Quote:
|
Originally Posted by LadyShea
The NCPA site is the first I came across, however the information is found on many sources and is attributed to one report attributed to Clark Wiseman
Quote:
Although many landfills are close to capacity, this is because they are designed to have a short life span. There is no shortage of room for landfills. Clark Wiseman of Washington State's Gonzaga University points out that a single square of land, 114 km on each side and about 37 metres deep, could accommodate all of the garbage generated in the United States for the next 1000 years (Wiseman, 1990). This is one tenth of one percent of the land area of the continental US
Source of information: Wiseman, Clark A. (1990). US Wastepaper Recycling Policies: Issues and Effects. Resources for the Future. Discussion Paper ENR 90-14.
Source of Quote here
|
How about the primary source? Got any criticisms against it? |
As presented, yes. I doubt that anyone can predict out 1000 years, first off. But given that, he has suggested that the hole be a given size. I'd be curious as to what rate of accumulation he took into consideration. Was it shrugged off as "at current rates"? Or was there a consideration of population increase and per person generation?
Second, did you consider the size of the hole being posited? 114 km = 71 mi. So, that's 71 miles square, or 5016 square miles. That's at a uniform depth of 37 m, or 121 ft. That's an area larger than at least one state. 12 storeys deep. That spot in Kansas is suddenly several counties large.
Third, the point is that such could never be done, but there is a pressing demand to find places that can take our garbage. We WILL continue to produce it, but our attitude seems to be one of "out of sight, out of mind" and once it's gone, it's no longer an issue. Just find another place.
What we require in terms of space for disposal of our waste is piddling compared to the rest of the world. But no matter where we decide to put it there will be a cost for us and a cost for somebody else. The point is that if we remove a huge amount of it and reuse it, we don't keep having to find new places, as quickly, to get rid of it.
Yes... Paper is currently item showing up as a large proportion of the waste stream. It has two possible lives other than being buried in a landfill: recycled into paper again, or burned to produce energy. It shouldn't be buried at all. Archeology into landfills is great. Finding that paper is a huge component is no surprise. And yet, it is the easiest to separate and remove....
Plastic is, by volume, a lesser component. It is, however, on the rise and a relatively recent arrival in the waste stream. It's problem is that, unlike organic items like foods and paper, it's biodegrability is abyssmal. It's even more pernicious in that paper items, once easily recycleable, become much more limited in their reuse, once they are plastic coated, which is increasingly common. The issue is how long it lasts once disposed of, not how much energy goes into making it.....somehow, nobody seems to attach a cost to that and it never gets dealt with in energy usage models.
I have no quarrel with the relative amounts of energy required to make plastic film bags over paper bags. But one takes multiple human lifetimes to breakdown and be reusable in the natural environment, while the other, biodegrades relatively quickly. I have no doubt that vast amounts of paper, like bundled newspapers, could last readably for quite some time.
I shall have to read about the Garbage Project. If it's who I think it is, he was the budding guru when I was just getting out of the business. He was doing great stuff back in 1980's.