How Landfills Work

Well-planned landfills have only recently come into widespread use. Recently, waste managers have found that they work a little too well and now the landfill is being reinvented.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you Stuff you Should Know from house stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
and this is stuff you should know. Hi. How's it going.

(00:22):
It's great? Good, Good to yourself. I found this topic
and I was starting to tell you before how interesting
I thought it wasn't. Yeah, you went it's awesome. I
was like, stop, it's gold. So now I'm going to
say it. It's awesome. And landfills, the concept of a landfill,

(00:44):
even though it ain't perfect, it's pretty neat. Yeah. And
even though we need to reduce the amount of trash,
especially Americans produce. Yeah, um, there is still going to
be trash in the world and it needs to be
dealt with. And this is way better than the old days. Uh,
when in like pre nineteen thirty New York City they

(01:07):
would dump their garbage in the ocean. And then between
nineteen thirty and we still do that. You realize New
York City doesn't dump it right in the Atlantic Ocean, No,
but a lot of garbage is dumped in the ocean. Yeah. Well,
we talked about the Great Pacific garbage back um. And
then between the nineteen thirties and the nineteen seventies they
had what they called dumps, which is a big hole

(01:28):
in the ground covered in rats and birds, and then
you would just dump garbage to leach into everything. Yes,
which is messed up. And the e p A comes
along and I think the sixties, definitely the seventies, and
was like, uh, we need to do something better about this.
But so the the idea of the landfill was born

(01:51):
in about the sixties, I believe. Well, well, the first
modern sanitary landfill was ninety seven and Fries. Now, okay,
that's right, and it's like a national his or place
or something, because it kind of kicked off the whole thing.
But it wasn't until the sixties and seventies that they
started passing law saying that, like every state really needs
to start doing the same thing. Right, And like you
said before that they just dumped their trash in a pit,

(02:14):
which people have been doing for millennia at least. Um.
They were burning their trash also, and it sounds mind
bogglingly awful and it is, especially from environmental standpoint, but
they didn't have the trash problem that we have now
in the sixties. Since the nineties sixties are trash generation,

(02:36):
municipal solid waste generation has um doubled, tripled, tripled, And
I was like, why is that? What's going on? Apparently
it's the advent of cheap packaging, Before styrofoam packaging, before plastic,
before aluminum cans, that everybody just threw away. Everything was

(02:57):
wrapped in a T shirt that you could wear exactly,
And like when you weren't carrying around a slab of
meat in the T shirt from the butcher to your house,
you wore your T shirt so you reused it, right, No,
but no, you would you would have maybe like, um,
do you remember when Sam the butcher brought Alice the
meat BC Boys reference about um Stone driving around with

(03:20):
two which is I guess a really weird way of
putting in his barefoot well that didn't rhyme bald feet anyway.
He would bring it to her wrapped in like white
butcher's paper, and she would throw it away and it
would really not take up much space to the dump.
It would decompose. It wasn't like styrofoam, which lasts for

(03:42):
fifty thou years, right, And so starting about packaging, especially
very non biodegradable packaging, took off like a rocket. Yeah
you could still go to the butcher though now you
can and you get it in paper, but you go
to that big chain grocery store and it's going to
be plastic and starmer foam. So between nineteen are packaging

(04:07):
waste increased. That meant that we had to do something.
We had a lot more trash and we had to
take care of this trash and ways that we had before.
And so the modern landfill based on that Fresno model
uh boomed And fortunately that's right. But even now they're

(04:27):
finding we went too far in one direction. Now we
need to adjust it, massage it a little bit, refine it.
And we were we were coming up with a new
generation of landfills. That's right. So, uh, if you're talking
about a landfill, the goal of a landfill is not
to compost trash. And a lot of people probably don't

(04:48):
know this. It's not to compost trash such that it
breaks down super quickly uh and biodegrades. It is the
opposite of that. It is to keep it as dry
as possible in an air tight and and just bury
it lock it away from the surrounding world. That's right.
And so that's what a landfill is, a sanitary landfill,

(05:08):
municipal solid waste or MSW landfill. Um, they isolate the
trash from the environment. They don't just dump it on
the dirt and let things leach in. And this thus
begins the landfill podcasts. There are a lot of components
to that, but that's along and short of it. It's true.
And um what what that's called. The whole idea behind

