Understanding Solid Waste Disposal: Methods, Impacts, and Solutions

hi everyone welcome to this PowerPoint on disposal of solid waste we're going to talk about two learning objectives

8.9 which is solid waste disposal uh the enduring understanding for this is that human activities including the use of

resources have physical chemical and biological consequences for the ecosystem so we're sticking with that

same one that we've been at for quite a while the learning objectives you should just be able to describe Solid Waste

Disposal methods and describe the effects of solid waste disposal methods and we're also going to be looking at

topic 8.10 which is waste reduction methods and the learning objective there is to describe changes and current

practices that could reduce the amount of generated waste and their associate benefits and drawbacks

I'll skip the vocab as usual but it is right here and what do we mean when we talk about

Solid Waste well it's probably pretty straightforward but this is a waste that's neither a gas nor liquid so it's

solid trash we typically use the terms trash refuse garbage for this type of waste and we're going to include both

hazardous and non-hazardous waste in this Solid Waste some of this is going to be totally benign some of it is going

to be hazardous and that's not to say that hazardous waste couldn't be a liquid it absolutely

can and it often is for example there's quite a few liquids in this list down here insect killer glues the acids

inside of batteries gasoline all of those are hazardous wastes as well but there's some hazardous wastes that are

solids now hazardous waste is potentially toxic or harmful to humans in the environment we have these four

categories of hazardous waste and you should probably know these um we have corrosive hazardous waste so this is

something that will corrode skin it will corrode materials um corrode tissues

we have toxic hazardous waste stuff that is just poisonous to humans and um other animals we have reactive hazardous waste

those with high reactivity and can have lots of different catalytic reactions inside of a landfill or you know in a

human body or anywhere and then we have flammable hazardous waste and that's probably the most straightforward

because they light on fire okay the U.S it should be noted produces about a third of the world's solid waste

so we are the most wasteful country on the planet we produce about a third of the of the solid waste on the planet

and with generating about a third of the world's waste we are only about four percent of the

world's population so if we do some quick math 333 million

which is about a good estimate of the U.S population size divided by 8 billion people on the planet

times 100 gives us about

four percent four point two percent of the world's population so per capita we are the most wasteful country on the

planet okay now this slide that I have this on I'm actually going

to skip this because we're not going to talk about plastic today we're going to talk about plastic in reference to our

lab that we'll do on microplastics and we'll talk about some of the effects of plastic but if you want to pause this

and see some of the most common types of plastic and their toxicity levels and really for this

um what is most commonly leached what toxins Leach from them it's really interesting

now a quick list some methods to dispose of solid waste landfills is where we're going to spend most of our time here

we're going to talk about recycling quite a bit we've already talked about waste incineration so I will reference

you to waste incineration power points and our energy unit to talk about waste incineration so

we're not going to talk about it a lot here we're going to talk about composting

we're going to talk about legal dumping but a lot of that was also in the one of the previous PowerPoints of this unit

not little litter my bad um where we talked about litter and then Oceanic dump in as well but again we

talked about that in this litter one two so we'll talk about it a little bit but not too much where we're going to spend

most of our time is landfills Recycling and composting all right landfills are definitely the

most common disposal method and it's probably the best disposal method if you cannot compost reuse recycle a material

okay um a little bit of history about landfills

landfills used to be just be simple pits that people would throw solid waste into anything that was you know maybe kitchen

waste or broken pottery would go into what we would call a midden if you're into archeology or just a waste pit okay

before the Industrial Revolution almost all trash was biodegradable again this means that it decays that microorganisms

can eat through it and it decays if it wasn't biodegradable it was at least non-toxic okay it might contain

heavy metals especially if we're talking about slag from um from metal smelting but it was at

least more or less non-toxic okay so a lot of the old waste was stuff like wood bone textiles food scraps ceramic glass

Etc you can see the list down there and if you go into if you're into archeology and if you watch a lot of archaeological

shows the ones that they can get out of these mittens are the ones that don't decompose readily stuff like bone

um Pottery Ceramics glass maybe coins anything that's that's metal is really good at preserving

things like food scraps that would be in these middens textiles typically aren't preserved except under very rare

circumstances same thing with wood typically not preserved under very rare circumstances

however after the Industrial Revolution especially in the plastic craze of the 20th century waste became more and more

and more um toxic okay

now one thing that I want to talk about we're going to talk about landfills in terms of the best case scenario we're

not really going to talk a lot about how landfills differ around the world but I do want you to keep in mind that

