that's one A
dry tomb is the industry lingo for it. It's and
(06:17):
it it was created in reaction to trash just being
allowed to seep into the groundwater and methane to leak
out in the air blow up. Apparently, houses that have
utility pipes that passed by old landfills, methane will get
into those utility pipes and like get in mixed in
(06:38):
with the electricity and when you go to plug in
your toaster and it sparks kaboom. Really. Yes, it's a
problem with old landfills because they were all idiots with
trash like up until the sixties, seventies, eighties, um, and
even still we have a big problem with trash, but
(06:59):
nothing like it is before. As far as taking care
of it, we're starting to really get a handle on it.
Americans produce four point six pounds of trash per day
per person. Yeah, and you know what's crazy is you'd think, well,
America is probably like as bad as it gets. Know,
the UK is America is like in the middle roughly
for trash generation, and the UK is the worst. They
(07:21):
produced per capita, They produced the most, and um they
also throw away the most. They have the lowest recovery rate. Um.
Although it's gone up I believe I think they had
like some sort of national initiative because it says here
that it went up from thirty one recovery rate, which
is like recycling and that kind of stuff, um, basically
(07:44):
diverting it from the landfill, to so it's actually better
than America as far as the resource recovery rate goes.
Canada is the worst. I'm sorry, Canada is the worst. Yeah,
that's hard to believe. I would think so too, but
it's true. The standout is Germany. Germany produces way more
trash per person than any other country per capita, but
(08:05):
they also have the highest recovery rate at like almost
of their trash gets diverted from the landfill. That's amazing.
Actually that's efficient. What what's the American number on that diversion?
It hovers about a third for at least a couple
of decades, now, maybe three decades, you could say Americans
(08:26):
diverted about they diverted about a third of their trash
from the landfill. You'd like to see that number get
better in three decades for sure, you know, and it's
always hovers around thirty and it should be a lot
better than that. You know, what that sounds like to me,
whoever is in charge of doing that study is just like,
let's just use last numbers. We can all live with that, right, Yeah, alright,
(08:50):
So if you want to landfill in your municipality, Um,
you're going to have to start with a proposal by saying.
You can't just go start Yeah, you gotta look around
and say we need to landfill everybody. So let's uh
do an environmental impact study and let's let's find an area.
Let's find a lot of acreage. Um. Because I think
(09:13):
they use the North Wake County Landfill in Raleigh, North
Carolina as a their go to example in this article.
So our how stuff works started two and thirty acres
of land, about seventy acres of which is the actual landfill.
So you're gonna need a lot of land, and you're
gonna have to do an environmental impact study to determine
a lot of things. How much land do you have, Yeah,
(09:34):
if there's enough of it? Sure? Um. What type of
soil you have and what bedrock is underneath it? Very important? Um?
How water flows over the surface of the site. Yeah,
does it flow right down into the river? Does it
not perfully? Right? Right? Exactly? Um. And then the uh,
the impact it's going to have on local wildlife. Sure,
(09:54):
and if it's an historic site, like an archaeological site, yeah,
you don't want a landfill on an archa a logical site.
What's funny is if you, um, if you go back
and look at the Fresh Kills landfill, which is one
of the biggest in the world New York, right yeah,
and it wasn't even the only one for New York.
It's closed now, right, yes, And the guy who created
the high line, James Corner, is um creating a park
(10:19):
there out of it, like a massive, massive park. Interesting.
I think like three times the size of Central Park.
Are they calling it Cancer Park? I think they're avoiding that. Okay,
I don't remember what it's called. I wrote a really
interesting New York magazine article about it now it really
well written and clever, um, where it's basically like, that's awesome,
that's awesome, this guy's got this great vision. And then
(10:41):
but it's a landfill, you know. I'm sure at the
end of the day it's still bared garbage exactly. Um. Alright,
So when we talked about the bedrock, that's really important
because if you have what would you really want to
try and prevent when you're building a landfill or operating
landfill is um leakage and seepage. That was like that
that was the big thing. When the e PA came along.
(11:03):
You started saying, like, you can't just bury your trash
anywhere there's groundwater, dummies, and like, as trash decomposes, it's
not just like old coca cola and banana peals. When
those things break down and start mixing together, some really
horrific stuff like ammonia gets produced, and that gets into
the groundwater and all of a sudden you're drinking ammonia.