(05:30):
that landfill that was in reaction to that's one dry
tomb is the industry lingo for it. It's and it
it was created in reaction to trash just being allowed
to seep into the ground water and methane to just
leak out into the air blow up. Apparently houses that

(05:53):
have utility pipes that pass by old landfills, methane will
get into those utility pipes and like get in mixed
in with the electricity and when you go to plug
in your toaster and it sparks kaboom. Really, yes, it's
a problem with old landfills because they were all idiots
with trash like up until the sixties, seventies, eighties, UM

(06:16):
and even still we have a big problem with trash,
but nothing like it was before. As far as taking
care of it, is starting to really get a handle
on it. Americans produce four point six pounds of trash
per day per person. Yeah, and you know what's crazy
is you think, well, America's probably like as bad as
it gets. Know, the UK is America is like in

(06:37):
the middle roughly for trash generation, and the UK is
the worst. They produced per capita, they produced the most,
and um, they also throw away the most. They have
the lowest recovery rate. Um, although it's gone up. I
believe I think they had like some sort of national
initiative because it says here that it won up from

(07:00):
thirty one percent recovery rate, which is like recycling and
that kind of stuff, um, basically diverting it from the landfill.
So it's actually better than America as far as the
resource recovery rate goes. Canada is the worst. I'm sorry,
Canada is the worst. Yeah, that's hard to believe. I
would think so too, but it's true. The standout is Germany.

(07:22):
Germany produces way more trash per person than any other
country per capita, but they also have the highest recovery
rate at like almost of their trash gets diverted from
the landfill. That's amazing, Actually that's efficient. What what's the
American number on that diversion? It hovers about a third

(07:43):
for at least a couple of decades, now, maybe three decades,
you could say Americans diverted about they diverted about a
third of their trash from the landfill. You'd like to
see that number get better in three decades for sure,
and it's always hovers around thirty three, and uh, it
should be a lot better than that. You know. That

(08:03):
sounds like to me, whoever is in charge of doing
that study is just like, let's just use last numbers.
We can all live with that, right, all right. So
if you want to landfill in your municipality, um, you're
going to have to start with a proposal by saying.
You can't just go start Yeah, you gotta look around
and say we need to landfill everybody. So let's uh

(08:27):
do an environmental impact study and let's let's find an area.
Let's find a lot of acreage. Um. Because I think
they use the North Wake County Landfill in Raleigh, North
Carolina as a their go to example, in this article,
so our how stuff work started two and thirty acres
of land, about seventy acres of which is the actual landfill.

(08:48):
So you're gonna need a lot of land, and you're
gonna have to do an environmental impact study to determine
a lot of things. How much land do you have, Yeah,
if there's enough of it, sure? Um. What type of
soil you have and what bedrock is underneath it? Very important? Um.
How water flows over the surface of the site. Yeah,

(09:08):
does it flow right down into the river? Does it
perfully right right exactly? Um? And then the uh, the
impact it's going to have on local wildlife. Sure. And
if it's an historic site, like an archaeological site, yeah,
you don't want to landfill on an archaeological site. What's
funny is if you, um, if you go back and
look at the Fresh Kills landfill, which is one of

(09:28):
the biggest in the world New York, right, Yeah, and
it wasn't even the only one for New York. Yes,
And the guy who created the high line, James Corner,
is um creating a park there out of it, like
a massive, massive park. Interesting. I think like three times
the size of Central Park are they calling it cancer Park.

