Monday
Aug312015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Is landfill the greener way to recycle?
Aug 31, 2015 Recycling ;)
Another recycling plant has gone up in smoke. This time the facility involved is in Wales, and there is apparently a fear that it could burn for days.
In related news a plastics recycling facility in Thailand was wiped out by fire a few hours ago.
On Saturday, it was a facility in Virginia that proved incendiary.
On Friday, there were two facilities in flames, one in Forth Worth and one in South Carolina.
Two days earlier, it was another pair, one in Maryland and one in Phoenix.
You do start to wonder whether it wouldn't be better for the environment to put all that stuff in landfill and collect the methane given off to use for fuel. Wouldn't that be a greener form of recycling?
Reader Comments (57)
I'm not sure why everyone thinks that you need a hole in the ground to dispose of waste.
You can obviously build up the existing ground (strip the soil, deposit the waste, replace the soil on top)- should be useful in low-lying areas, such as the Netherlands.
Domestic waste can also be used to raise sea walls (there are at least two completed and successful examples in Essex)- which might be useful in an area with lots of sea walls- the Netherlands again come to mind.
Pat
Low lying land on the Firth of Tay at Dundee has been reclaimed (nice old-fashioned word now applied to letting the sea back in) This has been going on since the 19th century and the airport at Dundee is built on reclaimed land.
stewgreen, 6:17 am: "From February 2010, shops selling more than 32kg of batteries a year (approx 345 x four-packs of AA batteries) have to provide battery recycling collection facilities in-store. "
Nope, it might be the intention, but it ain't happening here. Nor does it solve the problem of disposing of light bulbs.
Lord Stern, in his recent book, asserts that 'Recycling and reusing draws communities together.' (p.80) I have no idea what Stern had in mind by that statement - he doesn't elaborate. It made me think of families in developing countries picking over rubbish tips for reusable items, no doubt in a very sociable way (/sarc).
I responded in my recent review of Stern's book (shameless plug!) with a link to Hansard in which the DEFRA minister was asked by Derek Twigg MP in 2013 how many fires there had been at recycling sites since 2001. The minister replied with the numbers linked earlier by stewgreen - several hundred fires causing 'pollution incidents' each year.
I'd prefer Plasma Gasification.
http://www.waste-management-world.com/articles/print/volume-10/issue-4/features/plasma-gasification-clean-renewable-fuel-through-vaporization-of-waste.html
But recycling is all about showing you care. It is about the rosy glow of virtue you get by doing it, and the feeling of superiority you get when others don't. What happens to the stuff after it is collected is irrelevant.
But of course that extracting the methane out of the waste from the landfill is the best option, there is no doubt in that. I wonder how come these recycling plants catch fire. Do someone light 'em up deliberately or not ?