August 2, 2013 • 47 mins
Why does the United States depend so heavily on landfills? What are alternative methods of dealing with trash? Why not just blast it into space?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that looks at the future and says, trash,
go pick it up, don't take your life away. I'm
Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Local, and I'm Joe McCormick. Today
(00:23):
we're gonna talk about waste disposal, the future of it,
the current situation, and what happens to all that garbage
that we generate. Uh. If you listen to our last episode,
we talked a little bit about recycling. Today we're gonna
talk about other stuff. We're talking talking about landfills for example.
That's a good place to start because that's where a
lot of our garbage is up, a whole bunch of it,
lots and lots of it trash. It actually peaked in
(00:45):
the nineteen eighties, didn't it. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we've
gotten better at reducing the amount of garbage that goes
to landfills. Although you know, you could argue that the
amount continues to increase, but it kind of increases with population.
If you look at it as from a per person perspective,
it's going down. Um, But according to the New York Times,
New York City alone sends about ten thousand five tons
(01:08):
of residential garbage to landfills every day per day. Now,
let me think about that a little bit, because New
York City, that's not a place where you can just easily,
oh you know, about a mile away you can. Yeah,
those landfills aren't located in New York at all, not
New York State, not the Northeast. No, they're located in
(01:31):
Ohio and South Carolina. What yeah, they're shipping the garbage
to Ohio and South Carolina. Become a resident of Ohio. Hey, well,
you know, I kind of don't believe you what it's
high on the middle, and I know there's not like
a landfill in the middle of Manhattan, but what yeah, Well,
here's the thing is that with landfills, there is a
(01:52):
fee associated with throwing garbage into landfills. It's not like
there's just a hole that we dun't garbage in two
and then we just stroll a a merrely whistling a
happy tune. Probably for most of us, some of you
there may have a very different experience. But in general,
landfills are operated by private companies and these private companies
charge what is called a tipping fee. Yeah, so y'all,
(02:16):
have you all ever been to a landfill? Yes? I
had to in Florida for school field trips. Yeah. I
was helping somebody remodel a bathroom and we had all
this just junk, you know, from a smashed up tub
and stuff in the back of a truck and we're like, well,
we gotta take it to the landfill. I had no
idea how this worked, but yeah, you pull up and
(02:36):
they weigh your truck, and you go in, you dump
it out, and then you pay when you're leaving, right, Yeah,
to make sure it's see how much the the trash
weight that you dumped in there. In general, the the
tipping fees tend to be per ton. So on an
individual basis like that it would be pretty minor. But
for industrial, industrial use, municipal use, like if it's a
(02:59):
city that that's dumping tons and tons of New York
City tons of garbage, that racks up pretty quickly. So
on average in the United States, that tends to be
between thirty and forty dollars per ton. In the Northeast
that's closer to between seventy and eighty dollars per ton.
It's just landfill space there is is at a premium.
(03:19):
They're very few and they are very expensive, so uh,
it sometimes makes more sense economically speaking, to pay to
have your garbage the stuff you do not want to
be carried a very long way away to be dumped
in someone else's hole. So that's the case with New
York City. They're paying, you know, the shipping charges and
(03:42):
the tipping fees together are still less than it would
cost them if they were dumping the garbage closer to
home now. According to Popular Mechanics, they published a whole
UH article about landfills and myths and misconceptions about landfill
and recycling as well. They said that the United States
(04:04):
has about twenty years of disposal capacity left in existing landfills.
This was two thou eight, and so they said that
there were some places where space was getting a little tight. Uh.
Those spaces one of them Alaska, which considering that's a
huge state, but there's very limited uh landfill space. Connecticut, Delaware,
(04:26):
North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island all have less
than five years capacity, which obviously must have changed since
then because now it's five years later. But the northeastern
part of the country in general has the least available
landfill space, which is why that stuff is getting shipped
down to other landfills. I assume that, yeah, that means
if they don't take their trash to Texas or whatever.
(04:46):
Right well, And while the number of US landfills has
steadily declined, the average size of the landfills in the
United States has actually grown. So not just saying that
the piles of trash are get taller Sarah's Satia Sylvia
Stout style, just throwing my little shell silver state reference
in there, but but that the the land that's granted
(05:10):
to the landfill is is growing as well. Now in
the United States, we have and a lot of this
discussion is going to be about the the US, But
the United States we have lots and lots of land.
I mean, it's a huge country. So it's not actually
that we don't have land to dump trash, and it's
that you don't have appropriate land close enough, right, and
(05:32):
also that you have communities that resist having something like
a landfill put in. Now, you know, landfills are a
means of, uh creating some jobs, though not a whole
lot of them and also pulling in some money though
for mostly a private organization that's running the landfill. But
most communities look down upon it. It's not something that
(05:55):
adds value to a community generally speaking, so there's usually
a resistance. They're not especially fragrant in a good way. No, no,
and they have a they can have a like verminous
animals too. Yes, they do tend to do that. So, UM,
(06:15):
what ends up in a landfill. It's municipal solid waste,
which is made up of the things we tend to
use and then throw away. That includes everything from packaging,
food waste, old furniture, electronic waste, tires, grass clippings, etcetera. UM.
It does not, however, include industrial hazardous or construction waste
(06:36):
that's outside of municipal solid waste. And according to the
e p A, the United States generated about two or
fifty million tons of solid waste. You may have heard
that figure when we were talking about it back in
our previous podcast and UH that was back in two
thousand eleven. That was the most recent report we were
able to get information from UH. And then on average,
(06:57):
Americans recycled and composted a out one point five three
pounds of individual waste generation per day. But we generate
about four point four pounds of waste, So we're generating
four point four we're reclaiming one point five three. The
rest of that gets thrown away, which is more than
half of it um And uh, that stuff either ends
(07:21):
up going to a landfill or in a few places
it may go to an incinerator. But we'll talk about
the incinerator in a second. So about fifty three point
six of all the garbage in the United States ends
up in landfills. And uh, you know, some of that's problematic,
like anything that's organic is going to give off certain
(07:43):
gases that tend to be a little troublesome, like methane.
If you have a lot of organic material all sitting
together and it's just piling up, it'll give off methane,
which is a green euse gas and can affect decomposition. Yeah,
as a decomposers will give off methane. Obviously if you
were burn it, that would cause other issues. Other toxins
would be emitted as well as greenouse gases like carbon
(08:06):
dioxide would would be a byproduct, as as some of
the chemicals and plastics. Well, I know that's plastics breakdown.
But as some of the chemicals start reacting with each other,
you wind up with this toxic soup stuff called a leachate.
You don't want to you don't want that to get
into your water table for example, right right, it can
wind up right penetrating down through the soil and getting
(08:28):
into the water table and causing bad news for everyone around.
And it's bad, bad stuff. So landfills in general are
looked down upon. They're seen as you know, it's a
temporary solution. Really, it's just getting stuff out of sight
so that you don't have to think about them anymore. Though,
let me stick up for landfills in a way for
a second here. I mean, there's always going to be
at least some small amount of garbage that you can't
(08:52):
really do anything else good with and we can't reuse
or recycle in any way. Yeah, yeah, No, there's going
to be some stuff that we are going to end
owner that we cannot reclaim and we cannot you know,
put to some other use. And I mean that's just
a fact of life. But the question is what percentage
of the stuff we're throwing away is that? And it's
it's a much smaller percentage than the amount of stuff
(09:14):
that's actually ending up in landfills. Absolutely, I'm just pointing
out that I think if we're talking down on landfills
in a bit, that the goal should be reducing use
of them, not saying like we should live in a
world where there's no garbage. Yeah, that's that's unrealistic. Although
although part of the problem I think right now is
the manufacturing processes that are leading to uh TO to
(09:36):
waste materials that we have a difficulty post processing. So
so part of the change is going to need to
be our manufacturing right for getting packaging materials that can
actually be broken down in an easy way and and
sorted in an easy way. If you listen to our
recycling podcast, then you know that one of the challenges
is really the sorting process and making sure that the
(10:00):
the materials that are going into a recycling plant are
actually recyclable. In other countries, um, some of this burden
has been pushed onto the manufacturers already. In fact, in Germany, UM,
they they set out a legal precedent that really made
it the job of the manufacturers to figure out how
to deal with all of that, and and and they
(10:20):
created a coalition that has since created a national recycling program,
which is pretty nifty. Would you guys like to know
what what stuff makes up by percentage our municipal solid waste? Please?
Just all right? So how much? How much of a
percentage do you think paper and paperboard make out of
(10:42):
all the municipal solid waste? A thousand thousand percent? Okay,
how much? Jackass? How much food waste? How much food waste?
So paper and paper boards about how much? About food waste? Five?
So close, So it's exactly it's going to go down
(11:05):
from here, so don't go over. Plastic would be about
metals are about nine percent, and then you have a rubber, leather,
and textiles which make up eight percent or a fun
Saturday night wood is about six and glass is about
five percent. So that's that's just the general makeup of
(11:25):
the organic materials and other materials that you find the
municipal solid waste. Now, we did talk a lot about
recycling in that last podcast, and we covered pretty much
everything except well, there's there's some really creative recycling going on. Yeah,
some some dark recycling, some criminal recycling. Soprano, like these
(11:50):
recycling bins fell out the back of a truck. I
I don't think it's it's as organized as they talk
about in in some some movies and television unorganized crime.
