Article Title: The Basics of Landfills
Author: Environmental Research Foundation
Link: http://www.ejnet.org/landfills/
Summary:
Landfills are "carefully engineered" holes in the ground where solid and hazardous waste are stored.
They are made up of four main parts from top to bottom: a bottom liner, a leachate collection system, a cover, and the area around where you are storing it. All these precautions are used to make sure waste doesn't seep into an aquifer, underground spring, or overflow into surface water. The liners used (clay, plastic, and composite) for a landfill are not perfect and are sometimes combined to make a more effective liner. Leachate is badly contaminated water that sinks to the bottom of the landfill. It is collected by pipes toward the sloped bottom of the landfill. These pipes are corroded and weakened by the weight on top of them, so they often break. The covers of these landfills are susceptible to pressure and are sometimes corroded, causing leaks and endangering the nearby ecosystem. All in all, landfills are environmental liabilities that are never good for the surrounding ecosystem, watershed, and organism communities.
Personally, i believe that while landfills are an easy and short term method for the disposal of waste, they pose more of a threat to the environment that we realize. Say if some contaminants were to leak out from the landfill and get into a creek. The small amount of diluted pollution wouldn't affect anything right away, but over time organisms would accumulate a lot of toxins and spread disease among their species, throwing the equilibrium of the ecosystem out of whack. There are other ways of disposing of waste that don't harm the environment and i think that if we were educated more on those other methods then i believe that it would benefit ours and future generations.
Questions:
1. Can you think of any more environmentally friendly ways to dispose of waste?
2. What would you do if you were in charge of the EPA to make landfills safer?
3. Do you think this will become a bigger issue with the environment than it already is? If so, when? If not, why?
I invited Mr. Forastiere to post on our blog because I read his article on the tests that he did to find problems with landfills. I think that he can provide good information that we couldn't find from an article. I hope that he will post on the blog so we can all learn something new.
ReplyDeleteHere is the email:
Hello Mr. Forastiere,
We have a class blog that talks about current environmental problems. I think with the lab that you preformed and your knowledge of landfills that you would be a perfect candidate to put your information on our blog. All you have to do is post what landfills can do to the environment and if you like landfills.
Thank You,
Tyler
PS: this is the link to the blog: http://sciencepeoplez.blogspot.com/2012/12/zach-reilly-article-title-basics-of.html
This is the article I found that talks about recycling instead of landfills.
ReplyDeletehttp://greenliving.nationalgeographic.com/recycling-instead-landfills-2216.html
It talks about the environmental benefits of recycling instead of using landfills. For example recycling prevents deforestization. If you want to know more about it, I strongly suggest you go check it out to see what we should do instead of disposing our waste in land-fills.
1. Can you think of any more environmentally friendly ways to dispose of waste?
ReplyDeleteI think we should create a factory where you can turn waste into usable and renewable products, if it doesn't already exist. This factory would turn plastic bottles, any type of waste from the trash into items that work and can be helpful to this world.
2. What would you do if you were in charge of the EPA to make landfills safer?
I would start to find ways to help lower the amount of plastics or nonrenewable resources being sent to these landfills. Also find a way to help get rid of the harmful substances of gases form the landfills.
3. Do you think this will become a bigger issue with the environment than it already is? If so, when? If not, why?
Yes, i think it will become a huge issue later if we don't start to lower the amount of recyclables going into the landfills and if we do't start to find a way to clean them up and make them more safer to be around.
I think that landfills are a horrible idea and that they shouldn't be around, but really there is no other effective way to get rid of waste right now. People always come up with the idea that " hey, lets just throw it into space!", but really that idea is just as bad as throwing the trash into the ocean, exept in this case it's a very big ocean, not only that, but its also very costly to send something up into space just to throw out trash. Untill there is an efficient way to recycle all of our waste, landfills are really the only way to store everything.
ReplyDelete1-Should there be a program to build a large station in space that can hold tens of thousands of industrial sized containors that is in interlocking orbit around earth and has a space elevator leading to it for travel in order to hold our waste?
2- Should landfills have a layer of metal, such as steel/ stainless steel to keep liquids and other materials from being absorbed into the soil and water?
3-Sould there be landfills that have multiple levels and are recycled, such as using an abandoned tall building to maximize the carying capacity of our trash?