(11:23):
That's bad for you. Yeah, that's called the it's called
leech eight is the liquid um or garbage juice is
in other words that that's a better way to say it,
because that defines it all in one go, right, and um,
the whole point of the of the dry Tomb landfill
was to do everything you could to prevent this garbage
that you're burying from reaching the the water table. Right,
(11:47):
So you study that bedrock. If it's too fractured, it's
not gonna work because it's going to seep into that junk.
No mines, no quarries because they probably already have broken
through the water table before they were abandoned. That's right.
But at the same time, you also need to be
able to say wells in various points, so you can't.
The bedrock needs to allow for that as well. It's
like you're really looking for a specific area. When we
(12:08):
talked about the water flow. Of course you don't want
it flowing near wetlands or any kind of rivers or streams.
That's a no brainer. Fresh Kills is an old marsh
land that they just filled the marshes and lakes in
with garbage. What did they name it? That is that
the area or like that, Kills is a Dutch word
for stream. Okay, because I was about to say that's
like the worst name for anything totally unless it was
(12:30):
a butcher. But it really means fresh stream, fresh kills, charcooterie,
fresh stream garbage dump. Yeah, that makes sense. Now what
does kill mean stream a Dutch word because you've heard
it like fowery means really yes, that would be fish stream.
That makes a lot more sense now fresh kills. I
(12:52):
wondered about that for years now, you know st alright, so, uh,
local wildlife, they're going to really study that to see
what kind of UM. You know, it can't be in
the area of a migrate my migratory route for birds,
or like a nesting area a k marsh like Fresh
Kills landfill. That's right. And then once you figured all
(13:16):
this out and they say, oh wait, wait, you skipped
over the historical or archaeological site. Well you already mentioned
that like Fresh Kills landfill. Okay, apparently I think it
was stated at all wrong. Huh. Henry David Thoreau said
that UM arrowheads were the surest crop to dig from
the ground at Fresh Kills before it was a landfill. Yeah,
(13:37):
so archaeological site, wet land and very close to UM,
the groundwater seeping right into it. Unbelievable. UM. And I
believe there was a large bunny rabbit population that they
just dumped it right on top of UM. So once
you figured out this is not Fresh Kills is actually
(13:57):
a great spot, you're gonna get your permits you and
raise your money. UM. This one in North Carolina costs
about nineteen million to build cheap. That seems a little cheap,
but I don't think that one's brand new. Yeah, that's
probably from the nineties, and then you probably have a
public vote because you're probably gonna be using public dollars
and no one will know that that vote takes place,
(14:19):
and you're going to get a landfill built. Boom. Yeah,
they just build it in the night. All right. So
let's take a little break here and we will talk
about building that landfill right for this. All right, So
(14:50):
you've got your permits, you've got your money raised, it's
time to build a landfill. Yeah, you shouted down the
old guy at the board of come a shioner's meeting.
Who objects, old man, McLean the tree hugger. Let's recycle
all our garbage, crack pot. So we will list the
(15:13):
basic parts of a landfill and then go over them
in detail. How's that sound. It sounds like a bulleted list.
You've got the bottom liner system, you've got the cells,
you've got the storm water drainage, you've got the leech
eight collection system a K garbage juice methane collection system,
and you've got the cap the covering. Actually, that's the
(15:35):
opposite of what you want to happen with the cap
covering system. You don't want to kaboom. So start with
the bottom liner man. Again, this is the original purpose
of all landfills that are in use today, unless they're bioreactor.
Although it's it's part of it. But this dry tomb landfill, Uh,
(15:55):
it's the main part is the bottom liner. So they
use a very thick like um sometimes a hundred million
millimeter thick, very sturdy like polyethylene liner synthetic plastic that
they line the whole place with, puncture resistant, strong able
(16:15):
to withstand a lot of trash being dumped on it.