Unorganized crime is much better, yes, um, but see see.
The thing is is that the prices for for metals
like copper are skyrocketing, partially due to the electronics industry,
(12:12):
um and and just all of the other industrial uses
that we are finding frost. I think I see where
you're going here. So um, you know you've you wind
up having people stealing things like the bleachers out of
football fields, um and selling them for scrap, or breaking
into an an unoccupied house in or to steal the
(12:33):
copper wiring, stripping out the old copper white wiring, or
pipes shore or um uh, getting the catalytic converter out
of a car and selling that for You have to
slow down. I'm ranging these down for things to help
supplement my income, and you're going too fast. Um. And
kind of the sad thing about this is that when
you sell something for scrap, you're not going to get
very much of it. You know, a set of bleachers,
(12:55):
for example, is going to cost several thousand dollars. You're
going to get about six hundred for it. Um, a
catalytic converter is going to cost about two thousand bucks
to put in your car. It'll get you about a
hundred twenty at the scrap heat. Yeah, it turns out
the the I mean, if you're stealing it, then you
didn't spend any money into this this in the first place.
But well no, I imagine a stealing enterprise. You got
(13:16):
to invest in that like any other business marketing for blachers.
I mean there's manpower and trucks involved in taking those away.
There was an artist named Henry Moore, sculptor who was
very prolific in the sixties through the eighties about and
um made these gorgeous, giant, weird metal sculptures. UM one
of them, one of his reclining figure series, was two
(13:39):
tons in weight about about five thousand pounds in weight
UM worth three million pounds in money British British fellow
so um pound sterling right, and was stolen using a
crane and a truck and melted down. They suspect for
pounds sterling. That doesn't even seem worth it. That's a
(14:00):
lot of crane they need. Its gotta cost a whole
lot to rent a crane. So yeah, you know, you
can't can't just assume that it's like those kids you
know who like they would cheat on tests in school,
but they were like working way harder on the cheating
(14:20):
scheme than it would actually take to study. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
that's the dark side. I guess let's let's talk about well,
let's continue the dark side here. But there are there
are things that people are doing about this. There's UM,
the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries here in the United States,
which is a large organization of companies that are working
(14:41):
towards being more efficient with our resources. Have a theft
alert system in which if someone, for example, steals you
are UM five million dollar statue, you can call them
and say, hey, be on the lookout for this. UM
scrap programs would like that back. Yeah, I wonder, I
mean should should There will be suspicion to begin with,
(15:01):
if somebody shows up with a pickup truck full of
pipes or do people often sell their own pipes? I
think I think it happens in post construction projects, like
if if you're if you're scrapping a house except for
the foundation or something with a famous sculpture in the
back of your truck. Yeah, if you show up with
a truck full of pipes and maybe you know a
(15:23):
lot of meth paraphernalia, someone should be watching out. But
but they people do suspect that the drug addicts are
the largest portion of people who are you. That makes
sense because desperation would could drive you to that sort
of thing. If you'll listen to our previous podcast, we
don't spend the whole time painting recycling with the drug
crime brush. So we're pro recycling, yeah right, pro recycling,
(15:48):
but we're anti steal that thing that was meant for
one purpose so that you can make as on the dollar. Well,
let's talk a little bit about another way of dealing
with trash, which is burning it. That's uh yeah here
in the South, that used to happen in like a
big metal oil drum. Like I remember people, uh in
(16:11):
my my grandparents neighborhood who would occasionally burn parts of
their garbage. Um, because I mean this meant this was
a place where they didn't have any sort of curbside pickup.
You had to haul your garbage out to a dump.
So I mean that totally makes sense, right, because when
you burn something, all of its mass disappears. You can
(16:34):
tell already from the snark emanating from the other two
microphones that this is not necessarily the best idea, depending
upon your facility. Now that that being said, I need
to get this out of the way first. There are
incinerator facilities out there that use very sophisticated methods to
scrub and capture all the toxic materials that are released
from burning garbage, and then they're using the actual burning,
(16:57):
the incinerating of the garbage as a means of generating energy. Well,
you know, it's not just burning like you could imagine
an incenterator that the only purpose for it was just
to get rid of garbage. But that's not the case.
Characters from toy Story right right, It's it's a plot
device to make you more emotionally invested in some three
D animated characters. Uh No, it's usually part of an
(17:21):
energy plant of some sort that they're trying to reclaim energy.
Especially you're reclaiming some of the energy that was used
to make those products by converting it back into uh well,
really you're just applying heat and then usually you're converting
water into steam to turn steam turbines. But there are
other methods as well, and we'll talk about one of
(17:42):
them in a little bit. But because of the definition
of what incenterating is, so a lot of incinerators use combustion.
That's where you're burning trash. You're actually literally burning it
in the uh in you're having oxygen inside the environment.
You're setting fire to stuff. Uh And uh, you know,
in the old incenterators in the United States, and most
(18:03):
the incentrators in the United States are old. There haven't
been a lot of new ones made recently. There weren't
a whole lot of filters systems that would capture a
lot of the toxic materials that would be released, So
stuff would get released into the environment, uh, whether it
was through gases or through the fly ash, which is
really dangerous stuff. Fly ash is the ash that's left
(18:26):
over after you have burned your your trash, and it
can contain concentrated amounts of toxic material in it. Nice
deep breath of diaper and bleach, yeah, and and chlorine
and mercury like all other stuff that's really really really
bad for you, like deadly for you, and to the
(18:48):
point where you know, the disposing of that is its
own industry, where the the ash from these incenterators is
so toxic that it has to be stored in special
containers and dumped in toxic waste areas. Um nasty, nasty stuff.
I mean, you can talk about byproducts like hydrochloric acid,
sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, dioxins, and furins. These are deadly materials. Now,
(19:15):
Like I said, in the United States, there weren't a
whole lot of incinerators that can handle this in a
safe way. In Europe, it's a totally different story. In Europe,
they have incinerators that are designed to capture and scrub
all of this stuff to make it either useful or inert.
So they're generating energy from their garbage. It's not necessarily
the most efficient way of doing it, but it's a
(19:37):
way of dealing with the garbage and reclaiming some of
the energy that was used to produce the products in
the first place. And they're trying their best to make
sure that any kind of emissions are well below the
safety standards of whatever particular nation they are, if they're
in the European Union, etcetera. The United States, again, not
that many incinerators here, um, but there are people who
(20:01):
are trying to build more of them, and some of
them don't fit into the definition of incinerator as far
as combustion goes. Incinerator, as it turns out, in the definition,
is applying thermal energy to garbage in order to treat
it and reclaim energy in some form. So in that case,
one of the things we're talking about in a second,
(20:22):
which are plasma converters, are actually they fall in this
realm of incinerator under that definition. Even they're very much
more efficient and they're not burning so much as applying
huge amounts of energy to break down molecular bonds. But
we'll chat about that in a second. Before we get
to that, let's talk about another way. We've talked about recycling.
We've talked about stuff going to the landfill. One thing
(20:44):
we haven't really touched on is something that another way
of dealing with some garbage, especially organic material, specifically organic
material UH that has a lot of attention in some
parts of the world. In the United States, for example,
UH in San Francisco, there are a lot of people.
In fact, I think it's municipally mandated that you that
you do this, but it's not here in Atlanta, we
(21:06):
don't have this, but composting or for my friends in
the UK composting. Yeah. This this is a This is
a process that uses the natural organic decomposition of of
of materials by microorganisms and UM, you know, basically, all
all you're doing is is mixing some nitrogen heavy materials
(21:28):
you know, UM, grass or food products, UM, with carbon
heavy materials like dry leaves or wood chips or something
like that. UM in the right balance. UM you wanna
you want to process them, you know, to shred them
in some ways so that the micro organisms are going
to have a better surface area to to work off of. UM.
You know, make sure you've got enough air in them
(21:51):
so that they can so that the critters can breathe
m aerobic not anaerobic. Aerobic not anaerobic correct, thank you, UM,
enough water for them to survive and uh around at
the right temperature for them to do their thing. And UM,
it's it's a it's a layering process that that speeds
decomposition at the right rate to create a multua hummus
(22:15):
that you can then use to um to to fertilize
other stuff for many other purposes. Right. So, so this
is uh, this is a way of generating something that's
useful while getting rid of you know, organic garbage. Uh
and uh. And like I said, there are certain areas
of the United States that are very much savvy about this,
(22:37):
like that it's part of the daily existence of living
in that place. Yeah, there are actually some places, um
that are trying to become what's now being called zero
waste cities. Now that's kind of a misnomerum because again,
we don't really have the technology to scre waste right now. Yeah,
So sort of what's going on here is these cities
(22:59):
are saying, like, well, if we can divert not nine
of waste from landfills, we'll just say it's zero, but
mathematics zero, so it's yeah, it's zero ish. It's not
exactly true, but it's still pretty cool. Um. So I
read a Wall Street Journal blog about this from a
(23:20):
couple of years ago. I think it's from September two eleven,
and it was talking about Uh, San Francisco was the
big one at the time. They were they had made
it able to divert seventy seven of all of their
municipal solid waste from landfills, and they did this with
a combination of recycling and composting. And when you think
(23:42):
about it, if you put those together, that takes care
of most of your garbage. Uh. So you know, if
you can do plastic, aluminum, paper products, uh, steel, um,
glass and then food, what have you got left? You know,
just like nasty stuff basically. UM. So, Yeah, there is
(24:05):
a waste management company called Recollogy in uh San Francisco,
and that's not like Reek like Stinchology. It's like r
E C so like so reclaiming, yeah, reclaiming um. And
the way they've got it set up in San Francisco is, uh,
(24:26):
You've you've got three bins basically, and so you've got
a black bin that is just stuff that has to
go to the landfill, you can't do anything about it.