landfills are going to vary dramatically around the world and waste disposal methods are as well based off of the

socioeconomic model and the country infrastructure and that country the availability of land in that country so

island nations are going to have less landfilling than large Nations that have lots of empty space

and then the position on the demographic transition model let's start this off with a law this the

resource conservation Recovery Act so this is one that you need to know this is a U.S law only so United States law

only started in or was signed into being in 1976 this is an amendment to the solid

waste disposal Act of 1965 which you don't really need to know the resource conservation Recovery Act

or rcra or I'm not even going to try to pronounce it how some people do but rcra it's it was due to a huge volume a

growing volume of industrial and municipal waste especially hazardous waste and it gave the EPA responsibility

like sole responsibility over controlling hazardous waste essentially from the Cradle to the Grave now Cradle

to the Grave essentially means from when it was made in a factory or in a laboratory to the time that's disposed

of and it set goals and regulations some of those goals and regulations include

protecting human health protecting of the environment energy and natural resource conservation

reduction of waste generation and mandates for safe ways to dispose of waste and this has been really effective

in making sure that a lot of solid waste um ends up in landfills and especially that hazardous waste ends up in

landfills and this has resulted in a cleaner United States if you ever watch an old movie from the 60s or 70s and you

see just trash everywhere especially if it's like a dingy looking city that was the reality back then there was just

tons of trash all the time everywhere and there wasn't great waste disposal methods but in the 1970s due to the

resource conservation Recovery Act in large part we had much more efficient waste disposal methods

the primary waste disposal method that we use is a sanitary Municipal landfill now this was introduced in the early

1900s and it kind of caught on but again it was until the 60s and 70s when the money was there and when the

infrastructure was there and the demand was there to really um bring these into widespread use

so these are intentionally constructed to minimize negative health effects and negative environmental effects

and in these landfills I'll show a picture a couple pictures of them and diagrams of them on the next slides we

essentially have five stages in the decomposition of waste so now keep in mind that all not all waste will

decompose some waste will but not all of it will all right so when you have a garbage

truck that goes up to the landfill and dumps waste off of the landfill that waste is added to the top of the

landfill and it's typically going to be exposed to the air or even buried near the top of that landfill oftentimes

you'll bring in dirt so that you bury that waste so that birds and animals can't get to it and so it doesn't smell

as bad oxygen is going to be relatively common anaerobic decomposition of that material

is going to be pretty high and pretty quick but as the waste is compacted down into

essentially strata of waste oftentimes strata between waste and fill dirt that oxygen is going to be used up in

anaerobic decomposition is going to begin you could also on the right here add

pressure to this too because you'll have a little bit of pressure from all the stuff on top you'll have some

stratification step three you're gonna start to have some acids forming those acids are

volatile fatty acids which are organic acids which result from the decomposition from anaerobic bacteria

and with those acids you're going to start to get high hydrogen ion concentrations right the hydrogen is

just going to pop off of those acids um now that heavy metals you should remember heavy metals like aluminum

arsenic cadmium Etc they all tend to dissolve in water at lower pH which means that they're going to Leach from

your waste at this stage so if you have electronic waste that has high levels of heavy metals those heavy metals are

going to Leach out at this stage okay and they'll probably start to follow water via gravity and go down

throughout through the the strata of the landfill in stage four of this the volatile fatty

acids and other intermediate acid products such as acetic acid are going to be further decomposed by other

anaerobic bacteria that produce methane so methanogenic bacteria and that's going to produce lots and lots of

methane okay that leachate is going to become pH neutral again because you're dissolving all or sorry you're

decomposing these um these organic acids but you're producing lots of methane you have to deal with that methane in

some way you just can't have a flammable explosive Gas building up in your landfill over underneath of all this

trash otherwise it's liable to explode that would be bad so you have to vent it out and we'll talk about how you vent it

out on the next slide but essentially what you do is just as you're building your landfill and as you're putting

trash on your landfill you just have a bunch of pipes that um

this methane can leak into and then go elsewhere and then finally at the bottom of your

landfill your decomposition is going to slow as the available nutrients are depleted

and you're going to have um a reduction of this anaerobic respiration and by this time you're

going to start to have a little bit of oxygen coming in because your respiration isn't super high your

biological oxygen demand which we typically would use in terms of waterways but your biological oxygen

demand is pretty low so it allows what oxygen is there and that what oxygen filters through to

um to build up in concentration all right and any organic matter there will dissolve or sorry decompose um

aerobically and will eventually become humus the problem is is that this humus is going to be

um all around all kinds of stuff that doesn't Decay electronic waste Metals

Plastics silicates glass all of this stuff a lot of toxins from let's say like batteries or whatever is going to

be in there so you can't really use this humus for really much really anything you couldn't return it back to the

agricultural system so that's essentially how a land how material in a landfill is going to

decompose now let's talk about how landfills are constructed so like the anatomy of a landfill

when you dig this giant hole to make your landfill what you're going to do is first line

that giant hole with Clay okay so you have your subsoil and then you're going to put compacted