And just to be a certain they'll often use some
sort of like um fabric matt that they'll lay down
first and then put the the the liner on and
then put another mat on top of that to help
prevent it from being punctured by rocks or garbage. Rocks
below or garbage above. Everything's trying to puncture this mat. Yeah,
(16:39):
it's a moisture barrier, right, But that liner is the
main component, the the initial component of the landfill. That's right. Next,
we have our cell, and a cell is basically the
day's garbage. Yeah, it's the day's garbage that you dump
in there. Um, you compacted airspace is is key. That's
where uh, the more airspace you have the more trash
(17:02):
you can bury, so they want to keep it as
compact as possible. And they do this by rolling over
it with bulldozers and flatteners and rollers and graters, and
they smush it down. And a cell is um, it's
a it's a it's a hole in the ground. Apparently
in the North Carolina landfill that how stuff works went
(17:22):
to back in the day. A cell is fifty ft long,
fifty ft wide, fourteen ft deep, and all the trash
is put in there. Like you said, there's heavy equipment
that rolls over and compacts it. And did you read
the Atlantic um article I sent you about Pointe Hills.
They said that there's an added benefit of compacting trash.
(17:42):
Not just doesn't take up less space, it also kills
about fifty of the rats in there. Oh good. And
then at the end of the day, when the cell
is filled, they cover it over with about six inches
of dirt that they then compact. That kills the other
fifty of rats where the other half goes. And that
makes that type of landfill what's called the sanitary landfill,
(18:04):
which means rat free, because they're all dead, they're squished,
or they're suffocated by this process of compacting and covering
over and the By covering over this stuff every day,
you protected from being blown away by the wind, by
being carried away from by the rain. You protected from
being dug up by coyotes or trash scavengers. Right. Um,
(18:27):
and so that's what makes it a sanitary, dry tomb
landfill is what we've described so far. That's right. And
to get this thing as compact as possible, they're gonna
weed out things like that huge roll of carpet that
you took out of your uh, nineteen seventies bedroom, or
that mattress that has a you know, brown stained like
(18:48):
looks like the map of Asia from the sixteen hundreds, right,
because you raised that one Lady from Hell, raiser from
the dead. Yeah, so we're gonna take out all that
stuff and make it um you know, all the yard
ways to make it as compactable as possible. And then
um that is compacted at a rate depending on where
you are, about pounds for cubic yard. Yes, so boom,
(19:09):
flat dirt is over it now, and now we need
to worry about drainage. Yeah. Basically, once you created that cell,
you've just completed a portion of the landfill. Right, yes,
for the day, um, one day's trash. It's so weird,
it's like yours Tuesday's whole, right, sixty five days a
year and those well, those UM the Points Hills people
(19:31):
in that Atlantic article, we're saying that they in retrospect
figured out that they could have predicted the economic crisis
because about a little less than a year before it happened,
the UM they would fill up their days cell by
like one pm and closed. Now they stay up until
five and it's not even necessarily full. So they know
(19:52):
it's like a huge downturn in building materials and consumer waste. UM,
like a year or two before where the actual crisis
happened before they collapse. Well, you know what the the
old saying, if you want to know the state of
the country's economics, go to a landfill. It's a good thing.
That's what I think. Jimmy Carter first said that. So
(20:15):
you don't want liquids in that solid waste as much
as possible, So they test the solid waste for liquids,
and um, if it's not liquid, then it's fine to
go in the hole, right, So they put that in there,
and the other way that they want to keep liquids out.
And again, what they're doing is trying to prevent garbage
juice from forming. That's right, is to um have storm
raw storm, water, runoff, drainage going on, so all of
(20:41):
the First of all, you never want a flat landfill. Ever,
you want to mount it at least slightly. You never
want a plateau um, and so you want the water
to run off, and then when it runs off, you
want to collect it into pipes. You want to basically
create an eves system like you have on the roof
of your house, and then shoot it all down to
some concrete gulches or if French strains at your house
(21:04):
roos shepparls. What else? Uh gutters yeah, habitasher right, um,
and all that goes to a collection pond. That's right. Uh,
this is not the kind of thing you want to
swim in. What they wait for there is for um
the suspended particles to kind of settle on the bottom,
(21:27):
and then they will test the water for those the
garbage juice, and depending on how nasty it is and
riddled with chemicals, they'll go from there. They may um
treat it like regular wastewater. Well that depends like if
they if just the storm water shows some leech, they'll
send it to a leech a collection pond. If it's
(21:48):
if it turns out to just be normal stormwater, then
they'll let it flow out of there. That's trying to
like whatever river or whatever. Yeah, and sometimes it's gravity.