You've got a green bin and that's for composting and
so that would be like food scraps, plants, organic material
(24:47):
kind of thing like napkins that are with soiled with
food products, um. But those are biodegradable also. And then
you've got a blue one that's for mixed recyclables. Um.
And so by putting all this together and by like
a they had like a strong public awareness campaign, and
they make people pay for the trash they throw away,
(25:11):
but not for the stuff they recycled. So it gives
a monetary incentive to recycle and compost and and or
if you prefer a disincentive to throw stuff away, Yeah,
everything you put in the black bin that you could
have put in one of the other bin's, you're losing
money on UM. So yeah, so that's a strong incentive.
And so it'll either encourage recycling and composting or encourage hoarding.
(25:35):
But if you put the wrong stuff in the wrong bin,
apparently you can get an angry visit from the city,
right Maybe maybe not so much angry as gently reminding
you what each bin is surely reminding you in the kneecap,
I'm sure. Yeah, And so I that was There's also
(25:57):
there are other cities like Seattle that they're diverting more
than half of all of their garbage from landfills UM.
So some researchers are also figuring out really cool ways
to use things like composting UM for for greater um
ecological impact. There's a process called compost bioremediation UM and
(26:19):
and this refers to a process of using composting in
the microorganisms that it involves to um to clean out
toxic soils or environments. UM these organisms will will consume
these contaminants and and wind up turning them into into
this this great earthy soil called hemus and uh in
dirt byproducts like like carbon dioxide, water and salts. And
(26:40):
they can process such things as chlorinated and non chlorinated hydrocarbons,
would preserving chemicals, solvents, heavy metals, pesticides, petroleum products, and
even explosives. So so grounds that have had this problem
can be composted basically and reclaimed. Reclaimed composting guitar squeel
(27:02):
not the kind of heavy metal, but but yeah, like so,
compost collected in cities can be really useful for local agriculture.
Think of in a normal when you send all your
banana appeals to a landfill, I mean that that's kind
of a slap in the face to the farmers nearby.
Could be perfectly getting, could be slipping on banana peals
(27:23):
till the cows come home, and the cows could start
slipping on banana appeals. But farmers love slipping on banana peals.
Good to know, all right, let's talk about plasma converters
plasma waste converters. So we've talked about this before. The
idea here it's and this falls into the incineration radar
category even though it's not combustion. The idea is to
apply a high voltage electric arc to garbage, which causes
(27:49):
it to do one of two things. If it's if
it's organic. If it's carbon based, it gasifies, turns into
a gas which you then vent off and you cool
through a very um extensive process because that that gas
is super hot when it's escaping, so you have to
cool it down. After you cool it down, and you
can actually make it do work, you can have it
convert water into steam and turn steam turbines, so you
(28:12):
can reclaim some of the energy that way. Obviously you're
not gonna reclaim everything that way. You're gonna that's an
energy sink if that's all you do with it. But
then you can also um scrub the gas. You have
to do that because just like with the the combustion methods,
it's nasty stuff and then go a lot of nasty
stuff in it. You want to get rid of that
(28:33):
nasty stuff, so you can use special chemicals to help
capture all the stuff that is nasty and convert that
into to something that you can then dispose of safely,
although it's still you know, there's still some toxic material there,
so it's kind of like the incinerators where you still
have to find a way of getting rid of that
stuff safely. Everything else, though, UH can be turned into
(28:56):
a sin gas, a synthetic form of natural gas, and
burns about the same as natural gas does, so it
does give off some carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.
It's not like it's perfectly clean fuel, but it does
mean that you can use that sin gas to not
only run the facility, but if you have enough organic
material in the garbage you're processing, and organic material is
(29:17):
what makes up most of the garbage that's being sent
to landfills UH, you can actually then sell excess electricity
back to a power grid. So in other words, you
can help take some of the load off of other
power generating facilities and use use garbage as a way
of generating electricity. The other thing that happens is the
(29:37):
stuff that's inorganic, the non carbon based stuff, turns into slag,
which looks like volcanic rock. It looks like the stuff
you would see on the side of volcanoes, this black, glassy,
obsidian like substance. Uh. That's if it just cools naturally
by air, Like if you just let it drain off
and then cool, that's what looks like a like a
(29:59):
building are. Yeah, you can use it as anything from
aggregate so essentially like gravel, or you can actually use
it in building materials like you can build You can
use it to help create concrete or bricks, that kind
of stuff. If you cool it. If you if you
were to let the slag hit water, then it would
beat up and turn into this pebbly kind of material. Uh,
(30:20):
if you were to blow compressed air through it, you
would look like a maniac. But you would also generate
what's called rock wool. And rock wool is this very
fluffy substance looks kind of like cotton. Really, it's so
great for installation. It also can soak up oil while
still floating on the surface of water, so you could
actually use it to help with oil spills and that
(30:41):
kind of stuff for cleaning purposes. Um, it's it's neat stuff.
And the fact that you could do all of this
if you co located the plasmafication the gasification facility next
to a power generating facility, and you did that on
the side of a landfill. Depending upon the capacity of
(31:01):
the plasma waste converter, you could take in all incoming
garbage and even start to mind the landfill itself, so
you could with enough time make the landfill essentially reclaim
the landfill for other use um. Now grant that would
take decades of time, but it could happen. You would
be reversing the trend of the landfill filling up and
(31:22):
making it empty out. Now possibly with some of that
compost by remediation, you would be able to reclaim the
land eventual. Yeah, yeah, it's quite possible. Uh. Now, obviously
not everything would go into a plasma gasification chamber either.
Anything that was metal would you know, you'd have to
sort it kind of like we were talking about with recycling.
(31:43):
You want to pre sort the stuff before you put
it into the furnace. So anything that was metal you
could reclaim and recycle in other ways so that you
didn't just have it melt down with as part of
the slag. Uh. And then you would grind all that
garbage up. You would have grinders that would turn into
baller pieces, and then that's what the plasma torch would
then make break apart. Molecularly speaking, it actually breaks the
(32:07):
molecular bonds. It's pouring so much energy into that material that, yeah,
well it's just the bonds that hold it together, the
actual chemical bonds that would normally keep the stuff in
whatever form it's in, break apart, and you get these
various elements all turning into either gas or like I said,
a molten slag. So that's your basic plasma converter approach.
(32:33):
There are a few facilities. There's actually one that is
being proposed here in the United States that could take
I think four hundred tons per day of plasma gasification.
This comes to me as of, like thirty seconds before
I started talking, I got an email from Dr Louis Cercio,
who is an expert on plasma converters. He's one of
(32:54):
the guys who actually kind of pioneered this technology. Um,
and he works at the George Tech And I actually
emailed him earlier today and he just got back to me.
I was just reading the email before we started chatting,
which is kind of cool. UM. So there are a
few facilities. Most of them are in Japan's just a
couple of them. Uh, And there aren't. Like I said,
(33:15):
there are other problems. Just like withincinerators, you still have
some byproducts you have to worry about, but it's you
measure that against the impact of landfills and then you
have to decide whether or not it makes sense economically
and environmentally. Um, but what about other solutions to our
our garage problem. I got an idea. This solves everything. Okay,
(33:38):
we've talked about landfills and recycling and composting and that
are blah blah bla bla blah. Why don't we just
shoot it into space? Right? I mean, that's like the
easy way we goes forever. You just aim it at
the Sun and Star Trek Generations teaches us that a
rocket can reach the Sun like in thirty seconds. So
you sell like a man who's seen the movie Super
(34:00):
in for ah, yes, the Quest for Peace. Yeah you can.
In that case, it was nuclear weapons we were throwing
into the sun. But why stop there. Let's just throw
all of our garbage into the sun. And I mean
it's like a giant plasma. In fact, it is a
giant plasma, Joe, why don't we do this? Well, I
mean number one, As we've talked about before, space launches
(34:22):
are just mega crazy expensive and resource gobbling. It would
make absolutely knows it would cost ten thousand dollars per
pound of every uh pound of garbage you put into orbit.