(09:50):
I think they're avoiding that. Okay, I don't remember what
it's called. I wrote a really interesting New York Magazine
article about it, though. It really well written and clever
um where it's basically like, that's awesome, that's awesome, this
guy's got this great vision. And then but it's a landfill.
You know, I'm sure at the end of the day,
it's still buried garbage exactly. Um. Alright, So when we

(10:11):
talked about the bedrock, that's really important because if you have,
what would you really want to try and prevent when
you're building a landfill or operating landfill is um leakage
and seepage. That was like the that was the big
thing when the e PA came along and started saying like,
you can't just bare your trash anywhere there's groundwater, dummies,
and like, as trash decomposes, it's not just like old

(10:34):
coca cola and banana peals. When those things break down
instead of mixing together, some really horrific stuff like ammonia
gets produced and that gets into the groundwater, and all
of a sudden, you're drinking ammonia. That's bad for you. Yeah,
that's called the it's called leech eight is the liquid
um or garbage juice is another words that. That's a
better way to say it, because that defines it all

(10:55):
in one go, right and um, the whole point of
the of the dry tomb in fill was to do
everything you could to prevent this garbage that you're burying
from reaching the the water table. Right, So you study
that bedrock. If it's too fractured, it's not gonna work
because it's going to seep into that junk. No mines,

(11:15):
no quarries, because they probably already have broken through the
water table before they were abandoned. That's right. But at
the same time, you also need to be able to
sink wells in various points, so you can't the bedrock
needs to allow for that as well. That's right. Like
you're really looking for a specific area when we talked
about the water flow, of course, you don't want it
flowing near wetlands or any kind of rivers or streams.

(11:35):
That's a no brainer. Fresh Kills is an old marsh
land that they just filled the marshes and lakes in
with garbage. What what did they name it? That is
that the area or like that kills is a Dutch
word for stream, Okay, because I was about to say
that's like the worst name for anything unless it was
a butcher. But it really means fresh stream, fresh kills, charcooterie,

(11:57):
fresh stream garbage, don't Yeah, that makes sense. Now what
does kill mean stream of old Dutch word because you've
heard of like bowery means yes, that would be fish stream.
That makes a lot more sense. Now fresh kills. I
wondered about that for years. Now, you know, all right, so, uh,

(12:21):
local wildlife they're going to really study that to see
what kind of um You know, it can't be in
the area of a migrate my migratory route for birds
or like a nesting area a k marsh like Fresh
Kills landfill. That's right. And then once you figured all
this out and they say, oh wait, wait, you skipped

(12:41):
over the historical or archaeological site. Well you already mentioned
that like Fresh Kills landfill. Okay, Apparently I think it
was stated at all wrong. Huh. Henry David Thoreau said
that um arrowheads were the surest crop to dig from
the ground at Fresh Kills before it was a landfill. Yeah,
so our theological site wet land and very close to UM.

(13:04):
The ground water it's seeping right into it. Unbelievable. UM.
And I believe there was a large bunny rabbit population
that they just dumped it right on top of UM. So,
once you figured it out, this is not fresh skills,
is actually a great spot. You're gonna get your permits,
you're gonna raise your money. Um. This one in North

(13:25):
Carolina costs about nineteen million to build cheap. That seems
a little cheap, but I don't think that one's brand new. Yeah,
that's probably from the nineties. And then you probably have
a public vote because they're probably gonna be using public
dollars and no one will know that vote takes place,
and you're gonna get a landfill built. Yeah, they just

(13:46):
build it in the night. All right. So let's take
a little break here and we will talk about building
that landfill right for this all right, So you've got

(14:12):
your permits, you've got your money raised, it's time to
build a landfill. Yeah, you've shouted down the old guy
at the Board of Commissioners meeting, who objects, old man?
McLean the tree hugger. Let's recycle all our garbage, crack pot.

(14:32):
So we will list the basic parts of the landfill
and then go over them in detail. Hows that sound
It sounds like a bulleted list. You've got the bottom
liner system, You've got the cells, you've got the storm
water drainage, you've got the leech eight collection system, ok,
garbage juice methane collection system, and you've got the cap
the covering boom. Actually, that's the opposite of what you

(14:57):
want to happen with the cap covering system. You don't
want a kaboom, So start with the bottom liner. Man again,
this is the original purpose of all landfills that are
in use today, unless they're bioreactor, although it's it's part
of it. But this dry tomb landfill, uh, it's the

(15:18):
main part is the bottom liner. So they use a
very thick like um sometimes a hundred million millimeter thick,
very sturdy like polyethylene liner synthetic plastic that they line
the whole place with, puncture resistant, strong, able to withstand
a lot of trash being dumped on it. And just

