Topic: Satellite data finds landfills are methane 'super emitters' (Read 268 times)

Point is we can do something and refine the rubbish better.  Methane can be captured and used for energy, presently we release it and dont bother with the process of intelligent use of rubbish.  Its obviously easier to bury it and hope it goes away but we've known for many decades gas will appear with waste and it can be reused for power etc.        The extra info now is this gas is especially destructive when it reaches the upper atmosphere.

Somehow in all these emissions and green house gases, bitcoin is the only threat to the environment as per energy consumption hough mining and emissions from combustion or fossil fuels, how ironical the world thinks.

And there goes my country. Somehow, we always rank up in statistics like these. Good thing we also show up when It comes to population with crypto adoption evn as it isn't very much welcomed by the government of my nation.

Considering the calculations above at Franky1, other parameters could be at play as well. Like how the designs are made and managed.

It is said that landfill produces methane which can be used to produce electricity so why will you destroy them? And if you destroy them like burning them, this will cause an air pollution which is harmful if inhaled by a human or harmful to the ozone layer it rises above though burying it in the ground can be a better idea.

Sending them into space seems crazy. That will be very hassle plus we are also polluting other planets which is not good, only to make our planet more cleaner. There is still a solution to prevent a landfill and that is by recycling especially those items who are non degradable. Wastes are normal but it would be better to segregate them properly and don't just throw them away somewhere else.

Even if that's the case, do you believe that such measure is enough in order to prevent pollution? In my opinion, underground water pollution is just as important, and is certainly occurring to an extent, despite what officials claim. That water is finding its way to our seas and beaches, affecting humans and animals altogether.

I find it outstanding that we still haven't figured out a reasonable way to deal with our waste than simply dumping or shipping it somewhere we can't see it. If I remember correctly, Singapore has one of the most advanced waste management facilities by burning waste (which is slightly controversial if you ask me), filtering the generated fumes and use it for power.

We seriously need to find ways to destroy landfills without hurting the world one way or another. I mean look at all the plastic islands called great pacific garbage patch and all that, plus the landfills in every nation. We have waste and that's fine, nobody says we shouldn't have it because it is unrealistic to expect it to be like that.

But, we need to at least find a better way to get rid of it. I do not know how that could be done, maybe you could bury it? Maybe you could send it to space all I care, but we need to find a method for it. No matter how many times climate change deniers cry no foul is going on, we have a big environmental crisis in our hands and we need to do something right now, not later when it is too late.

Unlike some people in this thread, I do believe that Climate Change should be taken seriously because there is a scientific consensus on the matter, and whatever sufferings we currently have in the world, there will be more if we keep ignoring this global challenge. So emissions shouldn't be disregarded, but do we really need space solutions for it? I recently moved to a country where recycling food waste is a norm, something people are expected to do and mostly do. I haven't done organic recycling before, but it took me a whopping couple of days to figure it out and get adjusted. If there's appropriate infrastructure that takes care of organic waste, it's really not a hard thing to do. Same goes for basic recycling of paper, glass, plastic bottles.

A large chunk of american carbon and greenhouse gas emissions are US military.


I wonder which US sectors have the largest CO2 emissions, if a breakdown was made.

There is certainly no push to refit M-1 Abrams tanks with diesel engines that offer better fuel economy and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Its typical for US military vehicles to have the lowest range and worst fuel economy of any vehicle in their class. One element I've always disliked about its composition. Not only does it translate to greater carbon emissions but is also a disadvantage in eras like the present where fuel becomes a scarce commodity.

So does this mean that we should ditch the landfills then? There aren't any better alternatives to landfills AFAIK, and how would Man throw his waste anyway without landfills? We have to admit that the methane produced in landfills is somewhat 'necessary' and that there isn't anything we can do about it just yet until we find out how to possibly covert that methane into something useful. Until then, that methane isn't going anywhere unfortunately.

well its all about numbers
take https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/

1    China                10,432,751,400    
2    United States     5,011,686,600

everyone shouts out that china is bad..
yet. you got to put numbers in prospective

US has 330m population and china has 4-5x population(1400m)

if the US has 15.52 per person..
then china has 7.38 per person..

which in reality is each person in china is twice as good at conserving/preventing co2 as america.

that being said .based on the top 10 countries of population... india has a 1.91 per person pakistan, nigeria, bangladesh are under 1 per person

Now let's talk about something, even though you guys are right, we do know that most rich countries " dump " their waste in the developing or under developed countries, which means that ! The countries getting the dump filled would actually be blamed as the biggest emitter of methane etc.
Even though this would be actually ignored and people would blame poor countries and make list about the biggest emitter of the green house gases like ' methane ' etc. But they would generally ignore this fact as well, so we need to take everything into consideration before we can actually make a usual statment regarding such countries.