And that's just into orbit. So that would mean you'd
get it far enough up to like collide with the
(34:43):
I S S or something while it's floating around. You
actually have to take it further out beyond our Earth orbit,
which you know, if you didn't take it that far
it eventually you just get sucked back into orbit, right,
So you have to really shoot it out there with
space garbage, which would end up causing potential major problems
(35:04):
with things like satellites, the I S S, any other
kind of space slips on up an an appeal. That's
that's serious. Business is moving at per hour, That's that's serious. Yeah,
if you're going to shoot garbage into space, it would
it would probably be more economical to just bury it
under diamonds. So first create a diamond mine, yeah, and
(35:27):
then underneath it. Yeah right, yeah, I can see. I
can see why he's shooting it into space, might not
be the best idea, darn it. Whatever my starter. Yeah,
you could just pay Tom Cruise by the hour to
figure out an idea for something to do with it.
Johnny Depp or who's the highest paid, right maybe Robert
(35:50):
Downey Jr. After that Avengers deal and some serious cash
right there, So we'll get in the nineties, right right, Well,
I'll get on the horn with with r DJ and
see what he has to say about the whole thing.
But I don't know. I think I think if we
if we get together some kind of reality show about
shipping garbage to Mars. That's a little slide take that
(36:14):
Mars one. Okay, no, but this is actually this This
does make me think of something interesting. Um. So, everything
we've been talking about is earthbound. Um, but there's still
a garbage problem once we leave Earth, right well, I
mean yeah, I mean we're still going to be generating
waste hypothetically if we if we haven't gotten our gotten
(36:35):
our stuff together to reuse absolutely everything that we I mean,
or to manufacture in a way that we do not
create waste. Yeah, there's waste in space. So I was
reading there's an NBC report from and it estimates that
a four person crew in space, I think on the
I S S is what I was talking about, uses
about eleven pounds of waste daily, not uses produces. So
(37:00):
four people produce about eleven pounds. See, that's still better
than here on Earth, or at least, but especially in
the United States. We should say, like when I quoted
that four point four pounds of waste generated per day
per person, that's in the United States. There are other
places in the world that are where people generate less,
much less, significantly less waste per day. I think we're
(37:20):
behind only Japan and the amount of packaging that we use.
So anyway, so in space they're using less than the
typical United States citizen. Oh, I mean you'd have to
imagine that, because what is this waste? I mean, we're
paying huge amounts of money to ship it up there,
whatever it is. Um, So we got to find out
something useful to do with it. You can't let waste
(37:42):
pile up in a pressurized cabin in orbit around the Earth. Uh.
If you like your garbage can in the I S
S would not only stink mightily, um, but it would
probably be biohazard. You know, it's it's just not a
good idea. Um, So you need to find a way
to dispose of waste in space. In the past, what
(38:05):
they used to do with the from the I S
s as well, they just bag it up and make
these little like garbage footballs duct taped up and then
they put that back on the shuttle and the shuttle
would return it to Earth the most expensive curbside in history. Yeah.
Well no, I wasn't returning just for the garbage. But
you know, if you happen to be in the neighborhood
(38:27):
taking you swing by and take these footballs of waste, please.
So they used to do that, but now no more shuttle.
Uh So now you can put it in a module
that basically when it comes by, it will take your
trash away and drop it into the atmosphere so it
can burn up on reentry. Um. But that still means
(38:48):
you've got all this waste hanging around on the space
station until somebody can come take it away from you.
If you just throw it out the hatch, it will
continue along in orbit with you and potentially collide with you.
Cause trouble like that. If you launch it out real fast,
it can you can meet it the other way around.
(39:10):
It's just you just it's yeah. Um. So there have
been a lot of different ideas about what we should
do with space trash. One of the interesting things they
read about was this idea of heat pump dehumidification drying. Um.
What heat pump dehumidification drying and so what that is? It? Say,
(39:34):
you imagine that astronauts are producing some food waste, okay um,
and that is accumulating. What are you going to do
with it? Well, this idea, if it worked, what it
would do is put the waste in a capsule and
then you blast that with hot air in a way
(39:54):
that dehydrates the waste enough to make it bioneutral, so
it's not going to rot. Yeah. And at the same time,
the dehumidification process renders excess moisture, which is gold. You know,
you need every drop of water you can get, So
that's sort of a two in one. Um. So you
(40:16):
can prevent it from rotting while it's up there with you,
and you can get water from it. And I guess
then the idea would still be you'd have this dehydrated
trash that eventually you need to cart away and and
throw into the uh, the atmosphere or whatever they do
with it. Um, not ideal, but that that would be
somewhat of an improvement. UM. A while back, NASA experiment
(40:41):
in the Kennedy Space Center was experimenting with this thing
called the Research Space bio Converter, and that was a
way of doing composting in space. Yeah. And so basically
the idea was they would, um, they had this big
rotating drum that you put excess biomass in, and it
would allow anaerobic decomposition by micro organisms that use nitrate
(41:05):
instead of oxygen, because you don't want to waste oxygen
on bacteria. You know, you need that to breathe, and
all the oxygen you're giving them you're taking away from
the astronauts. So but instead and of course there's some
anaerobic decomposition UM that just smells nasty, and having astronauts
(41:27):
locked up in a pressurized cabin with a horrible smell
is psychological torture and you don't yeahs again so charming,
okay um, And but yeah, these micro organisms use nitrate,
and so that was one idea. Another idea is people
(41:50):
are trying to see if they can find a way
to turn waste in space back into usable propellant or
rocket fuel. Huh. Interesting because you think about a lot
of organic compounds like that that you would see in food.
Waste can easily break down to stuff like methane which
burns and could be used potentially as a supplementary propellant.
(42:15):
Um and so that's one more idea. Interesting, but it
is interesting that we're going to have to do something
about this if we're if we're talking about long term
space exploration, not so much because actually the waste itself
is more of a problem on the I S S
because you're in orbit around the Earth. You don't want
to launch it out uh to be a problem for
(42:38):
you to collide with satellites and stuff like that. If
you're flying to Mars, that's not quite as much of
a problem. I mean, you could potentially just launched stuff
out that yeah, litter the Solar System once you get
on Mars. I guess you would just be littering up
the planet. Huh, there's a planet there for that. That
that's the thing too. I actually read one really smart
(42:59):
comment is a good reason not to be littering the
Solar System is not to contaminate future experiments that are
looking for signs of life. Right, So if we contaminate
Mars or Europa with our garbage, it's entirely possible that
we could create an ecosystem on these planets of bacteria
by putting them there, or or at least we could
(43:21):
end up making it impossible for us to determine what
life may have at one point or even currently existed
on that that body. Like. You know, there was the
story about the Curiosity rover detecting some methane and that
the initial response, especially in the blogosphere, was, uh, Curiosity
discovers signs of potentially signs of life on Mars, because
(43:44):
methane is an organic compound, right, And then there were
some people who cautioned and said, we need to determine
whether or not this methane was in fact something that
pre existed on the planet, or was something that was
brought along with the Curiosity rover that was actually a
contaminant that the Curiosity over brought in. What a lot
of people think now is that is in fact what
they think that they said that the the amount was
(44:04):
so small and that there have been no further detections
of methane that it appears that this was in fact
a contaminant from Earth. So it's a good example is
saying that, you know, if we're if the purpose of
developing a colony on Mars is primarily one to conduct
scientific research, you don't want to contaminate that research by
just dumping your garbage out there on the red planet. Yeah,
(44:28):
and so so there's the garbage problem itself. But then,
like we like came up in all of these examples,
whenever you're throwing stuff away, you're missing an opportunity to
reclaim and to reuse. You want to try and reclaim
as much of that as possible, and part of that
is also about saving energy on just producing new stuff, right.
(44:50):
It's not just that you know you're saving the environment,
but if you think of it from an energy perspective,
like how much energy do you have to expend in
order to create the stuff you use? If you can
do do that with less energy by reclaiming things that
otherwise you would have thrown away, then that's a long
game right there. That's much better than saying, well, yeah,
(45:12):
granted we could, uh, we can. We've got plenty of
the raw material here, there's no scarcity issue, but it
still might be an energy issue. You know, even if
it's something that is easily uh, the raw materials are
easy for you to get. So for example, glass, if
you can reuse or recycle the glass, even though you're
(45:33):
not reclaiming as much energy overall, yeah, it's still a
little bit, you know, it's still it's still better than
going out and building all new stuff. So, uh, you know,
from an energy perspective, it's really important to crack the
nut on this whole waste problem. So even you know,
beyond just the the environmental concerns, which are by no
(45:55):
means trivial, it's important stuff. So I mean that's why
we wanted to do a full episode on it and
really look at what is the future of of trash
and garbage and what can we what can we do
to uh to reduce it as much as possible and
reclaim as much as we can. So I guess that
wraps this up. Does anyone have anything else they want
to talk about before I I finish? Joe, I was
(46:19):
gonna try to quote a lyric by that band Garbage,
but then I couldn't remember if the lyric that was
in my head was actually them Stupid girl. All right,
So guys, that wraps up this conversation about trash. Why
don't you let us know what you think? Write write
us and tell us what do you think about the
future of garbage? What? What? What would your solution be.
Do you think there's something that we didn't cover that
(46:41):
we should have, uh, you know, taken time to to
talk about. We want to hear from you. Write us.
Our email address is FW thinking at discovery dot com,
or you can go to FW thinking dot com. That's,
of course where you will find all the videos, the blogs,
the podcasts, links to other information that's that are all
about the topics we've talked about today, and you can
(47:02):
learn even more about this. We are excited to hear
from you, and we will talk to you again really soon.