Clay on top of that you're going to basically make this hard pan layer of clay and that clay will prevent any

material from leaching out of the landfill into the subsurface or at least that's the intention that Clay is pretty

hydrophobic and it's compacted and water won't be able to get through it above that clay though you're going to

put a layer of sand and in that sand you're going to put a leachate system that leachate system or these pipes is

designed to collect any leachate that gets through your liners okay we'll talk about the liner next

what leachate is and I have it defined on another slide is water that contains leached Metals minerals anything okay

any type of toxin really anything so water is going to get into the landfill and it's going to have metals that

dissolve into it it's going to have nutrients that dissolve into it it's going to have

like persistent organic pollutants that dissolve into it and all of it's going to stay in that water and it will

hopefully get into these pipes and be pumped out for treatment okay so you have a

leachate treatment system over here okay above that layer of sand with those

leachate collection pipes that leachate system you're going to have a synthetic liner this synthetic liner can be meters

thick but it's often about you know two meters thick rubber or maybe even thinner in some cases but it's going to

be a synthetic rubber liner that's super thick that can handle the stress of being in a landfill okay so that's

really going to be the one preventing all of the leachate from getting out of the landfill into the soil and into the

groundwater but if that fails you have your backup layer which is your clay

and then above that synthetic liner you have a layer of sand and then leachate collection pipes

remember that sand is um highly permeable to water so water can go through the sand but it's not going

to go through the synthetic liner or the clay and then above that you start adding

your garbage around your landfill you're going to have leachate monitoring Wells and both

the soil and the groundwater to make sure that none of the toxins that are in the landfill get into the soil or the

surrounding ground or the surrounding soil or the groundwater you'll see these all over the place we actually have a

great example of a sanitary Municipal landfill right near Grandview if you just drive down Gun Club Road heading

north you're going to see Dad's landfill dads landfill and you'll see these little leachate monitoring Wells

um sticking up out of the ground all around that landfill on the property of of the

landfill inside the landfill itself you're going to have a methane gas recovery system

because again you have to pump out or allow that methane to come out either pumped using energy or often at times

just passively because it is a gas and it will go into one of several different types of methane methane disposal type

of things which we'll talk about on the next slide when you're done with the landfill when the landfill is full

you're basically going to repeat this process that's the bottom at the top and this is what we call a cap

okay this at the bottom is a liner and at the top is a cap so you're basically going to have a

layer of clay then a layer of sand and then what's different about this is topsoil topsoil is going to allow grass

and other plants to grow on this and it will be somewhat remediated Okay the reason that you have the clay again is

because water will not go through it so if water was to fall on this area you know a lot of it is just going to run

off the um the the hilly side of this landfill but some of

it will get into the soil and then if it gets into the sand it'll get into the sand hit this clay which is

relatively impermeable or very impermeable and run off horizontally off of the sides of this landfill

okay so it's to it's designed to have the minimum amount of water get into the landfill

so there's a there's a couple documents on schoology that I want you guys to check out one is the anatomy of a

landfill and the other is the leachate collection system in a sanitary Municipal landfill okay

and before we get into some environmental impacts let's look at this picture on the right now this is an

aerial shot of them setting up that landfill and what you can see down here is the clay underneath well actually

over here I believe that you can see the clay liner underneath of the sand above that Clay and they're spreading out

these um these layers of synthetic rubber liners and you can see the scale of this right these are pretty big

machines that's a car on the road or a truck or something these are this is a pretty big facility but there are

definitely larger landfills than this okay so they're just setting up those liners at the bottom they're going to

set up the leachate collection system all of that as well now after use most of those landfills

are going to become re-vegetated okay now you're not going to put houses on this because that land is going to

settle as the stuff inside decomposes and you really couldn't do that because people would live there and it'd be

um potentially hazardous for them to live there but you can turn it into a park you can turn it into a nature

preserve you can turn it into an open space you can just turn it into something else that has vegetation on it

all right um some negative environmental impacts landfills can reduce carbon dioxide and