(15:39):
to be a certain, they'll often use some sort of
like um fabric matt that they'll lay down first and
then put the the the liner on and then put
another mat on top of that to help prevent it
from being punctured by rocks or garbage. Rocks below or
garbage above. Everything's trying to puncture of this mat. Yeah,

(16:01):
it's a moisture barrier. Right, But that liner is the
main component, the the initial component of the landfill, that's right. Uh. Next,
we have our cell, and a cell is basically the garbage. Yeah,
it's the day's garbage that you dump in there. Um,
you compacted airspace is is key. That's where the more

(16:22):
airspace you have, the more trash you can bury. So
they want to keep it as compact as possible. And
they do this by rolling over it with bulldozers and
flatteners and rollers and graters and they smush it down.
And a cell is um, it's a it's a it's
a hole in the ground. Apparently in the North Carolina

(16:42):
landfill that House Stuff Works went to back in the day.
A cell is fifty ft long, fifty ft wide, fourteen
ft deep yep. And all the trash is put in there.
Like you said, there's heavy equipment that rolls over and
compacts it. And did you read the Atlantic um article
I sent to you about Pointe Hills. Yes, they said
that there's an added benefit of compacting trash not just

(17:04):
doesn't take up less space, it also kills about the
rats in there. Oh good. And then at the end
of the day, when the cell is filled, they cover
it over with about six inches of dirt that they
then compact that kills the other of rats. That's where
the other half and that makes that type of landfill

(17:24):
what's called the sanitary landfill, which mean rat free, because
they're all dead, they're squished or they're suffocated by this
process of compacting and covering over. And the by covering
over this stuff every day, you protected from being blown
away by the wind, by being carried away from by
the rain. You protected from being dug up by coyotes

(17:46):
or trash scavengers. Right, um, And so that's what makes
it a sanitary dry tomb landfill is what we've described
so far. That's right. And to get this thing as
compact as possible, they're gonna weed out things like that
huge roll of carpet that you took out of your
uh nineteen seventies bedroom, or that mattress that has a

(18:07):
you know, brown stained like looks like the map of
Asia from the sixteen hundreds, because you raised that one
lady from Hell, raiser from the dead. Yeah, so they're
gonna chake out all that stuff and make it um
you know, all the yard ways to make it as
compactable as possible, and then um that is compacted at
a rate depending on where you are, about fift pounds

(18:28):
per cubic yard. Yes, so boom, flat dirt is over
it now and now we need to worry about drainage. Yeah. Basically,
once you created that cell, you've just completed a portion
of the landfill, right, Yes, for the day, um, one
day's trash. It's so weird, it's like yours Tuesday's whole

(18:48):
five days a year. And those well, those UM the
Hills people in that Atlantic article, we're saying that they
in retrospect figured out that they could have predicted the
economic crisis. Interesting because about a little less than a
year before it happened, the UM they would fill up
their days cell by like one pm and closed. Now

(19:10):
they stay up until five and it's not even necessarily full.
So they know it's like a huge downturn in building
materials and consumer waste. UM. Like a year or two
before the actual crisis happened before they collapse. Well, you
know what the old saying, if you want to know
the state of the country's economics, go to a landfill.

(19:31):
It's a good thing. That's what I think. Jimmy Carter
first said that. So you don't want liquids in that
solid waste as much as possible. So they test the
solid waste for liquids, and um, if it's not liquid,
then it's fine to go in the hole, right, So
they put that in there. And the other way that
they want to keep liquids out. And again, what they're

(19:52):
doing is trying to prevent garbage juice from forming. Is
to have storm raw storm, water runoff, drainage going on.
So all of the first of all, you never want
a flat landfill. Ever, you want to mount it at
least slightly. You never want a plateau um and so

(20:13):
you want the water to run off, and then when
it runs off, you want to collect it into pipes.
You want to basically create an eves system like you
have on the roof of your house and then shoot
it all down to some concrete gulches or French trains
at your house. Roos shepperls what else uh, gutters, yeah,
habit dasher right, um, and all that goes to a

(20:37):
collection pond. That's right. Uh, this is not the kind
of thing you want to swim in. What they wait
for there is for um the suspended particles to kind
of settle on the bottom, and then they will test
the water for those the garbage juice, and depending on
how nasty it is and riddled with chemicals, they'll go

