Random Nuclear Strikes

Day #3 and Myth #3 from PERC 

MYTH 3: PACKAGING IS OUR PROBLEM

Contrary to current wisdom, packaging can reduce total rubbish produced. The average household in the United States generates one third less trash each year than does the average household in Mexico, partly because packaging reduces breakage and food waste. Turning a live chicken into a meal creates food waste. When chickens are processed commercially, the waste goes into marketable products (such as pet food), instead of into a landfill. Commercial processing of 1,000 chickens requires about 17 pounds of packaging, but it also recycles at least 2,000 pounds of by-products.

The gains from packaging have been growing over time, because companies have been reducing the weight of the packages they use. During the late 1970s and 1980s, although the number of packages entering landfills rose substantially, the total weight of those discards declined by 40 percent. Over the past 25 years the weights of individual packages have been reduced by amounts ranging from 30 percent (2- liter soft drink bottles) to 70 percent (plastic grocery sacks and trash bags). Even aluminum beverage cans weigh 40 percent less than they used to.

Your food has to come in something. Be it an aluminum can or a plastic wrapper. Most foods cannot come wrapped in its own packaging like a cantaloupe. But one of their goals is to stop people from eating meat and getting their protein supply. The protein supply that helps them make rational decisions.

By the way, 30 cubic yards of uncrushed aluminum 12oz. cans weighs approximately 500lbs.

That is less than AlGore.

More myths from PERC 

MYTH 2: OUR GARBAGE WILL POISON US

The claim that our trash might poison us is impossible to completely refute, because almost anything might pose a threat. But the EPA itself acknowledges that the risks to humans (and presumably plants and animals) from modern landfills are virtually nonexistent: Modern landfills can be expected to cause 5.7 cancer-related deaths over the next 300 years-one every 50 years. To put this in perspective, cancer kills over 560,000 people every year in the United States (EPA 1990, 1991; Goodstein 1995).

Older landfills do possess a potential for harm to the ecosystem and to humans, especially when built on wetlands (or swamps), because pollutants can leach from them. When located on dry land, however, even old-style landfills generally pose minimal danger, in part because remarkably little biodegradation takes place in them.

Modern landfills eliminate essentially any potential for problems. Siting occurs away from groundwater supplies, and the landfills are built on a foundation of several feet of dense clay, covered with thick plastic liners. This layer is covered by several feet of gravel or sand. Any leachate is drained out via collection pipes and sent to municipal wastewater plants for treatment. Methane gas produced by biodegradation is drawn off by wells on site and burned or purified and sold.

Back in the day, landfills were know as “The Dump” and were built wherever people, though usually a township, wanted to put it. This was usually a chunk of land no one wanted because no one could built on it, usually it was a swamp or a tide flat or just wherever the locals started dumping their crap.

My current jobsite sits atop a Superfund site that is second only to the Hanford Nuclear reservation. I see the state come out at regular intervals to drill a core out from our parking lot so they can test the soil. In the early 20th Century the area was a tideflat where no one wanted to build, so the city government designated it “The Dump”.

Now your tax dollars go to maintaining it. If you’re 50 or older, your tax dollars previously went to cleaning up the City of Seattle government’s mistake.

You’ll find that a large number of our current environmental issues are the fault of someone in government.

Modern landfills, run by private industry, are so clean that when they are near completion, the surrounding areas not needed to take in and process the landfill gases are rehabilitated and turned into parks. The one I spoke about yesterday along Interstate 5 south of Seattle was purchased by a private company who is selling off the gases and will be making a very nicely landscaped park out of it. There was a time when they were thinking of turning it into a golf course, but how many of those damn things do we really need?

We’re going to change the format of the RNS QotD up for a couple weeks.

Believe it or don’t, there is a group of what could be called “Free Market Environmentalists”. In fact, the Property and Environmental Research Center (aka: PERC) have actually crafted and taken that very accurate title as their own.

PERC has four very simple ideas, with which I’m sure you will agree:

1. Private property rights encourage stewardship of resources.

2. Government subsidies often degrade the environment.

3. Market incentives spur individuals to conserve resources and protect environmental quality.

4. Polluters should be liable for the harm they cause others.

One of the fellows, Daniel K. Benjamin has written an article titled “Eight Great Myths About Recycling” and we’ll be spending the next two Monday through Thursday sessions posting them up as QotD and then adding in what knowledge my time spent working in the recycling industry has given me below Benjamin’s quotes.

Everyone on the same page? Here we go:

Myth #1: Our garbage will bury us

Since the 1980s, people repeatedly have claimed that the United States faces a landfill crisis. Former Vice President Al Gore, for example, asserted we are “running out of ways to dispose of our waste in a manner that keeps it out of either sight or mind” (Gore 1992, 145).

This claim originated in the 1980s, when the waste disposal industry moved to using fewer but much larger landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency, the press, and other commentators focused on the falling number of landfills, rather than on their growing overall capacity, and concluded that we were running out of space. The EPA also underestimated the prospects for creating additional capacity.

In fact, the United States today has more landfill capacity than ever before. In 2001, the nation’s landfills could accommodate 18 years’ worth of rubbish, an amount 25 percent greater than a decade before. To be sure, there are a few places where capacity has shrunk. But the uneven distribution of available landfill space is no more important than is the uneven distribution of auto manufacturing: Trash is an interstate business, with 47 states exporting the stuff and 45 importing it. Indeed, the total land area needed to hold all of America’s garbage for the next century would be only about 10 miles square.

As to the point of the EPA underestimating “the prospects for creating additional capacity” was basically a government agency doing what government agencies do best: Scerw up. Possibly on purpose, since the EPA has been manned by eco-idiots since at least the Carter Administration.

As of the early 90’s the landfill industry began the widespread buying up of old pit-types mines to turn them into landfills. Think about it: A large hole in the ground nobody wants anything to do with would sell pretty damn cheap. They’re usually huge so it’ll take decades to fill the thing in. They also already have an infrastructure that will support large, heavy vehicles, going right up to the rim of the pit, as well as into it.

Since that time, numerous small-to-medium sized landfills have closed up and these “Super Landfills” have taken the place of those smaller, community based ones. Also, technology has advanced exponentially in regards to the actual usefulness of a landfill.

Nowadays, the items being dumped into a landfill are being given a boost in the ways they decompose. The enzymes which assist in the decomposition of landfill materials are being added to enable the breakdown of said trash. The decompsotion generates two things in abundance: Methane and CO2 gasses. Therefore, the landfill is plumbed so as to collect over 80% of these gases.

In prior decades, these were burned off or “flamed”, giving landfills an eerie glow at night. One that sits along Interstate 5 south of Seattle always seemed very strange to me as a kid, with the light from these flames shining over the hill that separated it from the interstate looking as though like some alien craft had landed there.

As of late, these gases are now being collected and plumbed to power generators which make heat and lights come on in their nearby townships.

Throwing your pizza box away is actually much better for the environment than sending it off to be recycled. But we’ll get into that in the near future, along with how you can get paid to throw your trash away.