methane into the atmosphere especially the carbon dioxide the methane we'll talk about on the next slide

it can Leach toxic chemicals into nearby soil groundwater or surface water now this is relatively common okay there are

many old landfills in the country um in the United States where this can happen there's accidents that can occur

at modern sanitary Municipal landfills and again around the world landfills are going to vary dramatically based off of

the socioeconomics of that country of that area of that city of that part of the city as well as the laws and

legislation that exist in that country okay one of the big things in my eye probably because I'm a gardener is that

landfills sequester plant available nutrients okay so you take all of this plant matter all of these nutrients that

would be great to return to the soil in an agricultural system and you essentially funnel them all into the

landfill and sequester them in the landfill you can't get all these plant available nutrients out all of this

humus out of the landfill because it's all contaminated with all this hazardous waste and toxic materials and heavy

metals and all of that stuff so it's essentially lost to the agricultural system which is increasing

our demand for synthetic fertilizers which as an organic Gardener I'm totally

against okay now some of these problems the first one

let's talk about waste gas and specifically let's talk about methane okay so methane is going to result from

methanogenic bacteria in your landfill most landfills are going to um

capture that methane using a methane capture system but not all landfills some landfills are just going to have

pipes that go through that landfill and allow that methane to passively go into those pipes and then those pipes are

going to terminate at the top of the landfill or along the sides and this candy cane looking structure and that

candy cane looking structure that's just a pipe allows methane to vent into the atmosphere

right but not allow water to get into that pipe because you know rain water isn't gonna

you know magically jump jump into that pipe right so you'll get these candy cane looking pipes at some landfills you

can actually see old versions of that at Dad's landfill but it looks to me as though all of those have been capped and

they're now directing that methane into a methane capture system a lot of landfills are going to flare

the waste methane just burn it now that's um pretty bad because you're just

wasting that methane now it's it's not as bad as just allowing that methane to go up into the atmosphere where it can

like remain and act as a greenhouse gas for the lot for the lifetime of that methane however short it is

but flaring it is just wasting it right why would you waste this methane that you could otherwise capture and use at a

power plant okay besides flaring endangered birds this um looks like a hawk or a falcon

um was too close to a flare Tower and these

flare Towers you can't see very well during the day and it got its wings singed many birds have died from these

flower Towers um a lot of places nowadays are capturing and utilizing this gas for

power generation um this is an example of that this is a landfill gas power plant um in France

again methane is just the same as methane that we would use as natural gas right so why not capture it and use it

if you're going to produce it anyway and the good thing about this is that this is technically biogas

and it is technically renewable okay it's at least carbon neutral in a sense not not so much if it's like from coming

from Plastics or coming from any type of fossil fuel in there but if it's coming from uh plant matter it is

so here's where I Define leachate for you again it's water that's carrying any any minerals that have leached out of um

really any system it could be Metals minerals toxins um nutrients fertilizers what have you

okay so when the landfill is open to the elements rainfall is going to fall in that landfill it's unavoidable and it's

going to percolate down through all that trash and it's going to dissolve anything that's water soluble along the

way and again if we're making a lot of acids in that landfill and the pH is going down

that means that heavy metals are more often going to get into your leachate so Metals will dissolve easier at lower

pH modern landfills have ways to prevent this okay they have a storm collection

system this is essentially a cap and a drainage system that prevents rainwater from entering that landfill most often

they're going to be installed when the landfill is closed but often they'll install it in sections of the landfill

as it's being used and then they'll remove it and then use that section again to build up and then

um you know kind of use it sequentially through the landfill hi yeah um

we also have leachate collection systems these are essentially pipes that go throughout the landfill like I've talked

about that collect and process that leachate through the landfill so you have all this lead shape that's going

into the landfill collecting at the bottom um and goes into these pipes gets pumped

up and is treated and then again the synthetic liners at the bottom which we talked about at

length all right so landfills are okay they're they're great and what they do you take

all of your waste especially your hazardous waste that you don't want out in the environment your stuff that

doesn't decompose your stuff that can't be recycled or reused and you put it into a landfill okay it's not bad it's

better than having it um in the oceans for example but what are some ways to mitigate these

negative effects of landfills well the first is to just stop producing so much damn trash right reducing the amount of

stuff that we use the United States again is the most wasteful Society on the planet and by reducing the amount of

material Goods that we use that reduces the amount of materials that end up in a landfill

if we reuse things that means that we use things more than once and it repurposes materials and it keeps that