(20:58):
from there. They may um treat like regular wastewater. Well,
that depends, like if they if just the storm water
shows some leech, they'll send it to a leech a
collection pond. If it's if it turns out to just
be normal stormwater, then they'll let it flow out of there.
That's trying to like whatever river or whatever. And sometimes
it's gravity. Sometimes they use a pump, depends on the

(21:20):
lay of the land. But if it's leach, they have
a separate collect collection system for leech. A yes, which
is um basically perforated pipes that are running through the
cells and the leach. It is gonna happen, like they
try and prevent it as much as possible, but there
is no hole in the ground where you're not gonna
have any garbage juice right exactly. Um, So they collect

(21:41):
that garbage juice as it's forming, and they run it
out to a separate collection pond that's the leech a
collection pond. And if you don't want to swim in
the stormwater collection pond, like you don't even want to
look at the leech collection pump. So again, they let
the particles settle, they test the concentration of the leech
a in the pond, and then they send it either
to uh an on site UH water remediation system like

(22:05):
a wastewater plant, yeah, or else they send it to
like the local city or county wastewater plant for treatment. Yeah. Boy,
we gotta do one in wastewater treatment. At some point.
You got to talk about fascinating. You poop in the
water and eventually you water. It's pretty remarkable of what
we've learned to do. Uh, you know yep. So uh.

(22:28):
The other big thing that we mentioned earlier was methane,
and that is a byproduct that's a gaseous byproduct um
of anaerobic decomposition. And about fifty of your your gases
coming out of this thing, we're gonna be methane about
carbon dioxide and they say a little bit of nitrone,

(22:48):
little bit oxygen. I guess not even enough to be
a percentage point, almost negligible. So methane is um can
be dangerous and hazardous, but it can also be very useful.
So these days they're finding ways to harness this methane
and use it as fuel, right, which is pretty great. Yeah,
it is very great. And actually there's a lot of
money in it they're finding too, especially if you go

(23:10):
to the trouble of building an on site power plant
where you just basically extract the methane from the landfill
gas l f G is what it's called, and then
you burn the methane. You can power, you can create electricity, right,
you can power a turbine and boom, there's electricity being produced.
And actually at Fresh Kills, New York City gets ten
million bucks a year from a company that has exclusive

(23:32):
rights to extract the methane from this place. Ten million.
That's not something it needs that UM and Lincoln, Nebraska
did a pilot study in two thousand and ten and
found that they could make about three hundred thousand dollars
a year from methane collection from their landfill. So if
you're a city that's trying to like figure out ways
to at least keep your landfill open methane collection I

(23:56):
call my my worst days l f G. Actually when
I have landfill gats the worst. Uh. So, then you've
got your covering and your or your cap is the
final piece of the puzzle here, and um, it depends
on what kind of a landfill it is. Generally it's
going to be covered with six inches at least of

(24:18):
compacted soil and that's to keep you know, rats and
stuff out the ones that aren't killed and getting back
into the trash. But um, like we said earlier, airspace
is key. So like six inches, if they could find
a way to make that one inch, that would be
much better. And so they've been experimenting with that too,
like um, paper or submit emulsions instead that you just

(24:39):
spray on top instead of that six inches of soil,
it's like a quarter inch. Yeah, And then all of
a sudden you have five and three quarters extra inches
for trash, extra inches for more trash. That's a lot
many which we are right now absolutely uh. And then
eventually though, when you h it will have a permanent
cap um some sort of poly ethylene cap on top.

(25:02):
And so even after it's closed, that points hills Um
landfill outside of l A that was the focus of
the Atlantic article or fresh kills out in New York
when that when it's closed, you don't just walk away
from a landfill plant stuff on it. Well, yes, you
have to plant stuff on it because when you cover
it over with dirt, you want to plant something with um,

(25:24):
a low roots system that won't go into the landfill,
but we'll still hold the dirt and place to prevent
it from a roading. So like grass cut zoo, not trees.
I don't want to plant trees. But you also have
to stick around and leave some people behind to monitor
the groundwater for temperature changes. Change in temperature suggests that

