The Municipal Solid Waste Dilemma Essay

However, the pipes below the lined bottom that are designed to catch leachate, which is the run off of water that passes through the waste and into the soil or underground water, doesn’t always catch all of the toxic substance. The toxins pollute lakes, streams and aquifers. The decomposition of waste also gives off methane and carbon dioxide gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect. If not properly vented, it could result in an explosion. Another disadvantage is that the landfill will stay the same size because of the improper mixture of elements for

The leachate collection system is what collects any water that has been contaminated by seeping through the waste in a landfill. Leachate refers to the water that has been contaminated. If the system happens to fail for any reason, the leachate can contaminate groundwater, the source of many communities' drinking water.9

In addition, there exist some environmental risks related to producing landfill. Even though the Australian Federal Government is not offering incentives to repurpose waste, some communities and State and Local governments are offering incentives for this practice. The main purpose of this is to avoid the disposing of waste in landfills, due to the fact that it requires so much time, energy and space, injuring our planet's health (McCabe,

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.

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

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

When garbage or waste materials are tossed into a landfill, people are just asking for nauseating odors and polluted land sites. In Kathy P. Anderson’s article, “THE ENVIRONMENT: Reducing Waste,” she describes that liners are located beneath landfills and when the weather becomes a problem, those liners can leak, allowing leachate to attract to the surface. Saying this, she writes about the quality of environment after a leak: “The leachate then carries pollutants through the soil under the landfill to groundwater and to nearby rivers and lakes. When people or wildlife drink the poisoned water, they can get sick or die” (Anderson). If a liner were to leak, pollutants could be poisonous in the water and be harmful to not only individuals but

To begin waste disposal, is removing and destroying or storing damaged unwanted domestic. Disposal includes burning, burial at landfill sites, and recycling. Trash cans, can affect groundwater quality, especially if you dispose of it improperly. Roadside dumps as well

Landfills are a growing problem yet statistics claim that landfills have gone down from 8,000 landfills in the 80’s to 3,000 landfills today. While this is true, it is misleading as it failed to mention that as the years have passed, many have switched from small, local landfills to mega-landfills. Facts like these often understate the issue as landfills are a vague topic for most, needing more public attention and discussion. Landfills will take 450 years at minimum to degrade and when decomposed, turns into many toxic products. It takes up so much space while simultaneously ruining the soil for future farming use. This is important for the ever growing population where space is getting more valuable and early precautions will definitely help.

Once disposed of, solid waste is transported by a garbage truck to a landfill or a tip garbage site. Landfill and garbage tip sites bring multiple environmental issues, and once these landfill

Landfills are bad for our environment because buildings a regional landfill could also negatively impact the property values of surrounding properties. One more fuat is the risk for groundwater contamination is too great. For my last example is there's already a problem with loose trash on commonly traveled routes to the existing transfer station.

1. As of 1991, the EPA set a requirement for all landfills to have a several foot liner to prevent seepage from permitting the groundwater and causing health risks. The liner is made to last over 100 years and creates a dry environment inside of the landfill. The repercussion of this is that many decomposable items in the landfill become preserved, leaving more trash than necessary.

There are some reasons for the problem. The first reason is that the effects of the thrown rubbish are very dangerous and extremely harmful. According to Miller (1987), global industrial organizations produce over 80,000 different chemicals (para. 5). Basically, garbage is old, dirty and wet, so that it is a perfect place for bacteria and other viruses to stay in. Rubbish growth in cities has been a problem all over the world for centuries. Landfills have always been regarded as sources of illnesses and unpleasant smells. The harmful wastes from the garbage spread through the ground from paint, chemicals, petrol, batteries, and other toxic materials that have been thrown away into the garbage. The toxic chemicals get into the water pipes and spread through the people’s drinking water. Another reason of that problem is that people have created all these disasters, which are connected with environmental pollution. The more modern technologies are created, the more unbelievable become wastes and remains of what is produced. From this, man is responsible for what he or she created and for the following consequences. Anxieties about the environment have made people more aware of their environmental footprints or the kind of waste they leave behind during their existence. The difficulty is that an average person leaves an incredible amount of wastes in his or her lifetime. According to Lovejoy (1912), all biodegradable substances, contained in

Bioreactor is a modern landfills introduced in solid waste management, thus this concept are not fully universally applied yet. The objective of this bioreactor landfills involving disposal solely of inert materials after universally applied. Therefore, it is likely that landfills will continue to receive a variety of materials with potential for environmental impact. As the leachable materials are land disposed, impenetrable barriers are provided and waste stabilization is enhanced and accelerated so as to occur within the life of these barriers (Lee & Jones- Lee, 1996). That is, the landfill must be designed and operated as a bioreactor. This bioreactor landfills is equipped with liners and leachate collection systems. It operated and controlled to rapidly accelerate the biological stabilization of the land filled waste. The crucial process in bioreactor landfills is leachate recirculation, which leachate is recycled back to the landfill, to create the environment favorable to rapid microbial decomposition of the biodegradable solid waste (Lee & Jones- Lee, 1996). Additional advantages of the bioreactor landfill include increased gas production rates over a shorter duration, improved leachate quality, and more rapid landfill settlement. Instead of that, bioreactor operations protect the environment and reduce long- time liability and associated monitoring costs (Reinhart & Townsend, 1997). The rapid treatment of the waste facilitates the operation of a bioreactor landfill

Increasing numbers of natural resources are consumed by modern society, causing growing demands of waste disposals at the same time. Statistical results showed that landfill facilities had been used as a main solid waste disposal approach in the past decades. Landfill leachate is the one of primary concerns of landfill operation. Application of reliable barriers underneath waste disposal sites to protect underground water resources has become an important research subject. However, any defect of liner systems can put environment at risk due to the possible leakage. A large number of factors could cause the landfill liner failures in different ways. One of the main factor is provided by not enough interface shear strength of the composite liner.