material out of the landfill at least for a while you know sometimes you reuse it as much as you can until it

eventually breaks but at least it keeps it out of the landfill for quite a while okay and then recycling so we'll talk

about recycling on the next one these three you'll often see written as the three R's and you probably just remember

that from elementary school so recycling now recycling is not the Panacea that's going to save us from

ourselves okay I want to be crystal clear about that but recycling can be good it is good okay but only some

materials can be recycled they can be reprocessed and converted into new materials

some Plastics can be recycled I'm going to show a documentary in class about that

but at least I'm thinking I am not all Plastics can be recycled that's a huge myth that we've been misled by

the petrochemical companies the oil companies into believing that all Plastics can be recycled and that they

can be infinitely recycled that is absolutely not the case metals can definitely be recycled paper

cardboard can be recycled in fact cardboard is the most recycled material in the United States even more so than

Metals some textiles can be recycled not very common but some textiles can be recycled the other thing that I would

put on here is glass glass can definitely be recycled recycling reduces the demand for raw

materials this is the same for reducing and reusing all three of these reduce the demand for these raw

materials whatever the raw material is paper for trees or sorry trees for paper whatever

some drawbacks recycling is expensive okay it takes a lot of energy to break down these materials and to re-um take

Plastics down to their polymers for example or to melt glass or to melt Metals but the amount of material and

the amount of energy that it takes to melt glass the first time is essentially the same as it takes some milk glass the

second time so it's not um it's not cost restrictive in that sense it is labor intensive one of the

worst things that I think that we've done in terms of recycling is single stream recycling where you put all of

your recyclable materials into one bin and somebody else has to sort through it I remember when I was a kid we had

different bins and we had to have different bins for our different materials so we had to bend for glass

aluminum steel we had a bin for paper Etc and we would take those two-way

recycling facility and each one of those we would dump into their own respective dumpsters to be taken to a recycling

plant or however wherever they were taken single stream recycling means that they

have to be mechanically or manually sorted and has led to a huge spike in what we call wish cycling

basically saying like uh I don't know if it's recyclable but I'll throw it in there just in case we'll again see that

in the documentary that I hope to show in class and it can be potentially dangerous

dangerous for workers especially broken glass and electronic waste if you're sorting through all of this single

stream Recycling and you're trying to get pieces of glass away from your paper that's just inherently dangerous

okay electronic waste we're going to talk about on its own slide so I'll skip that for now

metals and glass can be infinitely recycled that means that you can melt down an aluminum can and make it into

another aluminum can over and over and over and over again infinitely or at least pretty much infinitely

most Plastics if they can be recycled again only some Plastics can they're typically only can be recycled

once or twice you can't take a pet bottle like your typical water bottle and recycle it again and again and again

and make um like a water bottle from a recycled old water bottle over and over and over and over like you can with a

glass bottle after they've been recycled once or twice they're typically down cycled now

I'll show that on the next slide but the um the the definitions here and then paper typically recycled five to seven

times before it is down cycled and then it can't be recycled again so I think that these other two terms

should be um more common in everyday speech because we talk about down cycling as

though it is recycling which it's not recycling the chasing arrows implies that this material can be reused

infinitely right again aluminum cans glass bottles can be infinitely recycled into new ones

down cycling means that the recycled material is going to be of a lower quality so think about the paper pulp

that makes egg cartons that is often down cycled from copy paper right the paper that you all are going to recycle

a mountain of after this class is over right um you can't go the other way around

there's no backwards arrow in this and in that sense it can be recycled right paper could be recycled five to seven

times before those fibers are too broken up and two damaged and two destroyed and you have

to make something like an egg carton something that is this weird pulpy paper upcycling is really cool upcycling is

essentially a form of reusing and it's taking um material from one purpose

and transforming that waste material into a new product so making furniture out of pallet wood would be a great

example old busted pallets that you can't that the company isn't going to take back make some furniture out of it

okay that's up cycling now these three videos are great um one of these two I'm gonna put I'm gonna

hopefully play in class so we'll wait for that if you're really interested in this

um you know I'd like to show this one in class also but whatever ones I don't show in class check out on your own

they're pretty awesome now let's look at some other ways to mitigate the negative effects of

landfills one of those is composting composting in my mind is huge you take all that organic matter that you would

otherwise throw into a landfill and you put it into a compost bin and even if you don't do this at home you can sign

up for a compost collection agency that will come and do it for you now what's really cool is that in many

other areas of the world and I don't see it very often in the United States maybe some more Progressive cities but in many