(25:44):
it's um. There's leachate that's intruded. Sometimes you can see
the leech seeping up through the ground, and that means
that there's you need to address an issue. It looks
like the Beverly Hillbillies thing where Jed shot and missed
that rabbit and instead oil comes up. That's what leech
kind of looks like, bubble up. But you have to

(26:04):
keep an eye on this place for decades and decades
and decades. Yeah, I think they sitting here like thirty years.
It needs to be maintained and monitored at least at
least I think that's definitely in the line. So we'll
talk a little more about operating a landfill and how
to well, I guess alternative slam fills is a way

(26:25):
to put it right after this. So, Chuck, let's say

(26:46):
you are Tommy Landfill and you want to fulfill your
birthright and open your own landfill, and you got everything
all set. You've got the municipal bonds. Old man, what
was it, mc tavish, mcvaine, something like that, mc lane, McClane.
He he's been shouted down. You got the place open.
How are you going to operate a day to day Well,

(27:09):
what you're gonna do is it's gonna be open to
a couple of different things. It's gonna be open to
the um municipality that collects the trash. Of course, it's
gonna be open to demolition companies, construction companies, and many
of them, including the one I go to, is open
to you and me. Okay, um, So let's say I'm
doing work on my house, which I've done, and I

(27:31):
end up with a bunch of junk in the back
of my pickup truck. I think it's called construction waste. Yes,
construction debris, which I try and re use as much
as I can, but you still end up with construction debris.
Did we do like a green renovation episode once? Yeah?
I think so okay, And um, I will drive my
truck out there to the landfill into Cabb County and

(27:51):
I will drive up onto a platform. Is the first
very first thing you do with a it's a way station.
Does it make you go up on two wheels and
then you drive through the land just wheel that's showing
off the stuck car scene. Um. Then you drive up
on the way station and they weigh your truck or
your car or whatever with full of trash. You go

(28:12):
dump it. There's gonna be various stations. Um, there's like
a recycling station. There's a here's where yard waste goes,
a kissing booth. Uh, there's a dunk tank, you know,
the traditional Catholic school carnival um at the one into
Capp County. There's actually free mulch and um compost if

(28:35):
you want to pick up stuff, which is kind of neat,
but then eventually you will be directed to, uh, here
is your dump and I pull up my truck, I
dump it in a big dumpster, and that dumpster has
then taken to the cell. I imagine. I don't follow
the route, but that's what's supposed to happen. Does it
make that bugs Bunny conveyor belt song? Yeah, someone wrote

(28:57):
in and had a song, yeah power If you look
up what was that the one that you were thinking, Yes, totally. Um.
I can't remember the composer's name, but it was the
twentieth century composer who think it is old man. It
was something something Quintet. Yeah, I can't remember the guy's name,
but anyway, look up to something something Quintet powerhouse, and

(29:18):
then I think it starts about almost a minute and
a half in. You'll be like, yeah, that's it, d dude,
you know I'm talking about Yeah. Absolutely. When I heard it,
it was unmistakably looney tunes. So I dump on my garbage, um,
and then I drive back out onto another platform and

(29:38):
then they rewagh my truck. They do the math and
then when they weigh it, um, they charge you a
tipping fee, yeah, which is usually a per ton amount right, Yeah,
and so you know, it's not that much money. Like
I'll have a truck full of junk, go dump it,
and then it's like ten or twelve bucks. And of
course it depends on how heavy the junk is, but
in my case, it was always you know, uh, lightwood

(30:02):
and stuff like that that I couldn't use nails. So
that's that's basically everything we just described as a dry
tomb landfill. Right. But as as UM companies like waste
management and local municipalies have figured out, like, hey, there's
actually money in this rotting garbage, they've been looking into
ways to get more methane out of it. And what

(30:25):
they figured out is that you don't want a dry tomb.
You want to kind of moist a little wet to
thirty percent moisture. Yeah. I was really surprised that this
isn't how it's done by now, because you can they said,
you know, what could take decades and a dry tomb
to break down, you can take just a few years
if you just add a little water, just a little