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota.
(47:27):
Let's go places.
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that looks at the future and says, trash,
go pick it up, don't take your life away. I'm
Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Local, and I'm Joe McCormick. Today
(00:23):
we're gonna talk about waste disposal, the future of it,
the current situation, and what happens to all that garbage
that we generate. Uh. If you listen to our last episode,
we talked a little bit about recycling. Today we're gonna
talk about other stuff. We're talking talking about landfills for example.
That's a good place to start because that's where a
lot of our garbage is up, a whole bunch of it,
lots and lots of it trash. It actually peaked in
(00:45):
the nineteen eighties, didn't it. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we've
gotten better at reducing the amount of garbage that goes
to landfills. Although you know, you could argue that the
amount continues to increase, but it kind of increases with population.
If you look at it as from a per person perspective,
it's going down. Um, But according to the New York Times,
New York City alone sends about ten thousand five tons
(01:08):
of residential garbage to landfills every day per day. Now,
let me think about that a little bit, because New
York City, that's not a place where you can just easily,
oh you know, about a mile away you can. Yeah,
those landfills aren't located in New York at all, not
New York State, not the Northeast. No, they're located in
(01:31):
Ohio and South Carolina. What yeah, they're shipping the garbage
to Ohio and South Carolina. Become a resident of Ohio. Hey, well,
you know, I kind of don't believe you what it's
high on the middle, and I know there's not like
a landfill in the middle of Manhattan, but what yeah, Well,
here's the thing is that with landfills, there is a
(01:52):
fee associated with throwing garbage into landfills. It's not like
there's just a hole that we dun't garbage in two
and then we just stroll a a merrely whistling a
happy tune. Probably for most of us, some of you
there may have a very different experience. But in general,
landfills are operated by private companies and these private companies
charge what is called a tipping fee. Yeah, so y'all,
(02:16):
have you all ever been to a landfill? Yes? I
had to in Florida for school field trips. Yeah. I
was helping somebody remodel a bathroom and we had all
this just junk, you know, from a smashed up tub
and stuff in the back of a truck and we're like, well,
we gotta take it to the landfill. I had no
idea how this worked, but yeah, you pull up and
(02:36):
they weigh your truck, and you go in, you dump
it out, and then you pay when you're leaving, right, Yeah,
to make sure it's see how much the the trash
weight that you dumped in there. In general, the the
tipping fees tend to be per ton. So on an
individual basis like that it would be pretty minor. But
for industrial, industrial use, municipal use, like if it's a
(02:59):
city that that's dumping tons and tons of New York
City tons of garbage, that racks up pretty quickly. So
on average in the United States, that tends to be
between thirty and forty dollars per ton. In the Northeast
that's closer to between seventy and eighty dollars per ton.
It's just landfill space there is is at a premium.
(03:19):
They're very few and they are very expensive, so uh,
it sometimes makes more sense economically speaking, to pay to
have your garbage the stuff you do not want to
be carried a very long way away to be dumped
in someone else's hole. So that's the case with New
York City. They're paying, you know, the shipping charges and
(03:42):
the tipping fees together are still less than it would
cost them if they were dumping the garbage closer to
home now. According to Popular Mechanics, they published a whole
UH article about landfills and myths and misconceptions about landfill
and recycling as well. They said that the United States
(04:04):
has about twenty years of disposal capacity left in existing landfills.
This was two thou eight, and so they said that
there were some places where space was getting a little tight. Uh.
Those spaces one of them Alaska, which considering that's a
huge state, but there's very limited uh landfill space. Connecticut, Delaware,
(04:26):
North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island all have less
than five years capacity, which obviously must have changed since
then because now it's five years later. But the northeastern
part of the country in general has the least available
landfill space, which is why that stuff is getting shipped
down to other landfills. I assume that, yeah, that means
if they don't take their trash to Texas or whatever.
(04:46):
Right well, And while the number of US landfills has
steadily declined, the average size of the landfills in the
United States has actually grown. So not just saying that
the piles of trash are get taller Sarah's Satia Sylvia
Stout style, just throwing my little shell silver state reference
in there, but but that the the land that's granted
(05:10):
to the landfill is is growing as well. Now in
the United States, we have and a lot of this
discussion is going to be about the the US, But
the United States we have lots and lots of land.
I mean, it's a huge country. So it's not actually
that we don't have land to dump trash, and it's
that you don't have appropriate land close enough, right, and
(05:32):
also that you have communities that resist having something like
a landfill put in. Now, you know, landfills are a
means of, uh creating some jobs, though not a whole
lot of them and also pulling in some money though
for mostly a private organization that's running the landfill. But
most communities look down upon it. It's not something that
(05:55):
adds value to a community generally speaking, so there's usually
a resistance. They're not especially fragrant in a good way. No, no,
and they have a they can have a like verminous
animals too. Yes, they do tend to do that. So, UM,
(06:15):
what ends up in a landfill. It's municipal solid waste,
which is made up of the things we tend to
use and then throw away. That includes everything from packaging,
food waste, old furniture, electronic waste, tires, grass clippings, etcetera. UM.
It does not, however, include industrial hazardous or construction waste
(06:36):
that's outside of municipal solid waste. And according to the
e p A, the United States generated about two or
fifty million tons of solid waste. You may have heard
that figure when we were talking about it back in
our previous podcast and UH that was back in two
thousand eleven. That was the most recent report we were
able to get information from UH. And then on average,
(06:57):
Americans recycled and composted a out one point five three
pounds of individual waste generation per day. But we generate
about four point four pounds of waste, So we're generating
four point four we're reclaiming one point five three. The
rest of that gets thrown away, which is more than
half of it um And uh, that stuff either ends
(07:21):
up going to a landfill or in a few places
it may go to an incinerator. But we'll talk about
the incinerator in a second. So about fifty three point
six of all the garbage in the United States ends
up in landfills. And uh, you know, some of that's problematic,
like anything that's organic is going to give off certain
(07:43):
gases that tend to be a little troublesome, like methane.
If you have a lot of organic material all sitting
together and it's just piling up, it'll give off methane,
which is a green euse gas and can affect decomposition. Yeah,
as a decomposers will give off methane. Obviously if you
were burn it, that would cause other issues. Other toxins
would be emitted as well as greenouse gases like carbon
(08:06):
dioxide would would be a byproduct, as as some of
the chemicals and plastics. Well, I know that's plastics breakdown.
But as some of the chemicals start reacting with each other,
you wind up with this toxic soup stuff called a leachate.
You don't want to you don't want that to get
into your water table for example, right right, it can
wind up right penetrating down through the soil and getting
(08:28):
into the water table and causing bad news for everyone around.
And it's bad, bad stuff. So landfills in general are
looked down upon. They're seen as you know, it's a
temporary solution. Really, it's just getting stuff out of sight
so that you don't have to think about them anymore. Though,
let me stick up for landfills in a way for
a second here. I mean, there's always going to be
at least some small amount of garbage that you can't
(08:52):
really do anything else good with and we can't reuse
or recycle in any way. Yeah, yeah, No, there's going
to be some stuff that we are going to end
owner that we cannot reclaim and we cannot you know,
put to some other use. And I mean that's just
a fact of life. But the question is what percentage
of the stuff we're throwing away is that? And it's
it's a much smaller percentage than the amount of stuff
(09:14):
that's actually ending up in landfills. Absolutely, I'm just pointing
out that I think if we're talking down on landfills
in a bit, that the goal should be reducing use
of them, not saying like we should live in a
world where there's no garbage. Yeah, that's that's unrealistic. Although
although part of the problem I think right now is
the manufacturing processes that are leading to uh TO to
(09:36):
waste materials that we have a difficulty post processing. So
so part of the change is going to need to
be our manufacturing right for getting packaging materials that can
actually be broken down in an easy way and and
sorted in an easy way. If you listen to our
recycling podcast, then you know that one of the challenges
is really the sorting process and making sure that the
(10:00):
the materials that are going into a recycling plant are
actually recyclable. In other countries, um, some of this burden
has been pushed onto the manufacturers already. In fact, in Germany, UM,
they they set out a legal precedent that really made
it the job of the manufacturers to figure out how
to deal with all of that, and and and they
(10:20):
created a coalition that has since created a national recycling program,
which is pretty nifty. Would you guys like to know
what what stuff makes up by percentage our municipal solid waste? Please?
Just all right? So how much? How much of a
percentage do you think paper and paperboard make out of
(10:42):
all the municipal solid waste? A thousand thousand percent? Okay,
how much? Jackass? How much food waste? How much food waste?
So paper and paper boards about how much? About food waste? Five?
So close, So it's exactly it's going to go down
(11:05):
from here, so don't go over. Plastic would be about
metals are about nine percent, and then you have a rubber, leather,
and textiles which make up eight percent or a fun
Saturday night wood is about six and glass is about
five percent. So that's that's just the general makeup of
(11:25):
the organic materials and other materials that you find the
municipal solid waste. Now, we did talk a lot about
recycling in that last podcast, and we covered pretty much
everything except well, there's there's some really creative recycling going on. Yeah,
some some dark recycling, some criminal recycling. Soprano, like these
(11:50):
recycling bins fell out the back of a truck. I
I don't think it's it's as organized as they talk
about in in some some movies and television unorganized crime.