areas of the world you'll see bins specifically for organic waste traveling in Mexico Central America Europe you're

going to see bins that are specifically for organic waste and that's to keep it keep that organic waste from getting

wasted in a landfill and they go to composting facilities Municipal composting facilities and then they're

sold they sell this really great humus or this compost to Farmers or gardeners to use it's a great way to mitigate the

negative effects of landfills you reduce your um your methane emissions and carbon

dioxide emissions from the landfill you reduce the amount of synthetic fertilizers that you depend on in the

agricultural system all of that so what is compost compost is basically the process of taking organic waste and

turning it into humus and that humus we call compost and you can use all kinds of materials for that it could include

yard waste like your grass clippings or your dead leaves in the Autumn it can include food scraps animal waste

typically not dog and cat but I'm thinking like chicken manure um

stuff like old straw crop residues would be old straw untreated paper or cardboard so stuff

that isn't bleached or coated in a non-stick coating all of that can be composted and it's going to return those

nutrients back to the agricultural system or even to a natural system there's a lot of groups that are putting

compost and natural systems as well to improve soil quality some of the drawbacks of composting you

can release carbon dioxide and methane but it's carbon neutral right this watermelon

grew in a single growing season carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere drawn down through photosynthesis to create the

tissue of this watermelon plant including the watermelon fruit and then whatever is wasted not eaten

even the stuff that is eaten is going through cellular respiration and it's going to produce carbon dioxide

again but you know no net increase of carbon dioxide in fact you have a net reduction of carbon dioxide because this

dark organic this dark humus is high in organic matter a lot of that is carbon so the darker and Blacker your compost

is the more carbon it's going to contain and it's a really great way to sequester carbon in the soil so it's

carbon neutral or even a way to draw down carbon okay many of these Industrial Systems for composting is

going to collect the methane and it's going to use it as a biogas okay either sell it or use it on site

some other drawbacks AP and their learning objectives tells you that it smells I've been composting for over

like over 15 years and I will tell you that it does not smell unless you do it wrong what it does smell like is really

really good soil that like Rich earthy like humid forest soil it smells really good

now you might smell like coffee grounds if you just add a bunch of coffee grounds from the local coffee shop on

top of it or it might smell like a lot of citrus if you just pressed a lot of oranges into orange juice and you have a

lot of oranges on top but it doesn't smell bad unless you're doing it wrong or unless you're doing some anaerobic

system like bokashi composting now what it does but but AP says it smells so on the AP test say it smells

okay what it does do is can attract rodents right if you live in Bear Country you might be attracting Bears

you might be attracting raccoons you might be attracting Birds Etc but that's not that big of a deal in my eyes

okay we'll watch this short little clip about composting but if you're not going to be in class check it out it's really

cool to watch a time last of composting um this is a composting facility I want to say in Germany

um where they have all of this compost going it's at a late stage of decomposition and you notice that there

is a pipe coming out into this pipe and this pipe goes into it and has a bunch of pipes in there to collect the the

methane you can probably see some of those back here collecting the methane and that methane is going to be

collected in these storage tanks and it's going to be sold for industry and what's really cool about this facility

you can see the solar panels on top all right moving right on um electronic waste now electronic waste is also

called E-Waste we've mentioned it several times in this it's any type of electronic that enters the waste stream

okay so it enters um your your trash system okay any type of electronic this is a

very complex waste it includes all kinds of plastics Metals silicates it has all kinds of other materials it might have

some acids and transistors it might have some persistent organic pollutants it can have all kinds of really different

materials in it and if you're going to recycle these materials it has to be dismantled and some of it is really

difficult to get at if you without creating further environmental harm so for example it's really easy to recycle

copper but it's really difficult to strip copper wires from the plastic sheathing or insulation around that wire

what people typically default to doing is burning that plastic off well that's going to release a lot of dioxins and is

one of the leading causes of dioxins to be released into the atmosphere which are a type of persistent organic

pollutant okay so it's really difficult to get to that copper in some cases without further damaging the environment

many of these electronic sources of electronic waste can reduce can Leach synthetic petrochemicals heavy metals

and other toxins into your landfills or if they're dumped illegally right into the soil

or water so let's talk about illegal dumping well landfills are expensive and they won't take certain types of waste

right I if I'm really poor and I don't have the money to dispose of an old mattress properly well you know

to pay the dumping fee at the landfill well maybe I'll just take it in the middle of the night to the end of the

road and dump it into the ditch right out in the country okay that's illegal dumping