Perhaps lack of economics from one perspective, but vibrant with economics from another. While others are throwing away their garbage because they amount to nothing anymore, others are making a living out of it.


Well, at the very least, there are costs involved in developing it. Whoever develops it will have to be paid. Apart from that, there will also be operational costs. They will have to be paid for these as well. And a certain amount of revenue will also be needed for further development or possible extension or whatever.

If your source is correct and that 25% of global warming is caused by methane (these estimations are often wrong to begin with so I take the estimation at face value), then whatever emissions produced from landfills are merely noise in system and of little importance. Humans have to produce pollution, it's a product of existing. The climate change alarmist suggest that crypto mining doesn't produce anything tangible and subsequently becomes an easy target opposed to something like landfills, a necessity. I don't suppose even the most radical climate change activist would support eliminating landfills allowing waste to pile up in local environments.

I don't take these people very seriously, anyways. We would be much better off not trying to aim for a carbon free society and use energy sources until depletion. Then switch to nuclear energy. Carbon based fuel will last at least 5 more decades.

well its the lack of economics,, not profitable to do anything more than dump it.

but isnt it funny for a century it was dumped, and the very second someone mentions biogas.. suddenly they put a roof over it, collect the gas and refuse to give it away unless someone pays them

Well, that's the design at least. These landfills are supposed to be sanitary landfills. And before they're approved, they have to be properly designed in such a way that it is not posing any serious danger to the surrounding communities and beyond. For sure, these landfills secured all the necessary permits and clearances. Alas, satellite data disprove everything. Sanitary landfills are anything but sanitary.  

Probably one reason why the garbage can't be covered properly is that there are actually significant economic activities within sanitary landfills.

Of course it's moire dangerous because CO2 is used by plants, methane is not. It also smells bad.

There's one interesting feature that it has which is combustion that turns it into CO2 and H20 and produces heat in the process. If we were able to separate organic components from our garbage and put it in enclosed compartments to decompose, we'd be able to gather methane and use it for heating instead of propane, butane, petroleum gas and all that.

Food is used to produce biogas and has been since the second world war when it was essential at times.   Its probably a tiny minority to the waste that occurs.   I was recently watching a program in India where this occurs and alot of the food is damaged or wasting crops that are not worth transporting back from market.  
  The obvious first usage is cattle feed for alot of food stuffs but since it can be mixed in with rubbish becoming a potential hazard, food is used for crop fertilizer also I think.  The Indian company I saw mashed and water the food, then fed it into a sealed tank with no air just massive amounts of bacteria designed to consume and produce this gas that can be burnt.  The gas was used on site to heat meals again for workers, but biogas can power cars and many things.

though this topic is about ecology rather than economy.. lets delve into it

carbon and methane are bad chemicals to have in the air which affect the human lungs alot and do have some sway on the climate.. but many people forget the other factors of climate that have been impacted by humans, things that have a more dramatic and noticable change to weather and temperature that people can see but no one seems to talk about

the one facet to think about in regards to methane. which no one thinks about..
each autumn all plants lose their foliage. all fruit plants drop their fruits.
if all of this was not eaten 100% would go to decompose.

yes a small landfill is like thousands of acres worth of foodstuff. put into a small area the size of only a football stadium. so ofcourse it appears like alot of emmission for one area.
but if plants and animals were not consumed 100% of plants and animals would die in fields and rott. where none of their cells are used. thus 100% decompose. so the atmosphere would have alot more methane. just the more methane would be spread out over hundreds of fields instead of the space of 1 field

think about this aswell

when science looks at the % of whats found in the atmosphere.
when they show 400parts per million (0.000,4%) of carbon..
what they sometimes dont explain
is this
imagine you had a plate of 1000g of sausages and 1000g burgers 1000g of beans and 1000g of water (4kg on a plate)
where each represents 25%
if you take 200g of water off the plate.
meaning total is now 3800g of all content
guess what..
it now appears that there are 1000g of 3800g total of sausages
meaning instead of 25% of sausages. there are 26.31% of sausages
..
that said. whats more interesting about climate is the water cycle. due to concrete and tarmac land. water never gets to soak into land to cool it down as much as it did. instead it gets ushered and directed into sewers and pipes. so hardly any of it cools the land. and also hardly any has a chance to evaporate to then create new rain clouds to create new rain for the next day.

