80's To 3, 000 Landfills: A Growing Problem

All kids should be required to visit a landfill as an educational necessity. One large landfill, the GROWS Landfill, is “part of Waste Management Inc.’s 6,000-acre garbage treatment complex” (Rogers 187). 6,000 acres is roughly the size of 5,000 full football fields, which is enormous when you think about the vast size of this landfill and its trash. Schools should be required by law to make at

Landfills are a major problem in our world. According to Just Live Greener “Every hour, Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles, 90% of which will finish their short lives in a landfill”. If landfills are not stopped, it will impact our Earth. Humans need to be aware of the effect of landfills has on the planet and learn about how to prevent it. Landfills damage our environment. A landfill is where waste can be disposed. One type of landfill is a sanitary landfill. This landfill actually helps the environment. How? The people seal the garbage away. The second type is municipal solid waste. This is also like a sanitary landfill, except it holds more of our household waste. The last type is an unsanitary landfill. This landfill can affect human life and the health of our environment.

Every year Americans collectively create approximately 208 million tons of municipal solid waste, which breaks down to 4.3 pounds of waste generated per American per day. In addition to this normal waste, the United States produces roughly 279 million tons of hazardous waste per year.1 All of this waste has to go somewhere. Two good methods of waste disposal, infrequently used, are incineration and recycling. However, any waste that is not recycled or incinerated ends up in America’s landfills. Landfills that are not in proper working order can pose a serious threat to humans and the environment, but ones that safely store all of their waste may possibly be helpful for the

In Mantua Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey, privately owned land once stood as one of the most hazardous waste sites in the United States. This site known as the Helen Kramer Landfill included 66-acres of waste, 11 acres of unfavorably conditioned vegetation, and no onsite residents. Prior to the early 1960’s, Helen Keller landfill was a sand and gravel excavation operation, but soon began to incorporate the disposal of waste material for about a decade. After the landfill received numerous inspections and notices between 1971 and 1977, the owner Helen Kramer was informed to cease operation of the landfill. As New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection reports indicated and area residents stated, “sporadic chemical

The complex issues surrounding the Agriculture Street Landfill are part of a much larger story about environmental justice and public housing that, while an entrenched part of the city’s history, came to the forefront post-Katrina. According to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Health Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., “a powerfully discriminatory tendency in planning is for environmentally vulnerable low-income neighborhoods to be deemed disposable, whereas equally vulnerable high-income neighborhoods are deemed indispensable because they are more valuable (Morse 2008).” Nowhere has this been more evident than in these poor, black New Orleans neighborhoods, historically dominated by public housing.

Emelle, Alabama not only holds one of the biggest commercial hazardous-waste landfill in America, but African-Americans make up 90% of the population of the town. A Choctaw Native American reservation in Philadelphia, Mississippi holds a 466-acre hazardous landfill (Wright 532). These statistics have revealed the sensitive boundary between racial and social classes. Specific human factors have driven the need for change in environmental practices, such as growing human population, increased natural resource consumption, and the effluent discharges of manufacturing. This situation has resulted in a significant negative impact on world ecosystems (Dietz, Ostrom, and Stern 1907). What ties both of these critical concerns

Fresh Kills Landfill, the largest landfill in the world (former), is located in Staten Island, New York. It is a total of 2200 acres where it opened in 1948 and lasted until March of 2001. The initial goal of the landfill was to remain open for five years, yet it was open longer, if not for a few decades. This landfill was one of the dominant landfills for storing garbage collected around New York City.

Currently, landfills are responsible for 15 million tonnes of C02 in our atmosphere each year. When garbage decomposes, it creates methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This contributes to greenhouse gasses and damages the ozone layer. Landfills take up space, as well as being dangerous and toxic. Rubbish that ends up in our oceans can cause harm to our marine life and poison our water.

Lisa Foderaro in her article discusses how the landfills like the valley of ashes are creating

Have you ever wondered where all the trash goes that you throw out? Most of it ends up in landfills, gets burned or ends up on the street. Landfills are the most cost-efficient ways to get rid of trash for places like the United States but at what price. When waste disintegrates in landfills and water passes through the waste, the resulting liquid is called leachate. When leachate run off encounter local rivers and lakes it can contaminate the water and destroy whole eco systems that live in these areas. Landfill gas consists of naturally occurring methane and carbon dioxide, which form inside the landfill as the waste decomposes. As the gases form, pressure builds up inside a landfill, forcing the gases to move. Some of the gases escape through

When big name brand CSR got involved in waste management and planned to develop a dump site in Werribee they underestimated the backlash that would come, in the process of trying to control the fire they made several PR fiascos. One of the mistakes CSR made when they unveiled the landfill proposal was attempting to disguise the risk factors in hopes that it would create passivity within the community. In their proposal, they summarised that the landfill would be protected by a double clay liner and a leachate collection system, would be state of the art and most importantly would be monitored and regulated by the EPA. In response to this members of the Werribee community highlighted the dangers the landfill would create, these risks included fires, spillages and dust storms that could cross contaminate crops. As a large farming community the crops were an essential source of revenue for the local economy, it would also put the tourism industry under threat. The landfill presented economic, environmental and social risk factors and CSR failed to take the community 's concerns seriously (van Moorst 2001).

Evidence: Eighty percent of the fresh water that we consume is used to grow food. Yet we end up throwing nearly half of that food away. "When you throw out a burger, that's the equivalent of taking a 90-minute shower, "says Dana Gunders from the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Throwing out an apple is like taking a seven-minute shower

In the span of 50 years, the population of humans on this planet have reached all-time highs and continue to rise and with this rise comes the effects of overpopulation. The planet cannot sustain so many people during such a short span of time. Not only is there a loss of space for new generations of humans to live on, but there has been an excessive use of natural resources before there is a chance to replenish them such as food, natural gases, and water. The problem of overpopulation seems to truly encompasses all other aspects of the factors leading to the sixth mass extinction such as habitat loss and global warming. The population must be feed and because of this, million upon millions of acres of land once inhabited by a whole ecosystem have been converted to farmland to provide food for the growing population. In addition, the increase in leads to an increase in waste and therein arises a problem: where to put the waste. In the United States alone, “4.39 pounds of trash per day and up to 56 tons of trash per year are created by the average person” Landfills seemed to be the perfect solution for this problem, however, over the years, “landfill managers have been emphasizing just how quickly they are running out of space. The more people there are on the planet, the more waste is being produced. Some of this waste is quite toxic, and even landfills which are

Many people seem to think that when the nation is looking for a new place to put a landfill, that must mean the old landfills are closing or filling up. This is not necessarily the case. The nation does keep generating large amounts of waste that do need to be handled. However the political statement of “Not in My Backyard”, or Nimby, is really the issue surrounding landfills. Wealthy individuals with political influence do not want to live in a neighborhood with smelly and unsightly piles of trash, so that becomes one less location available for landfills. (Patterson III, 2010) So instead of having a landfill within their own area, some states pay other states, like Kentucky, to take their trash. So now the trash has a further way to travel

New York City, like most cities across the United Sates utilizes landfills to dispose of their waste. Fresh Kills Landfill opened in 1948 and was only intended to be a temporary landfill used for 20 years, however by 1955 it became the largest landfill in the world as it was turned into New York’s primary dumping ground for the second half of the 20th century. At the peak of operation Fresh Kills was receiving twenty barges carry 650 tons of waste each and every day. In March of 2001 Fresh Kills reached capacity and with the urging of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and local residents it was shut down. That left a big question for the Department of Sanitation as to what to do with New York City and its surrounding boroughs trash? (Fresh Kills Park Alliance)