um so cost and regulations can be be prohibited and again certain materials

won't be accepted on landfill because they're too hazardous so what most people will do or maybe not most people

what some people will do is just illegally dump them rather than dispose of them properly

um according to code okay now this could range from anything from household appliances you'll see right dryers and

refrigerators on the side of the road in some areas you'll see tires yard waste is very common you'll see like just dead

trees on the side of the road on the way to the landfill and the idea is that people don't want to pay the dumping fee

but instead they'll just cut down the tree that died in their yard and then dump it in the ditch and somebody else

will come along and pick it up some of these materials are potentially toxic again tires we've talked about

before they Leach synthetic Plastics synthetic rubbers and heavy metals into the soil or into the water but tires

also have other negative aspect I don't know if you can see this very well but they collect water in the rim of those

tires that water is a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes which can spread disease like malaria or typhoid fever

so in many areas where they have really bad problems with people dumping tires they at least have mandates for people

to slash the tires to cut them so they drain before they're dumped another example is batteries before

um before uh auto stores have Battery Exchange programs batteries were one of

the most illegally dumped items in the United States and they leak sulfuric acid and other types of acids right

battery acid um and all kinds of other nasty stuff out of those right heavy metals as well

even the double a batteries that we often throw into the trash can shouldn't be going into the trash can and into the

landfill they should be going somewhere else okay um to a proper disposal facility

and let's end this with another law this is the comprehensive environmental response compensation and liability act

circla I'm going to call it circla from here on out this is a U.S law it's also called Superfund I'll try not

to say that because how you're going to see it on the test is circla but oftentimes in the Press you'll see it as

super fund this is a 1980 law that charges the EPA to investigate and clean up sites that have been contaminated

with hazardous waste or any other type of hazardous pollutant okay the most so so the EPA will go and investigate these

sites and the most contaminated are put on what they call the national priorities list which is within this law

okay the the ones that are on the national priorities list are the ones that are

supposed to be cleaned up ASAP the goal of this is to reduce health and environmental risk from pollutants

especially hazardous pollutants and to remediate sites to be used um for any others any other reason after

afterwards now unfortunately super fund or circular rather is massively underfunded it's had

its budget slash many times by every Administration uh Republican or Democrat and right now there is about sixteen

hundred sites on the national priorities list that are being cleaned up with it beyond that there's 40 000

Superfund sites in the United States so we have done a very good job of disposing of hazardous materials

improperly for a very long time now historically cleanup should be paid for by the polluter typically that is a

company that is responsible for the pollution but what happens if that company goes bankrupt or what happens if

that company is bought by by another company and that new company refuses to pay

um for the cleanup for take responsibility for the actions of the previous company right like uh one small

company gets bought by a multi-million dollar large conglomerate well that conglomerate had nothing to do with the

initial pollution because they're not the ones that polluted it's the company that they bought you see what I mean

so about 70 percent of the cleanups have been funded by the polluters the remainder is taxpayer funded okay

so what kicked this all off is the Love Canal disaster again something I hope to watch in class but if you're not going

to be in class um check this out on your own and down here in the bottom left you see

a map of the Superfund sites as of October 2013. you can see how distributed around the United States

they are and what I want you to notice is that they're more distributed and heavily populated areas right North

Dakota doesn't have many because there's not very many people in very much industry there but the Upper Midwest the

East Coast California they have quite a few currently about 50 million people live

within three miles of a Superfund Site if you think about the US population again of 333 million that's a pretty

good chunk of the US population what is that a sixth a seventh of the U.S population

an example that we have locally in Colorado you notice a nice little cluster right there around Denver

um is Rocky Flats Rocky Flats was a um an area it was a facility where they

created the plutonium buttons for atomic bombs so they weren't making atomic bombs there they were just making the

plutonium buttons or the plutonium trigger for the atomic bombs and there was a long history of leaks of plutonium

around this site and plutonium as you well should know is radioactive and it was listed as a Superfund Site and

remediated okay right now it is a wildlife refuge um this is down at the bottom is an

example of dredging of the Hudson by General Electric General Electric spent billions of dollars dredging the Hudson

River where they dumped pcbs for years for decades okay so it should be again clean um

funded by the company that's responsible but not not um always is now if we just look at Colorado notice these ones in

the mountains not all super fun sites have to be maybe that one's in Colorado Springs but the not all Superfund sites

are going to be um due to Industry some of them like in Colorado Rockies are going to be due to