Sometimes they use a pump. It depends on the lay
of the land. But if it's leech, they have a
separate collect collection system for leachate. Yes, which is um
basically perforated pipes that are running through the cells and
(22:10):
the leach it is gonna happen, Like they try and
prevent it as much as possible, but there is no
hole in the ground where you're not gonna have any
garbage juice right exactly. Um, So they collect that garbage
juice as it's forming, and they run it out to
a separate collection pond that's the leech a collection pod.
And if you don't want to swim in the stormwater
collection pond, like you don't even want to look at
the leech collection pod. So again they let the particles settle,
(22:34):
they test the concentration of the leech a in the pond,
and then they send it either to an on site
uh water remediation system like a wastewater plant, or else
they send it to like the local city or county
wastewater plant for treatment. Yeah, boy, we gotta do one
in wastewater treatment at some point. You got to talk
about fascinating you poop in the water and eventually water.
(23:01):
It's pretty remarkable of what we've learned to do. Uh
you know yep. So Uh. The other big thing that
we mentioned earlier was methane, and that is a byproduct
that's a gaseous byproduct um of anaerobic decomposition. And about
fifty of your your gases coming out of this thing.
(23:22):
We're going to be a methane about carbon dioxide and
they say a little bit of nitrone, little bit of oxygen.
I guess not even enough to be a percentage point,
almost negligible. So methane is um can be dangerous and hazardous,
but it can also be very useful. So these days
they're finding ways to harness this methane and use it
as fuel, right, which is pretty great. Yeah, it is
(23:44):
very great, and actually there's a lot of money in
it they're finding too, especially if you go to the
trouble of building an on site power plant where you
just basically extract the methane from the landfill gas l
f G is what it's called. And then you burn
the methane. You pow. You can create electricity. Right, you
can power a turbine and boom, there's electricity being produced.
(24:05):
And actually at Fresh Kills, New York City gets ten
million bucks a year from a company that has exclusive
rights to extract the methane from this place. It's pretty great.
Ten million. That's not something it needs that UM and Lincoln,
Nebraska did a pilot study in two thousand and ten
and found that they could make about three hundred thousand
dollars a year from methane collection from their landfill. That's awesome.
(24:27):
So if you're a city that's trying to like figure
out ways to at least keep your landfill open, methane
collection I call my my worst days l f G.
Actually when I have landfill gas, it's the worst worst.
Uh So, then you've got your covering and your or
your cap is the final piece of the puzzle here
(24:49):
and UM it depends on what kind of a landfill
it is. Generally it's going to be covered with six
inches at least of compacted soil. And that's to keep
you know, rats and stuff out the ones that aren't
killed and getting back into the trash. But um, like
we said earlier, airspace is key. So like six six inches,
if they could find a way to make that one inch,
(25:11):
that would be much better. And so they've been experimenting
with that too, like UM paper or submit emulsions instead
that you just spray on top instead of that six
inches of soils like a quarter inch. Yeah, and then
all of a sudden you have five and three quarters
extra inches for trash, straight inches for more trash. That's
a lot man speaking about this, which we are right
(25:32):
now absolutely uh. And then eventually though, when you it
will have a permanent cap um some sort of polyethylene
cap on top. And so even after it's closed, that
points hills Um landfill outside of l A that was
the focus of the Atlantic article or fresh kills out
in New York when that when it's closed, you don't
(25:53):
just walk away from a landfill. You plant stuff on it. Well, yes,
you have to plant stuff on it because when you
cover it over with dirt, you want to plant something
with um, a low roots system that won't go into
the landfill, but we'll still hold the dirt and place
to prevent it from a roading. So like grass cut zoo,
not trees. I don't want to plant trees. But you
(26:13):
also have to stick around and leave some people behind
to monitor the groundwater for temperature changes. Change in temperature
suggests that it's um. There's leachate that's intruded. Yeah. Sometimes
you can see the leech seeping up through the ground,
and that means that there's you need to address an issue.