take the sahara desert. do you think its hot due to cow farts, and rotting vegetables and car fumes..(though no cars, cows of vegetation has existed there for decades) or because of drought and where flash floods to force waters across the land and straight to rivers and straight to the sea before it has had chance to soak into the land to have a thin enough layer of water to evaporate back up

take a little lesson.

have 3 cups of water.
put 1 cups worth of water in a closed off pipe on a patio slap on your back yard in the sun
put 1 cups of water(still in cup on your back yard patio in the sun.
put 1 cups worth of water(poured out) onto you patio slab in the sun

and just watch
see which one evaporates the most water.
and also take a temperature before and after of
the patio slab with the water pipe
the patio slab with the cup
the patio slab where the puddle was

ENJOY learning about human factors that contribute to climate change in your own back yard

on really hot days of the year. do people complain "dang their air is smokey" or are they saying "dang the air is dry"

many arrid deserts are seeing climate activists do the simple task of putting grass seed and also specific plants that can root well to turn the desert sands into land that gran crab and allow water to soak into the land rather than just wash across the surface.

Methane isn't he primary greenhouse gas.  Its not even close.   

Also, there have been plans for utilizing the methane produced by landfills to generate power for like 40 years.   Never seen or heard of one run yet. 


So the take away here Is..


FUD.   This isn't news

Have a great day !

If we're talking worst-case scenario, everything being dumped randomly, no storage no compressing, no burning, and with the ground being exactly the worst, a clay mixture can keep emitting gas for nearly 25 years. There are claims of over that period but those are just pockets of trapped gas.
The best case scenario advertised for our brand new local ecobiogreennaturefriendly is 5 years with multiple layered waste, heavy recycling on-site, no direct dumping of food waste and use of incinerators, and so on and on, and a ton of money! The same advert claims it to be fully ready for other kinds of development, god knows what that might be, in 10 years.

But I wouldn't want to be the one going around estimating how the landfill is doing even after 10 years, just carpet bomb the shit out of it and be done. My region has always grown both pigs and cattle intensively, we have hundreds of manure pits and I know tens of scary stories when even after one year some went full "witness me!!!' with shovels to dig it out and barely managed to get alive when a pocket of hydrogen sulfide was punctured.


Let's see how long the world last in two cases:
- without bitcoin
- without agriculture
then let's do more of these comparisons that make absolutely no sense.

The issue is actually part of modern world problem...in olden days in certain places people typically have farms which they feed with things generated from their homes that there won't be need to have places for public to pile them up to rot away and pollute the environment. I guess one of the main reasons piling them is more common these days is the synthetic waste that can't be used in farms,which is still part of the modern world problem.

In regards to blaming methane for the heats, I don't think it's the problem assuming earth is built to generate methane and use it efficiently even for warming up the environment in extreme cold weather. The issue is the protective bubble that is covering Earth. If it's weakened while you have zero methane, there will still be the extreme heat problems. If the bubble is strong, even with the presence of methane, you won't have to worry about the extreme heat. The bubble should be strengthed...I'm not sure Methane weakens the bubble

OK, then I guess that I've made a confusion in terms; however, I've read somewhere that recovering methane from the new waste is being pushed (more or less), while I heard nothing about also considering the old waste.
Of course, I have no idea what are all the possible methods for how that "recovering" would work; indeed, burning on-site makes sense - I think that's already being done for municipal centralized heating.


Do you know by chance for how long would a landfill produce this gas, as an approximated estimation? Maybe what I'm asking is stupid though, since one cannot compare the waste of let's say Tampa FL, with the waste of Rio de Janeiro.

This solution will only be kicked into effect provided that the commercial rocket industry booms. That doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon