home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Title: Landfills - Fact is more ominous than fiction
- It has long been believed that the largest entity brought upon the Earth by
- humankind is the Pyramid of the Sun, constructed in Mexico around the start
- of the Christian era. The mammoth structure commands nearly thirty million
- cubic feet of space. In contrast, however, is the Durham Road Landfill,
- outside San Francisco, which occupies over seventy million cubic feet of the
- biosphere. It is a sad monument, indeed, to the excesses of modern society
- [Gore 151]. One might assume such a monstrous mound of garbage is the
- largest thing ever produced by human hands. Unhappily, this is not the case.
- The Fresh Kills Landfill, located on Staten Island, is the largest landfill
- in the world. It sports an elevation of 155 feet, an estimated mass of 100
- million tons, and a volume of 2.9 billion cubic feet. In total acreage, it
- is equal to 16,000 baseball diamonds [Miller 526]. By the year 2005, when
- the landfill is projected to close, its elevation will reach 505 feet above
- sea level, making it the highest point along the Eastern Seaboard, Florida
- to Maine. At that height, the mound will constitute a hazard to air traffic
- at Newark airport [Rathje 3-4].
- Fresh Kills (Kills is from the Dutch word for creek) was originally a tidal
- marsh. In 1948, New York City planner Robert Moses developed a highly
- praised project to deposit municipal garbage in the swamp until the level of
- the land was above sea level. A study of the area predicted the marsh would
- be filled by the year 1968. He then planned to develop the area, building
- houses and attracting light industry. Mayor Impelliteri issued a report
- titled "The Fresh Kills Landfill Project" in 1951. The report stated, in
- part, that the enterprise "cannot fail to affect constructively a wide area
- around it." The report ended by stating, "It is at once practical and
- idealistic" [Rathje 4]. One must appreciate the irony in the fact that
- Robert Moses was, in his day, considered a leading conservationist. His
- major accomplishments include asphalt parking lots throughout the New York
- metro area, paved roads in and out of city parks, and development of Jones
- Beach, now the most polluted, dirty, overcrowded piece of shoreline in the
- Northeast. In Stewart Udall's book The Quiet Crisis, the former Secretary of
- the Interior lavishes praise on Moses. The JFK cabinet member calls Jones
- Beach "an imaginative solution ... (the) supreme answer to the ever-present
- problems of overcrowding" [Udall 163-4]. JFK's introduction to the book
- provides this foreboding passage: "Each generation must deal anew with the
- raiders, with the scramble to use public resources for private profit, and
- with the tendency to prefer short-run profits to long-run necessities. The
- crisis may be quiet, but it is urgent" [Udall xii]. Oddly, the subject of
- landfills is never broached in Udall's book; in 1963, the issue was, in
- fact, a non-issue.
- A modern state-of-the-art sanitary landfill is a graveyard for garbage,
- where deposited wastes are compacted, spread in thin layers, and covered
- daily with clay or synthetic foam. The modern landfill is lined with
- multiple, impermeable layers of clay, sand, and plastic before any garbage
- is deposited. This liner prevents liquids, called leachates, from
- percolating into the groundwater. Leachates result from rain water mixing
- with fluids in the garbage, making a highly toxic "juice" containing inks,
- heavy metals, and other poisonous compounds. Ideally, leachates are pumped
- up from collection points along the bottom of the landfill and either
- shipped to liquid waste disposal points or re-introduced into the upper
- layers of garbage, to resume the cycle. Unfortunately, most landfills have
- no such pumping system [Miller 527].
- Until the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency by Nixon in 1970,
- there were virtually no regulations governing the construction, operation,
- and closure of landfills. As a result, 85 percent of all landfills extant in
- this country are unlined. Many are located in close proximity to aquifers or
- other groundwater features, or near geologically unstable sites. Many older
- landfills are leaching toxins into our water supply at this very moment,
- with no way to stop them. For example, the Fresh Kills landfill leaks an
- estimated one million gallons of toxic ooze into the surrounding water table
- every day [Miller 527]. Sanitary landfills do offer certain advantages.
- Offensive odors, the mainstay of the old city dump, are dramatically reduced
- by the daily cover of clay or other material. Vermin and insects, both of
- the terrestrial and airborne varieties, are denied a free meal and the
- opportunity to spread disease, by the daily clay layer. Furthermore, modern
- landfills are less of an eyesore than their counterparts of yore. However,
- the causality of these positive affects are the very reasons for some of the
- significant drawbacks to landfills [Turk and Turk 486]. The daily compacting
- and covering of the garbage deposits effectively squeezes the available
- oxygen out of the material. Whatever aerobic bacteria are present in the
- garbage are soon suffocated and decomposition stops. Anaerobic bacteria, by
- their very nature, are not present in appreciable numbers in our biosphere.
- What few manage to enter and survive in the garbage deposits are slow-acting
- and perform little in the way of breaking down the materials. In other
- words, rather than the giant compost heap most people imagine, a landfill is
- actually a huge mummification center. Hot dogs and bananas, decades old,
- have been recovered from landfills, still recognizable in their mummified
- splendor [Rathje 111-12]. What little decomposition does occur in landfills
- generates vast amounts of methane gas, one of the significant greenhouse
- effect gasses. Some landfills have built-in processes to reclaim the
- methane. The Fresh Kills landfill pipes methane gas directly into thousands
- of homes, but in most instances, the gas is either burned off or leaked
- directly into the atmosphere. Based on ice core samples from Antarctica, the
- methane concentration in the Earth's atmosphere, over the past 160,000
- years, has fluctuated between 0.3 and 0.7 parts per million. In 1987, the
- methane count was 1.7 ppm [McKibben 17-17].
- The modern landfill is not alone in its defiance of decomposition. The
- excavation in 1884 of an ancient Roman dump had to be halted periodically so
- the workers could get fresh air, so unbearable was the stench from the
- still-extant refuse [Rathje 113]. In today's landfills, decomposition is
- negligible. While the total tonnage of garbage decreases over years, due
- mostly to dessication, the volume varies less than ten percent. Most of the
- actual short-term rotting is from scraps of prepared food. Plastics
- biodegrade not at all. Biodegradable plastic is an oxymoron at best; the
- most unstable plastic requires intense sunlight to decompose, and sunlight
- is denied in a sanitary landfill. Newspapers from before World War Two are
- still readable; they have, in fact, become important date markers for
- scientists examining garbage strata in landfills [Rathje 112-13].
- The public is sadly misinformed as to what comprises the bulk of municipal
- garbage. A typical survey shows that the average American sees the
- disposable diaper as the number one culprit for the premature closing of our
- landfills. This is a sad and costly misconception. According to the most
- recent scientific studies, disposable diapers account for only 0.53 to 1.28
- percent of all landfill deposits, by volume [Rathje 162-63].
- If burning garbage and dumping garbage at sea are unacceptable, what are the
- alternatives? Of the landfills, sanitary and otherwise, open for business in
- 1979, 85 percent are now closed [Miller 527]. Where is all the garbage
- going? Some municipalities are shipping garbage to other cities, or even
- other states, a costly proposition. Larger metropolitan agencies have even
- taken to shipping garbage to third world countries, strapped for cash and
- eager for the infusion of Yankee dollars. This, of course, only transfers
- the problem from one population to the other. Stories of wandering garbage
- barges and orphaned garbage trains have made splashes in American newwpaper
- headlines. Covert garbage disposal has become a lucrative business, as the
- plethora of medical waste washed up along the New Jersey shoreline proves.
- These anecdotes, while shocking and perversely entertaining, are hardly
- representative.
- Recycling really is making a difference. Newspapers, which used to make up
- 25 to 40 percent of the garbage volume of a typical city, are now
- effectively banned from household garbage. Aluminum can recycling has become
- a profitable sideline, both for economically disadvantaged and for the
- average homeowner trying to offset the ever-increasing cost of garbage
- collection. Construction waste is now barred from landfills in most locales;
- this high volume material is now recycled or put to Earth-friendly uses,
- such as making barrier reefs. Plans for the safe incineration of refuse to
- generate electric power have presented some highly contentious issues. The
- ash from such incinerators is normally highly toxic, since it concentrates
- existing toxins, and must be disposed of as such. Citizens object to these
- plants, in a frenzy of Not-In-My-Backyard syndrome. A clear-cut answer is
- probably non-existent. Several effective programs, enacted in unison, will
- probably lead us to success.
- Works Cited:
- Gore, Senator Al. Earth in the Balance. New York: Houghton, 1992.
- MacKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989.
- Miller, G. Tyler, Jr. Living in the Environment. Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 1994.
- Rathje, William and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish!. New York: Harper, 1992.
- Turk, Jonathan. Environmental Science. New York: Holt, 1984.
- Udall, Stewart. The Quiet Crisis. New York: Holt, 1963.
-
-