(30:46):
bit of water, Like there's already about ten to fifteen
percent moisture in a dry tomb, no matter how much
you try to keep it out. There's gonna be about
ten to fift They figured out that if you add
another water, you're going to greatly increase anaerobic um decomposition.
And it can be leachated. It's not like they have
have spring water exactly. It can be that stormwater you're collecting,

(31:09):
it can be leech eate um, it can be gas
condensation from the gas that's coming off and and basically
what you're doing is you're speeding up that anaerobic decomposition
that's already going on. So these things are breaking down
that organic stuff, the banana peels and the grass clippings
and all that stuff. It's already in there. They're not
breaking down the styrofoam, at least not very quickly, so

(31:31):
that stuff is still going to be left behind. But
that's kind of that burying walk awayte mentality as well. Still,
but at least the the density of your m landfill
is going to increase tremendously as all that other stuff decomposes,
and you're gonna have the added benefit of a lot
more methane production. Yeah, and a lot more methane and

(31:52):
a lot shorter time spans. So what they've had to do,
because this is basically accelerated production, is create collection systems
that can handle They can't just throw the old methane
collection system in there that's used to collecting slowly, but
surely they have to do something collect a lot and
a little bit of time. Yeah, because they used to
collect the methane in that they would harvest it and

(32:14):
then burn it, which is sounds horrible because you're just
releasing all that stuff into the atmosphere, but it's better
than just vending it. Just vending methane. Methane is a
um much more potent greenhouse gas than even like CEO
two like by far, So you don't want to just
vent that stuff, so you burn it off. But even

(32:34):
better is if you're gonna burn it, at least use
it to power stuff. So by adding just a little
bit of water you can create this. You can accelerate
the anaerobic decomposition. And since the anaerobic decomposition is what
makes the landfill like a moving, living, evolving pile, once
that's done in ten years, you've got all the methane

(32:57):
you're gonna get from it, the things not gonna settle anymore,
and you can walk away without monitoring it for the
next fifty years. Yeah, so the bioreactor model seems like
far and away the wave of the future. Right. Um,
I guess it's just a matter of like building more
of them. Yes, so we got a couple of more
things here before we close. For sure. This is very interesting.

(33:18):
One Neto thing that I didn't know. I think I
knew about Giant Stadium, but I didn't know that. I
just heard Jimmy hoff was buried there. Well, you might
have just been in the in the landfill. Apparently some
sports arenas like Kemiskey in Chicago, Mile Haush Stadium in Denver,
Giant Stadium in New Jersey built on landfills because they're cheap,
cheap land, and some speculation that it might give athletes cancer. Yeah,

(33:44):
apparently there are a lot of Giants players are several
um that came down with cancer. That one of the linebackers,
Harry Carson, told The New York Times, Um, it makes
you wonder what's going on around here, referencing the fact
that it was built on an old land hill. Yeah,
and apparently there was a game at Comiskey Park where

(34:05):
there was a I think a short stop like ran
into a piece of metal sticking up from the diamond
and like started like kicking away. I didn't realized it
was getting bigger and bigger, and the grounds crew came
out and investigated, and it was Jimmy Hoffa. It was
a copper cuddle from the landfill. They had moved its

(34:27):
way up. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, So they had to
dig it up and then refill it. Unbelievable. I'm sure
that was a lovely break for the fans. Yes, because
moving that they needed. They needed a breathere. Uh. I
read an article on Slate called go West Garbage can
exclamation point, and the main gist of it is, when

(34:51):
are we going to run out of space? It's a
great question. You can't keep bearing trash right? Um, Apparently
you can, because what they're doing now is there there
are fewer landfills than ever before. They're making these huge landfills. Yeah.
In nineteen in six, there were close to seventy dumps

(35:12):
in the US, and by two thousand nine there were
just under two thousand. Decline in less than twenty five years,
and so essentially what they're creating of these super landfills, um,
which is kind of cool, fewer landfills, right, but what's
the problem, Um, do you know stinkier landfills? What the

(35:35):
problem is is you're now trucking garbage sometimes five miles
away to dump in the landfill because your state may
not even have one. So then they're looking at you
know how much c O two is used to do that? Um? Like,
is it really greener to have fewer landfills and truck
your garbage on a train or in a truck every day? Uh?