Unorganized crime is much better, yes, um, but see see.
The thing is is that the prices for for metals
like copper are skyrocketing, partially due to the electronics industry,
(12:12):
um and and just all of the other industrial uses
that we are finding frost. I think I see where
you're going here. So um, you know you've you wind
up having people stealing things like the bleachers out of
football fields, um and selling them for scrap, or breaking
into an an unoccupied house in or to steal the
(12:33):
copper wiring, stripping out the old copper white wiring, or
pipes shore or um uh, getting the catalytic converter out
of a car and selling that for You have to
slow down. I'm ranging these down for things to help
supplement my income, and you're going too fast. Um. And
kind of the sad thing about this is that when
you sell something for scrap, you're not going to get
very much of it. You know, a set of bleachers,
(12:55):
for example, is going to cost several thousand dollars. You're
going to get about six hundred for it. Um, a
catalytic converter is going to cost about two thousand bucks
to put in your car. It'll get you about a
hundred twenty at the scrap heat. Yeah, it turns out
the the I mean, if you're stealing it, then you
didn't spend any money into this this in the first place.
But well no, I imagine a stealing enterprise. You got
(13:16):
to invest in that like any other business marketing for blachers.
I mean there's manpower and trucks involved in taking those away.
There was an artist named Henry Moore, sculptor who was
very prolific in the sixties through the eighties about and
um made these gorgeous, giant, weird metal sculptures. UM one
of them, one of his reclining figure series, was two
(13:39):
tons in weight about about five thousand pounds in weight
UM worth three million pounds in money British British fellow
so um pound sterling right, and was stolen using a
crane and a truck and melted down. They suspect for
pounds sterling. That doesn't even seem worth it. That's a
(14:00):
lot of crane they need. Its gotta cost a whole
lot to rent a crane. So yeah, you know, you
can't can't just assume that it's like those kids you
know who like they would cheat on tests in school,
but they were like working way harder on the cheating
(14:20):
scheme than it would actually take to study. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
that's the dark side. I guess let's let's talk about well,
let's continue the dark side here. But there are there
are things that people are doing about this. There's UM,
the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries here in the United States,
which is a large organization of companies that are working
(14:41):
towards being more efficient with our resources. Have a theft
alert system in which if someone, for example, steals you
are UM five million dollar statue, you can call them
and say, hey, be on the lookout for this. UM
scrap programs would like that back. Yeah, I wonder, I
mean should should There will be suspicion to begin with,
(15:01):
if somebody shows up with a pickup truck full of
pipes or do people often sell their own pipes? I
think I think it happens in post construction projects, like
if if you're if you're scrapping a house except for
the foundation or something with a famous sculpture in the
back of your truck. Yeah, if you show up with
a truck full of pipes and maybe you know a
(15:23):
lot of meth paraphernalia, someone should be watching out. But
but they people do suspect that the drug addicts are
the largest portion of people who are you. That makes
sense because desperation would could drive you to that sort
of thing. If you'll listen to our previous podcast, we
don't spend the whole time painting recycling with the drug
crime brush. So we're pro recycling, yeah right, pro recycling,
(15:48):
but we're anti steal that thing that was meant for
one purpose so that you can make as on the dollar. Well,
let's talk a little bit about another way of dealing
with trash, which is burning it. That's uh yeah here
in the South, that used to happen in like a
big metal oil drum. Like I remember people, uh in
(16:11):
my my grandparents neighborhood who would occasionally burn parts of
their garbage. Um, because I mean this meant this was
a place where they didn't have any sort of curbside pickup.
You had to haul your garbage out to a dump.
So I mean that totally makes sense, right, because when
you burn something, all of its mass disappears. You can
(16:34):
tell already from the snark emanating from the other two
microphones that this is not necessarily the best idea, depending
upon your facility. Now that that being said, I need
to get this out of the way first. There are
incinerator facilities out there that use very sophisticated methods to
scrub and capture all the toxic materials that are released
from burning garbage, and then they're using the actual burning,
(16:57):
the incinerating of the garbage as a means of generating energy. Well,
you know, it's not just burning like you could imagine
an incenterator that the only purpose for it was just
to get rid of garbage. But that's not the case.
Characters from toy Story right right, It's it's a plot
device to make you more emotionally invested in some three
D animated characters. Uh No, it's usually part of an
(17:21):
energy plant of some sort that they're trying to reclaim energy.
Especially you're reclaiming some of the energy that was used
to make those products by converting it back into uh well,
really you're just applying heat and then usually you're converting
water into steam to turn steam turbines. But there are
other methods as well, and we'll talk about one of
(17:42):
them in a little bit. But because of the definition
of what incenterating is, so a lot of incinerators use combustion.
That's where you're burning trash. You're actually literally burning it
in the uh in you're having oxygen inside the environment.
You're setting fire to stuff. Uh And uh, you know,
in the old incenterators in the United States, and most
(18:03):
the incentrators in the United States are old. There haven't
been a lot of new ones made recently. There weren't
a whole lot of filters systems that would capture a
lot of the toxic materials that would be released, So
stuff would get released into the environment, uh, whether it
was through gases or through the fly ash, which is
really dangerous stuff. Fly ash is the ash that's left
(18:26):
over after you have burned your your trash, and it
can contain concentrated amounts of toxic material in it. Nice
deep breath of diaper and bleach, yeah, and and chlorine
and mercury like all other stuff that's really really really
bad for you, like deadly for you, and to the
(18:48):
point where you know, the disposing of that is its
own industry, where the the ash from these incenterators is
so toxic that it has to be stored in special
containers and dumped in toxic waste areas. Um nasty, nasty stuff.
I mean, you can talk about byproducts like hydrochloric acid,
sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, dioxins, and furins. These are deadly materials. Now,
(19:15):
Like I said, in the United States, there weren't a
whole lot of incinerators that can handle this in a
safe way. In Europe, it's a totally different story. In Europe,
they have incinerators that are designed to capture and scrub
all of this stuff to make it either useful or inert.
So they're generating energy from their garbage. It's not necessarily
the most efficient way of doing it, but it's a
(19:37):
way of dealing with the garbage and reclaiming some of
the energy that was used to produce the products in
the first place. And they're trying their best to make
sure that any kind of emissions are well below the
safety standards of whatever particular nation they are, if they're
in the European Union, etcetera. The United States, again, not
that many incinerators here, um, but there are people who
(20:01):
are trying to build more of them, and some of
them don't fit into the definition of incinerator as far
as combustion goes. Incinerator, as it turns out, in the definition,
is applying thermal energy to garbage in order to treat
it and reclaim energy in some form. So in that case,
one of the things we're talking about in a second,
(20:22):
which are plasma converters, are actually they fall in this
realm of incinerator under that definition. Even they're very much
more efficient and they're not burning so much as applying
huge amounts of energy to break down molecular bonds. But
we'll chat about that in a second. Before we get
to that, let's talk about another way. We've talked about recycling.
We've talked about stuff going to the landfill. One thing
(20:44):
we haven't really touched on is something that another way
of dealing with some garbage, especially organic material, specifically organic
material UH that has a lot of attention in some
parts of the world. In the United States, for example,
UH in San Francisco, there are a lot of people.
In fact, I think it's municipally mandated that you that
you do this, but it's not here in Atlanta, we
(21:06):
don't have this, but composting or for my friends in
the UK composting. Yeah. This this is a This is
a process that uses the natural organic decomposition of of
of materials by microorganisms and UM, you know, basically, all
all you're doing is is mixing some nitrogen heavy materials
(21:28):
you know, UM, grass or food products, UM, with carbon
heavy materials like dry leaves or wood chips or something
like that. UM in the right balance. UM you wanna
you want to process them, you know, to shred them
in some ways so that the micro organisms are going
to have a better surface area to to work off of. UM.
You know, make sure you've got enough air in them
(21:51):
so that they can so that the critters can breathe
m aerobic not anaerobic. Aerobic not anaerobic correct, thank you, UM,
enough water for them to survive and uh around at
the right temperature for them to do their thing. And UM,
it's it's a it's a layering process that that speeds
decomposition at the right rate to create a multua hummus
(22:15):
that you can then use to um to to fertilize
other stuff for many other purposes. Right. So, so this
is uh, this is a way of generating something that's
useful while getting rid of you know, organic garbage. Uh
and uh. And like I said, there are certain areas
of the United States that are very much savvy about this,
(22:37):
like that it's part of the daily existence of living
in that place. Yeah, there are actually some places, um
that are trying to become what's now being called zero
waste cities. Now that's kind of a misnomerum because again,
we don't really have the technology to scre waste right now. Yeah,
So sort of what's going on here is these cities
(22:59):
are saying, like, well, if we can divert not nine
of waste from landfills, we'll just say it's zero, but
mathematics zero, so it's yeah, it's zero ish. It's not
exactly true, but it's still pretty cool. Um. So I
read a Wall Street Journal blog about this from a
(23:20):
couple of years ago. I think it's from September two eleven,
and it was talking about Uh, San Francisco was the
big one at the time. They were they had made
it able to divert seventy seven of all of their
municipal solid waste from landfills, and they did this with
a combination of recycling and composting. And when you think
(23:42):
about it, if you put those together, that takes care
of most of your garbage. Uh. So you know, if
you can do plastic, aluminum, paper products, uh, steel, um,
glass and then food, what have you got left? You know,
just like nasty stuff basically. UM. So, Yeah, there is
(24:05):
a waste management company called Recollogy in uh San Francisco,
and that's not like Reek like Stinchology. It's like r
E C so like so reclaiming, yeah, reclaiming um. And
the way they've got it set up in San Francisco is, uh,
(24:26):
You've you've got three bins basically, and so you've got
a black bin that is just stuff that has to
go to the landfill, you can't do anything about it.