It looks like the Beverly Hillbillies thing where Jed shot
(26:36):
and missed that rabbit and instead oil comes up. That's
what leech kind of looks like, bubbles up. But you
have to keep an eye on this place for decades
and decades and decades. Yeah, I think they sit in
here like thirty years. It needs to be maintained and
monitored at least at least I think that's definitely in
the line. So we'll talk a little more about UM
(26:57):
operating a landfill and how to well, I guess alternatives
lamb fills is a way to put it. Yeah, right
after this, So Chuck, let's say you are Tommy Landfill
(27:30):
and you want to fulfill your birthright and open your
own landfill, Tommy Landfill. And you got everything all set.
You got the municipal bonds. Old man, what was it, McTavish, mcvain,
something like that, McLean McClean. He he's been shouted down.
You've got the place open. How are you going to
operate a day to day? Well, what you're gonna do
(27:50):
is it's gonna be open to a couple of different things.
It's going to be open to the um municipality that
collects the trash. Of course, it's gonna be open to
militian companies, construction companies, and many of them, including the
one I go to, is open to you and me. Okay, um, so,
let's say I'm doing work on my house, which I've done,
(28:11):
and I end up with a bunch of junk in
the back of my pickup truck. I think it's called
construction waste. Yes, construction debris, which I try and re
use as much as I can. But you still end
up with construction debris. Did we do like a green
Renovation episode? Once? Yeah? I think so, And um, I
will drive my truck out there to the landfill into
Cab County and I will drive up onto a platform.
(28:34):
Is the first very first thing you do with a
it's a way station. Does it make you go up
on two wheels? And then you drive through the landfills
just on two wheels, off the stuck carn um. Then
you drive up on the way station and they weigh
your truck or your car or whatever with full of trash.
You go dump it. There's gonna be various stations. Um,
(28:54):
there's like a recycling station. There's a here's where a
yard waste goes. Kissing boo, just a kissing booth. Uh,
there's a dunk tank, you know, the traditional Catholic school
carnival um at the one into Capp County there's actually
free mulch and um compost if you want to pick
(29:16):
up stuff, which is kind of neat. But then eventually
you will be directed to, uh, here is your dump
and I pull up my truck at dump it in
a big dumpster. Then that dumpster has then taken to
the cell. I imagine I don't follow the route, but
that's what's supposed to happen. Does it make that bugs
Bunny conveyor belt song? Yes, someone wrote in and had
(29:37):
a bunch of song was Powerhouse. Yeah, Powerhouse. If you
look up, was that the one that you were thinking, Yes, totally. Um.
I can't remember the composer's name, but it was the
twentieth century composer who I think it was a old man.
It was something something Quintet. Yeah, I can't remember the
guy's name, but anyway, look up to something something Quintet, powerhouse,
(29:58):
and then I think it starts about Oh my us
a minute and a half in you'll be like, yeah,
that's it, ye dat dude, d d D you know
what I'm talking about. Yeah. Absolutely, when I heard it, it
it was unmistakably looney Tunes. So I dump on my garbage, um,
and then I drive back out onto another platform, and
(30:18):
then they rewagh my truck. They do the math, and
then when they weigh it, um, they charge you a
tipping fee yeah, which is usually a per ton amount,
right yeah, and so you know it's not that much money.