(35:56):
And they basically say they don't really know. Which is
back to burning everything? Which is more environmentally friendly? Um?
In different states? Apparently there's a lot of money in it.
Different states have way more room than others. And then
some states don't even want that stuff. Of course, in
the Northeast, like Massachusetts are like, we don't want landfills

(36:16):
in our state, the Rhode Island. Same way they send
it to Springfield, they send it to Kentucky. Well, no,
remember the commissioner episode he accepted other states to waste. Yeah,
that's exactly what's happening. Um. Let me see, Arkansas has
enough capacity for more than six hundred years of trash
without any more facilities being opened. There you go we'll

(36:39):
just send it all to Arkansas. Whereas Rhode Island only
has twelve years remaining. New York State only has twenty
five years of capacity left. Send it to Arkansas. So
that's what they're doing. Um, Kentucky is twenty nine dollars
per ton, making about six billion dollars a year. Ohio
twenty one billion dollars a year of available land phil

(37:00):
space because Ohio knows how to negotiate. That's right, the
Buckeye State, that's right. Don't tread on me. That's New
Hampshire the Tea Party. I think it's either New Hampshire, Vermont,
one of those you know New Hampshires is lived for
your die and make their inmates make those license plates. Yeah, no,
don't tread on me wasn't a state motto. And I

(37:21):
think that was just flag with the cut up snake
right that the Tea Party adopted. Remember did they adopt that? Yeah?
So yeah, if you see a bumper sticker with one
of those flags on it, they're not just like a
history buff or anything. Yeah. Or if it says who
was John Galt? Yeah that that that'll tell you something
about the driver of that vehicle was that a Tom
Cruise movie. No John Galt was the main character, and

(37:43):
Atlas shrugged, Oh yeah, I ran, I'm thinking of Jack Reacher.
If you want to know more about landfills, you can
type that word into the search part how stuff works
dot com and uh, I said search bar. So it's
time for a listener, ma'il. I needna call this very
sad email but uplifting at the same time. Hey guys,

(38:06):
two weeks ago, my amazing and wonderful father in law,
Walter passed away. We had to drop everything, my husband
and son and I and fly from Florida to Germany,
where he lived. He's been in my world for twenty
four and my fifty years. And I was so sad.
I felt like I was going to throw up all
the time. When we arrived in Germany, walking through the
front door of the family home without him there was
one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.

(38:28):
That was and is devastating. My husband and youngest son
and I sat in the dark days for days, mixing
the crying mixed with crying and feeling lost. I always
listen to podcasts while I run, though, which I do
every day, and after ten days of being there in Germany,
I finally decided to cue up one of your podcasts
while running. It was Blood Types. I laughed for the

(38:49):
first time in two weeks out loud. Guys. It was
so nice to laugh again, and it really opened the
door for me. I realized that we as a family
are going through was so tough. But I also started
to realize that if I laugh, than I could heal. Uh. Yesterday,
my husband and I, still in Germany, decided to go
UH to walk to the nursing home where my aunt lives,

(39:09):
which is two and a half hours through the forest,
up and down hills. I love this family. By the way,
walking to the nursing home like that, we of course
brought our thirteen year old son, Oliver, who was moaning.
After about twenty minutes of walking, I handed into my
phone and he listened to UH three Stuff you Should
Know podcasts along the way and is now hooked. He
loves you, guys. My husband and I had a badly

(39:31):
needed quiet, get in touch with nature walk as a result,
and we didn't have to listen to our sun moan
at all. Uh More, long walks are in his future
as long as I have you guys on my phone.
And Oliver also asked me along the walk, wait a minute, mom,
these guys get paid to do this. When I said yes,
I saw a sparkle in his eye. I love this email. Boom,

(39:54):
that is from Jennifer and Jennifer. That is awesome. I uh,
those mean the most us. Yeah, I mean that was
a great top not to email. Great email and those
more to it. Even I had to leave out some
of it for Lincoln Jennifer right, Jennifer and Oliver her
son and she doesn't even anonymous husband anonymous husband on
name notes. But yeah, thanks a lot, Jennifer. We appreciate

(40:16):
you letting us know that that's a again great email.
And uh, if you out there want to let us
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(40:39):
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