Old Mines right they're going to be due to all kinds of um all kinds of activities that have

created hazardous waste not just industry but industry is one of the leading causes

now I said that was the last name but I lied this is the last thing haha fooled you uh illegal dumping just in the ocean

we hit on this when we talked about um litter but I thought we should expand on it now many people have assumed

incorrectly that the world's oceans are so big that it has an unlimited ability to mix and purify waste that is

absolutely not true you see some of these images of waste going into the ocean and this isn't really that far

removed from home before 1972 the Marine protection research and sanctuaries act which you do not need to know

um hundreds of millions of tons of U.S waste were dumped in the ocean it was just way easier to do that than to

dispose of them properly in landfills okay but that pattern of dumping occurs really worldwide

um primarily in the developing world where they lack the laws and legislation to and the infrastructure and the

economies to prevent this in the developed world it's much less common but it really does depend again

on local economy regulations infrastructure that's the largest determinant of where your waste ends up

if you don't have the infrastructure um you know like the garbage trucks running 24 7 to pick up trash on the

curb your trash is going to end up in in you know illegal dumps um or the ocean okay

and just a couple um quotes to illustrate this the first one is from Dr Jan post who is a marine biologist

she says that the ocean today has become an over exploited resource and Mankind's ultimate Cesspool the last destination

for all pollution now if you don't know what a cesspool is look it up it's really really gross

the second quote from Dr Patricia tester who's an oceanographer the oceans have become nothing but Giant cesspools and

you know what happens when you heat up a cesspool essentially what that's saying and I'll tell you what a cesspool is

it's a pool a cesspool is a pool that they used to use and um before sewage treatment where you would just

all of the human waste would be funneled into this pool okay so so it's a ship pool this is essentially saying that if

you heat up that um that pool full of feces what's going to happen you're going to have a massive

algal bloom it's going to smell like high heaven it's disgusting and that's what's happening with the world's oceans

you're seeing on the bottom two pictures of eutrophication events a green algae example and a red algae example also

known as a red tide and then on the bottom right you were seeing a dump that is right next to the ocean or at least

one presuming to be the ocean and even a couple people swimming in that water okay who knows what toxins they're being

exposed to right then and if I haven't given you enough videos to check out check out these ones pretty

interesting people are always asking this question so I thought I'd throw this video in uh this is a really cool

way to use old plastic bricks because again we'll talk about plastic and how hard it is to recycle it so recycled

bricks made of recycled plastic pretty cool it's essentially like a giant Lego brick that you can build houses of

okay so that was a lot in this PowerPoint um the Essential Knowledge Solid Waste

is any discard material that's not a liquid or gas it's generated in any type of sector Solid Waste is most often

disposed of in landfills landfills can contaminate groundwater and they can release harmful gases okay so that if

there if if you do have a problem with that leachate collection system you can contaminate soil and groundwater with

that leachate and then it can release harmful gases the most notable of which is methane but you can release others

but we didn't really talk about we talked about electronic waste and sanitary Municipal landfills and how

they are created and then describing the effects of landfills or solid sorry describing the

effects of solid waste disposal methods factors in landfill decomposition we talked about the stages of decomposition

and landfill Solid Waste can be disposed of through incineration that is really in our energy unit so check it out there

and then some items may not be accepted and sanitary Municipal landfills they're often disposed of illegally right

illegal dumping an example of that is batteries tires Etc

tires specifically can become breeding ground from mosquitoes and then some countries dispose of their

waste by dumping in the ocean that's really bad and most of the effects of that checkout and that litter PowerPoint

aquatic pollution and litter that practice um has led to large floating islands of

trash in the ocean I really wish they didn't use that term large floating islands but those are the garbage

patches that we talked about in that litter PowerPoint okay so hope you guys learned something

and um never mind we have one more slide because we have one more learning

objective um we talked about recycling so certain Solid Waste can be recycled converted

into new products recycling is one way to stem the flow of our demand for any type of material doesn't have to be

minerals it could be trees right if we're talking about paper or cardboard composting is great for reducing um

the the waste that goes into a landfill again they say it smells I tend I disagree

electronic waste can be recycled and reused but it's very dangerous for the workers and it is relatively dangerous

to do metals such as lead and Mercury can Leach from that material as well uh landfill mitigation strategies range

from burning waste to energy to restoring habitat again remember that a lot of European countries are resorting

to burning waste as a form of electricity production again go back to the energy resources PowerPoints and

then combustion of gas is produced from decomposition of organic materials and landfill can be used for energy this is

biogas right methane all right so I hope you guys learned

something and I'll see you on class bye