Like I'll have a truck full of junk, go dump it,
and then it's like ten or twelve bucks. Of course,
it depends on how heavy the junk is, but in
(30:38):
my case, it was always you know, uh, light wood
and stuff like that. That I couldn't reuse nails. So
that's that's basically everything we just described as a dry
tomb landfill, right, that's right. But as as UM companies
like waste management and local municipalies have figured out, like, hey,
there's actually money in this rotting garbage. They've been looking
(31:02):
into ways to get more methane out of it. And
what they figured out is that you don't want a
dry tomb. You want to kind of moist a little
wet to moisture. Yeah, I was really surprised that this
isn't how it's done by now, because you can They said,
you know, what could take decades and a dry tomb
to break down, you can take just a few years
(31:24):
if you just add a little water, just a little
bit of water, Like there's already about ten to fifteen
percent moisture in a dry tomb, no matter how much
you try to keep it out, there's gonna be about
ten to They figured out that if you add another water,
you're going to greatly increase anaerobic um decomposition and it
can be leech aated. It's not like they have have
(31:46):
spring water exactly. It can be that stormwater you're collecting
it can be leech eight um, it can be gas
condensation from the gas that's coming off, and and basically
what you're doing is you're speeding up that anaerobic decomposition
that's already going on. So these things are breaking down
the organic stuff, the banana peals and the grass clippings
and all that stuff that's already in there. They're not
(32:08):
breaking down the styrofoam, at least not very quickly, so
that stuff is still going to be left behind. But
that's kind of that bury and walk awayte mentality as well. Still,
but at least the the density of your um landfill
is going to increase tremendously as all that other stuff decomposes,
and you're gonna have the added benefit of a lot
(32:29):
more methane production. Yeah, and a lot more methane and
a lot shorter time span. So what they've had to do,
because this is basically accelerated production, is create collection systems
that can handle They can't just throw the old methane
collection system in there that's used to collecting slowly, but
surely they have to do something collect a lot and
(32:49):
a little bit of time. Yeah, because they used to
collect the methane and that they would harvest it and
then burn it, which is sounds horrible because you're just
releasing all that stuff into the atmosphere, But it's better
than just vending it. Just vending methane. Methane is a
um much more potent greenhouse gas than even like c
O two like by far, so you don't want to
(33:12):
just vent that stuff, so you burn it off. But
even better is if you're going to burn it, at
least use it to power stuff. So by adding just
a little bit of water you can create this. You
can accelerate the anaerobic decomposition. And since the anaerobic decomposition
is what makes the landfill like a moving, living, evolving pile,
(33:33):
once that's done in ten years, you've got all the
methane you're going to get from it, the things that
can settle anymore, and you can walk away without monitoring
it for the next fifty years. Yeah. So the bioreactor
model seems like far and away the wave of the future,
right for sure. Um, I guess it's just a matter
of like building more of them. Yes, so we got
(33:54):
a couple of more things here before we close. For sure,
this is very interesting. One Neto thing that I didn't
I think I knew about Giant Stadium, but I didn't
know that. I just heard Jimmy Hoff was buried there. Well,
he might have just been in the in the landfill.
Apparently some sports arenas like Kemiskey in Chicago, Mile Haun
Stadium in Denver, Giant Stadium in New Jersey built on
(34:16):
landfills because they're cheap, cheap land and some speculation that
it might give athletes cancer. Yeah, apparently there are a
lot of Giants players are several um that came down
with cancer that one of the linebackers, Harry Carson, told
The New York Times, Um, it makes you wonder what's
(34:36):
going on around here, referencing the fact that it was
built on an old landfill. Yeah. And apparently there was
a game at Kemiskey Park in Chicago where there was
a I think a short stop like ran into a
piece of metal sticking up from the diamond and like
started like kicking away and didn't realized it was getting
(34:58):
bigger and bigger, and the ground crew came out and investigated,
and it was Jimmy hoffa right, It was a copper
cuttle from the landfill they had moved its way up.
Isn't that crazy? Yeah, so they had to dig it
up and then refill it. Unbelievable. I'm sure that was
a lovely break for the fans. Yes, because around so
fast moving that they needed they needed to breathe. Uh.
(35:22):
I read an article on Slate called go West garbage
can exclamation point, and the main gist of it is,
when are we going to run out of space? It's
a great question. You can't keep bearing trash right? Um?
Apparently you can, because what they're doing now is there
(35:42):
there are fewer landfills than ever before. They're making these
huge landfills. Yeah, in nine six there were close to
seventy dumps in the US, and by two thousand nine
there were just under two thousand. Decline in less than
twenty five years, and so essentially what they're creating of
these super landfills. Um, which is kind of cool, fewer landfills, right,
(36:08):
But what's the problem, Um, do you know stinkier landfills?
What the problem is is you're now trucking garbage sometimes
five miles away to dump in the landfill because your
state may not even have one. So then they're looking
at you know, how much c O two is used
to do that. Um, like, is it really greener to
(36:30):
have fewer landfills and truck your garbage on a train
or in a truck every day? Uh? And they basically
say they don't really know which is which is more
environmentally friendly. Um, in different states, apparently there's a lot
of money in it. Different states have way more room
than others. And then some states don't even want that stuff.
