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TODAY Monday 23 February 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Garbage

You say solid waste, I say garbage. With a Flatbush accent: GAH-bidge. More expressive, perhaps, than "trash?"

Here in Noo Yawk, they're closing down the world's largest garbage dump four years from now. Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island covers 3,000 acres with a rolling landscape of refuse that in places reaches 200 feet high. Each day Fresh Kills emits about five million pounds of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps heat 25 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. Only five percent of the methane is recovered.

So what'll happen to the post-2002 garbage? Don't guess recycling: only 14% of the total tonnage of things thrown away by New York residents gets recycled, and the percentage is dropping. Rudy Giuliani has cut back on the curbside pickup schedule, pro-recycling propaganda is scant, and people are losing motivation. No, what we'll do is pay somebody to haul the stuff away and then that somebody will dump it in a landfill remote from us. As with everything else in this town, you can get whatever you want if you pay for it.

And here's the dirty secret, dear readers: it's not such a bad outcome. Just this morning I was talking with Fred Hapgood, who reminded me that once upon a time we enviros worried aloud that the country was "running out of" landfill space. Not hardly. What happened was that many municipalities were filling up haphazardly planned landfills, which were leaching toxins into groundwater and smelling bad, and then they realized that either making things right (meeting new regulations) or sending the garbage to the next town would cost a whole lot more money than they were used to spending on waste handling. Meanwhile, people were getting good and freaked about the health dangers of garbage dumps, and it became ever harder to find a town compliant enough to take other towns' throwaways.

It now appears that -- putting aside for the moment vast questions about the depletion of the world's natural resources -- landfills can be designed and managed so that they're really not much of an environmental problem at all. Prodded by regulations and economics, expertise has been gained.

No one seems more expert than a professor at the University of Wisconsin named Robert Ham. Professor Ham has just completed a six-year study where he buried mesh sacks full of different kinds of garbage at uniform depths at three landfills around the country. He then dug them up at regular intervals -- after one year, after two years, and after six years -- to weigh and chemically test the contents. As a general rule, he found that the moisture content of the overall landfill was the most important variable influencing the speed at which materials decomposed. Paper diapers in an uncapped, moist Florida landfill over two years decomposed much faster than paper diapers in a clay-capped, dry Wisconsin landfill over six years.

The difficulty is that federal capping regulations intended to reduce toxic leaching also prolong decomposition. Professor Ham thinks it's just a design problem. He and his colleagues are now working on large-scale demonstrations of how an uncapped dump can minimize water contamination at the same time as it captures methane to be used as an energy source. Call him for details at 608-238-4527.

I've given the number to Rudy Giuliani.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

There is, of course, a ready reference here at Lib Tree for those of you who want to delve into more fundamental questions: What are things made of? And what happens to the thing when you don't want it any more? Your guide to the world of materials (and materials policy) is John Young, erstwhile senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

2/20: Population Rebellion in the Sierra Club
2/19: The Trouble With Cattle
2/18: Optimistic Feds and the Future of Kyoto
2/17: The New Great Game
2/13: Windmills
2/12: Stuart Eizenstat's Smart Bomb
2/11: Alligator in the Coal Mine
2/10: Inconvenient Public Opinion
2/9: Remember Penn Station
2/6: Adam Smith and Automobile Efficiency
2/5: Clean Water, Naturally
2/4: Roll, Storms, Roll
2/3: Land Purchase Fever
2/2: Groundhog Day in the Persian Gulf
1/30: Trees and Hormones
1/29: Things To Come (2)
1/28: Things To Come
1/27: 'Bye, 'Bye Brazil
1/26: Jaywalking and Jaydriving
1/23: Good Biotech, Bad Biotech
1/22: No More Roads
1/21: Swordfish

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.