You've got a green bin and that's for composting and
so that would be like food scraps, plants, organic material
(24:47):
kind of thing like napkins that are with soiled with
food products, um. But those are biodegradable also. And then
you've got a blue one that's for mixed recyclables. Um.
And so by putting all this together and by like
a they had like a strong public awareness campaign, and
they make people pay for the trash they throw away,
(25:11):
but not for the stuff they recycled. So it gives
a monetary incentive to recycle and compost and and or
if you prefer a disincentive to throw stuff away, Yeah,
everything you put in the black bin that you could
have put in one of the other bin's, you're losing
money on UM. So yeah, so that's a strong incentive.
And so it'll either encourage recycling and composting or encourage hoarding.
(25:35):
But if you put the wrong stuff in the wrong bin,
apparently you can get an angry visit from the city,
right Maybe maybe not so much angry as gently reminding
you what each bin is surely reminding you in the kneecap,
I'm sure. Yeah, And so I that was There's also
(25:57):
there are other cities like Seattle that they're diverting more
than half of all of their garbage from landfills UM.
So some researchers are also figuring out really cool ways
to use things like composting UM for for greater um
ecological impact. There's a process called compost bioremediation UM and
(26:19):
and this refers to a process of using composting in
the microorganisms that it involves to um to clean out
toxic soils or environments. UM these organisms will will consume
these contaminants and and wind up turning them into into
this this great earthy soil called hemus and uh in
dirt byproducts like like carbon dioxide, water and salts. And
(26:40):
they can process such things as chlorinated and non chlorinated hydrocarbons,
would preserving chemicals, solvents, heavy metals, pesticides, petroleum products, and
even explosives. So so grounds that have had this problem
can be composted basically and reclaimed. Reclaimed composting guitar squeel
(27:02):
not the kind of heavy metal, but but yeah, like so,
compost collected in cities can be really useful for local agriculture.
Think of in a normal when you send all your
banana appeals to a landfill, I mean that that's kind
of a slap in the face to the farmers nearby.
Could be perfectly getting, could be slipping on banana peals
(27:23):
till the cows come home, and the cows could start
slipping on banana appeals. But farmers love slipping on banana peals.
Good to know, all right, let's talk about plasma converters
plasma waste converters. So we've talked about this before. The
idea here it's and this falls into the incineration radar
category even though it's not combustion. The idea is to
apply a high voltage electric arc to garbage, which causes
(27:49):
it to do one of two things. If it's if
it's organic. If it's carbon based, it gasifies, turns into
a gas which you then vent off and you cool
through a very um extensive process because that that gas
is super hot when it's escaping, so you have to
cool it down. After you cool it down, and you
can actually make it do work, you can have it
convert water into steam and turn steam turbines, so you
(28:12):
can reclaim some of the energy that way. Obviously you're
not gonna reclaim everything that way. You're gonna that's an
energy sink if that's all you do with it. But
then you can also um scrub the gas. You have
to do that because just like with the the combustion methods,
it's nasty stuff and then go a lot of nasty
stuff in it. You want to get rid of that
(28:33):
nasty stuff, so you can use special chemicals to help
capture all the stuff that is nasty and convert that
into to something that you can then dispose of safely,
although it's still you know, there's still some toxic material there,
so it's kind of like the incinerators where you still
have to find a way of getting rid of that
stuff safely. Everything else, though, UH can be turned into
(28:56):
a sin gas, a synthetic form of natural gas, and
burns about the same as natural gas does, so it
does give off some carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.
It's not like it's perfectly clean fuel, but it does
mean that you can use that sin gas to not
only run the facility, but if you have enough organic
material in the garbage you're processing, and organic material is
(29:17):
what makes up most of the garbage that's being sent
to landfills UH, you can actually then sell excess electricity
back to a power grid. So in other words, you
can help take some of the load off of other
power generating facilities and use use garbage as a way
of generating electricity. The other thing that happens is the
(29:37):
stuff that's inorganic, the non carbon based stuff, turns into slag,
which looks like volcanic rock. It looks like the stuff
you would see on the side of volcanoes, this black, glassy,
obsidian like substance. Uh. That's if it just cools naturally
by air, Like if you just let it drain off
and then cool, that's what looks like a like a
(29:59):
building are. Yeah, you can use it as anything from
aggregate so essentially like gravel, or you can actually use
it in building materials like you can build You can
use it to help create concrete or bricks, that kind
of stuff. If you cool it. If you if you
were to let the slag hit water, then it would
beat up and turn into this pebbly kind of material. Uh,
(30:20):
if you were to blow compressed air through it, you
would look like a maniac. But you would also generate
what's called rock wool. And rock wool is this very
fluffy substance looks kind of like cotton. Really, it's so
great for installation. It also can soak up oil while
still floating on the surface of water, so you could
actually use it to help with oil spills and that
(30:41):
kind of stuff for cleaning purposes. Um, it's it's neat stuff.
And the fact that you could do all of this
if you co located the plasmafication the gasification facility next
to a power generating facility, and you did that on
the side of a landfill. Depending upon the capacity of
(31:01):
the plasma waste converter, you could take in all incoming
garbage and even start to mind the landfill itself, so
you could with enough time make the landfill essentially reclaim
the landfill for other use um. Now grant that would
take decades of time, but it could happen. You would
be reversing the trend of the landfill filling up and
(31:22):
making it empty out. Now possibly with some of that
compost by remediation, you would be able to reclaim the
land eventual. Yeah, yeah, it's quite possible. Uh. Now, obviously
not everything would go into a plasma gasification chamber either.
Anything that was metal would you know, you'd have to
sort it kind of like we were talking about with recycling.
(31:43):
You want to pre sort the stuff before you put
it into the furnace. So anything that was metal you
could reclaim and recycle in other ways so that you
didn't just have it melt down with as part of
the slag. Uh. And then you would grind all that
garbage up. You would have grinders that would turn into
baller pieces, and then that's what the plasma torch would
then make break apart. Molecularly speaking, it actually breaks the
(32:07):
molecular bonds. It's pouring so much energy into that material that, yeah,
well it's just the bonds that hold it together, the
actual chemical bonds that would normally keep the stuff in
whatever form it's in, break apart, and you get these
various elements all turning into either gas or like I said,
a molten slag. So that's your basic plasma converter approach.
(32:33):
There are a few facilities. There's actually one that is
being proposed here in the United States that could take
I think four hundred tons per day of plasma gasification.
This comes to me as of, like thirty seconds before
I started talking, I got an email from Dr Louis Cercio,
who is an expert on plasma converters. He's one of
(32:54):
the guys who actually kind of pioneered this technology. Um,
and he works at the George Tech And I actually
emailed him earlier today and he just got back to me.
I was just reading the email before we started chatting,
which is kind of cool. UM. So there are a
few facilities. Most of them are in Japan's just a
couple of them. Uh, And there aren't. Like I said,
(33:15):
there are other problems. Just like withincinerators, you still have
some byproducts you have to worry about, but it's you
measure that against the impact of landfills and then you
have to decide whether or not it makes sense economically
and environmentally. Um, but what about other solutions to our
our garage problem. I got an idea. This solves everything. Okay,
(33:38):
we've talked about landfills and recycling and composting and that
are blah blah bla bla blah. Why don't we just
shoot it into space? Right? I mean, that's like the
easy way we goes forever. You just aim it at
the Sun and Star Trek Generations teaches us that a
rocket can reach the Sun like in thirty seconds. So
you sell like a man who's seen the movie Super
(34:00):
in for ah, yes, the Quest for Peace. Yeah you can.
In that case, it was nuclear weapons we were throwing
into the sun. But why stop there. Let's just throw
all of our garbage into the sun. And I mean
it's like a giant plasma. In fact, it is a
giant plasma, Joe, why don't we do this? Well, I
mean number one, As we've talked about before, space launches
(34:22):
are just mega crazy expensive and resource gobbling. It would
make absolutely knows it would cost ten thousand dollars per
pound of every uh pound of garbage you put into orbit.
And that's just into orbit. So that would mean you'd
get it far enough up to like collide with the
(34:43):
I S S or something while it's floating around. You
actually have to take it further out beyond our Earth orbit,
which you know, if you didn't take it that far
it eventually you just get sucked back into orbit, right,
So you have to really shoot it out there with
space garbage, which would end up causing potential major problems
(35:04):
with things like satellites, the I S S, any other
kind of space slips on up an an appeal. That's
that's serious. Business is moving at per hour, That's that's serious. Yeah,
if you're going to shoot garbage into space, it would
it would probably be more economical to just bury it
under diamonds. So first create a diamond mine, yeah, and
(35:27):
then underneath it. Yeah right, yeah, I can see. I
can see why he's shooting it into space, might not
be the best idea, darn it. Whatever my starter. Yeah,
you could just pay Tom Cruise by the hour to
figure out an idea for something to do with it.