(36:52):
Of course in the Northeast, like Massachusetts are like, we
don't want landfills than our state, Rhode Island. Same way
they send a to Springfield, they send it to Kentucky. Well, no,
remember the Trash Commissioner episode. Yeah, he accepted other states
to waste. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Um, let me see,
Arkansas has enough capacity for more than six hundred years
(37:15):
of trash without any more facilities being opened. There you go,
We'll just send it all to Arkansas, whereas Rhode Island
only has twelve years remaining. New York State only has
twenty five years of capacity left. Send it to Arkansas.
So that's what they're doing. Um, Kentucky is ty dollars
per Ton making about six billion dollars a year, Ohio
(37:36):
twenty one billion dollars a year of available landfill spaces
because Ohio knows how to negotiate. That's right, the Buckeye State,
that's right. Don't tread on me White, that's New Hampshire Party.
I think it's either New Hampshire Vermont, one of those.
You know New Hampshire's is lived for your die right
and make their inmates make those license plates. Yeah. No,
(37:59):
don't tread on me was in a state motto. And
I think that was just flag with the cut up
snake right that the Tea Party adopted. Remember did they
adopt that? Yeah? So yeah. If you see a bumper
sticker with one of those flags on it, they're not
just like a history buff or anything. Yeah. Or if
it says who was John Galt? Yeah, and that that
that'll tell you something about the driver of that vehicle.
(38:20):
Was that a Tom Cruise movie? No, John Galt was
the main character, and Atlas shrugged. Oh yeah, I ran,
I'm thinking of Jack Reacher. If you want to know
more about landfills, you can type that word into the
search bar how stuff works dot com And uh, I
said search bar. So it's time for listener mail I'm
gonna call this, uh, very sad email, but uplifting at
(38:45):
the same time. Hey, guys, two weeks ago, my amazing
and wonderful father in law, Walter passed away. We had
to drop everything, my husband and son and I and
fly from Florida to Germany, where he lived. He's been
in my world for twenty four my fifty years, and
I was so sad. I felt like I was going
to throw up all the time. When we arrived in Germany,
walking through the front door of the family home without
(39:05):
him there was one of the hardest things I've ever
had to do. It was and is devastating. My husband
and youngest son and I sat in a dark days
for days, mixing the crying mixed with crying and feeling lost.
Always listen to podcasts while I run, though, which I
do every day, And after ten days of being there
in Germany, I finally decided to cue up one of
your podcast while running. It was Blood Types. I laughed
(39:28):
for the first time in two weeks out loud. Guys.
It was so nice to laugh again, and it really
opened the door for me. I realized that we as
a family are going through was so tough, but I
also started to realize that if I could laugh, then
I could heal. Uh. Yesterday, my husband and I, still
in Germany, decided to go uh to walk to the
nursing home where my aunt lives, which is two and
(39:50):
a half hours through the forest, up and down hills.
I love this family. By the way, walking to the
nursing home like that, we of course, brought our thirteen
year old son, Oliver, who has mon After about twenty
minutes of walking, I handed on my phone and he
listened to UH three Stuff you Should Know podcast along
the way and is now hooked. He loves you guys.
My husband and I had a badly needed quiet, get
(40:12):
in touch with nature walk as a result, and we
didn't have to listen to our sun moan at all.
Uh more, long walks are in his future as long
as I have you guys on my phone. And Oliver
also asked me along the walk, wait a minute, mom,
These guys get paid to do this. And when I
said yes, I saw a sparkle in his eye. I
(40:33):
love this email boom that is from Jennifer and Jennifer
that is awesome. I Uh those mean the most to us. Yeah,
I mean that was a great top not to email,
great email and there was more to it even I
had to leave out some of it from link Jennifer right,
Jennifer and Oliver her Son and she doesn't even anonymous
husband anonymous husband named not But yeah, thanks a lot, Jennifer.
(40:56):
We appreciate you letting us know that that's a again
great email. And uh, if you out there want to
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