Johnny Depp or who's the highest paid, right maybe Robert
(35:50):
Downey Jr. After that Avengers deal and some serious cash
right there, So we'll get in the nineties, right right, Well,
I'll get on the horn with with r DJ and
see what he has to say about the whole thing.
But I don't know. I think I think if we
if we get together some kind of reality show about
shipping garbage to Mars. That's a little slide take that
(36:14):
Mars one. Okay, no, but this is actually this This
does make me think of something interesting. Um. So, everything
we've been talking about is earthbound. Um, but there's still
a garbage problem once we leave Earth, right well, I
mean yeah, I mean we're still going to be generating
waste hypothetically if we if we haven't gotten our gotten
(36:35):
our stuff together to reuse absolutely everything that we I mean,
or to manufacture in a way that we do not
create waste. Yeah, there's waste in space. So I was
reading there's an NBC report from and it estimates that
a four person crew in space, I think on the
I S S is what I was talking about, uses
about eleven pounds of waste daily, not uses produces. So
(37:00):
four people produce about eleven pounds. See, that's still better
than here on Earth, or at least, but especially in
the United States. We should say, like when I quoted
that four point four pounds of waste generated per day
per person, that's in the United States. There are other
places in the world that are where people generate less,
much less, significantly less waste per day. I think we're
(37:20):
behind only Japan and the amount of packaging that we use.
So anyway, so in space they're using less than the
typical United States citizen. Oh, I mean you'd have to
imagine that, because what is this waste? I mean, we're
paying huge amounts of money to ship it up there,
whatever it is. Um, So we got to find out
something useful to do with it. You can't let waste
(37:42):
pile up in a pressurized cabin in orbit around the Earth. Uh.
If you like your garbage can in the I S
S would not only stink mightily, um, but it would
probably be biohazard. You know, it's it's just not a
good idea. Um, So you need to find a way
to dispose of waste in space. In the past, what
(38:05):
they used to do with the from the I S
s as well, they just bag it up and make
these little like garbage footballs duct taped up and then
they put that back on the shuttle and the shuttle
would return it to Earth the most expensive curbside in history. Yeah.
Well no, I wasn't returning just for the garbage. But
you know, if you happen to be in the neighborhood
(38:27):
taking you swing by and take these footballs of waste, please.
So they used to do that, but now no more shuttle.
Uh So now you can put it in a module
that basically when it comes by, it will take your
trash away and drop it into the atmosphere so it
can burn up on reentry. Um. But that still means
(38:48):
you've got all this waste hanging around on the space
station until somebody can come take it away from you.
If you just throw it out the hatch, it will
continue along in orbit with you and potentially collide with you.
Cause trouble like that. If you launch it out real fast,
it can you can meet it the other way around.
(39:10):
It's just you just it's yeah. Um. So there have
been a lot of different ideas about what we should
do with space trash. One of the interesting things they
read about was this idea of heat pump dehumidification drying. Um.
What heat pump dehumidification drying and so what that is? It? Say,
(39:34):
you imagine that astronauts are producing some food waste, okay um,
and that is accumulating. What are you going to do
with it? Well, this idea, if it worked, what it
would do is put the waste in a capsule and
then you blast that with hot air in a way
(39:54):
that dehydrates the waste enough to make it bioneutral, so
it's not going to rot. Yeah. And at the same time,
the dehumidification process renders excess moisture, which is gold. You know,
you need every drop of water you can get, So
that's sort of a two in one. Um. So you
(40:16):
can prevent it from rotting while it's up there with you,
and you can get water from it. And I guess
then the idea would still be you'd have this dehydrated
trash that eventually you need to cart away and and
throw into the uh, the atmosphere or whatever they do
with it. Um, not ideal, but that that would be
somewhat of an improvement. UM. A while back, NASA experiment
(40:41):
in the Kennedy Space Center was experimenting with this thing
called the Research Space bio Converter, and that was a
way of doing composting in space. Yeah. And so basically
the idea was they would, um, they had this big
rotating drum that you put excess biomass in, and it
would allow anaerobic decomposition by micro organisms that use nitrate
(41:05):
instead of oxygen, because you don't want to waste oxygen
on bacteria. You know, you need that to breathe, and
all the oxygen you're giving them you're taking away from
the astronauts. So but instead and of course there's some
anaerobic decomposition UM that just smells nasty, and having astronauts
(41:27):
locked up in a pressurized cabin with a horrible smell
is psychological torture and you don't yeahs again so charming,
okay um, And but yeah, these micro organisms use nitrate,
and so that was one idea. Another idea is people
(41:50):
are trying to see if they can find a way
to turn waste in space back into usable propellant or
rocket fuel. Huh. Interesting because you think about a lot
of organic compounds like that that you would see in food.
Waste can easily break down to stuff like methane which
burns and could be used potentially as a supplementary propellant.
(42:15):
Um and so that's one more idea. Interesting, but it
is interesting that we're going to have to do something
about this if we're if we're talking about long term
space exploration, not so much because actually the waste itself
is more of a problem on the I S S
because you're in orbit around the Earth. You don't want
to launch it out uh to be a problem for
(42:38):
you to collide with satellites and stuff like that. If
you're flying to Mars, that's not quite as much of
a problem. I mean, you could potentially just launched stuff
out that yeah, litter the Solar System once you get
on Mars. I guess you would just be littering up
the planet. Huh, there's a planet there for that. That
that's the thing too. I actually read one really smart
(42:59):
comment is a good reason not to be littering the
Solar System is not to contaminate future experiments that are
looking for signs of life. Right, So if we contaminate
Mars or Europa with our garbage, it's entirely possible that
we could create an ecosystem on these planets of bacteria
by putting them there, or or at least we could
(43:21):
end up making it impossible for us to determine what
life may have at one point or even currently existed
on that that body. Like. You know, there was the
story about the Curiosity rover detecting some methane and that
the initial response, especially in the blogosphere, was, uh, Curiosity
discovers signs of potentially signs of life on Mars, because
(43:44):
methane is an organic compound, right, And then there were
some people who cautioned and said, we need to determine
whether or not this methane was in fact something that
pre existed on the planet, or was something that was
brought along with the Curiosity rover that was actually a
contaminant that the Curiosity over brought in. What a lot
of people think now is that is in fact what
they think that they said that the the amount was
(44:04):
so small and that there have been no further detections
of methane that it appears that this was in fact
a contaminant from Earth. So it's a good example is
saying that, you know, if we're if the purpose of
developing a colony on Mars is primarily one to conduct
scientific research, you don't want to contaminate that research by
just dumping your garbage out there on the red planet. Yeah,
(44:28):
and so so there's the garbage problem itself. But then,
like we like came up in all of these examples,
whenever you're throwing stuff away, you're missing an opportunity to
reclaim and to reuse. You want to try and reclaim
as much of that as possible, and part of that
is also about saving energy on just producing new stuff, right.
(44:50):
It's not just that you know you're saving the environment,
but if you think of it from an energy perspective,
like how much energy do you have to expend in
order to create the stuff you use? If you can
do do that with less energy by reclaiming things that
otherwise you would have thrown away, then that's a long
game right there. That's much better than saying, well, yeah,
(45:12):
granted we could, uh, we can. We've got plenty of
the raw material here, there's no scarcity issue, but it
still might be an energy issue. You know, even if
it's something that is easily uh, the raw materials are
easy for you to get. So for example, glass, if
you can reuse or recycle the glass, even though you're
(45:33):
not reclaiming as much energy overall, yeah, it's still a
little bit, you know, it's still it's still better than
going out and building all new stuff. So, uh, you know,
from an energy perspective, it's really important to crack the
nut on this whole waste problem. So even you know,
beyond just the the environmental concerns, which are by no
(45:55):
means trivial, it's important stuff. So I mean that's why
we wanted to do a full episode on it and
really look at what is the future of of trash
and garbage and what can we what can we do
to uh to reduce it as much as possible and
reclaim as much as we can. So I guess that
wraps this up. Does anyone have anything else they want
to talk about before I I finish? Joe, I was
(46:19):
gonna try to quote a lyric by that band Garbage,
but then I couldn't remember if the lyric that was
in my head was actually them Stupid girl. All right,
So guys, that wraps up this conversation about trash. Why
don't you let us know what you think? Write write
us and tell us what do you think about the
future of garbage? What? What? What would your solution be.
Do you think there's something that we didn't cover that
(46:41):
we should have, uh, you know, taken time to to
talk about. We want to hear from you. Write us.
Our email address is FW thinking at discovery dot com,
or you can go to FW thinking dot com. That's,
of course where you will find all the videos, the blogs,
the podcasts, links to other information that's that are all
about the topics we've talked about today, and you can
(47:02):
learn even more about this. We are excited to hear
from you, and we will talk to you again really soon.
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota.
(47:27):
Let's go places.
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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