РефератыИностранный языкLaLandfills Essay Research Paper Title Landfills

Landfills Essay Research Paper Title Landfills

Landfills Essay, Research Paper


Title: Landfills – Fact is more ominous than fiction


It has long been believed that the largest entity brought upon the Earth by


humankind is the Pyramid of the Sun, constructed in Mexico around the start


of the Christian era. The mammoth structure commands nearly thirty million


cubic feet of space. In contrast, however, is the Durham Road Landfill,


outside San Francisco, which occupies over seventy million cubic feet of the


biosphere. It is a sad monument, indeed, to the excesses of modern society


[Gore 151]. One might assume such a monstrous mound of garbage is the


largest thing ever produced by human hands. Unhappily, this is not the case.


The Fresh Kills Landfill, located on Staten Island, is the largest landfill


in the world. It sports an elevation of 155 feet, an estimated mass of 100


million tons, and a volume of 2.9 billion cubic feet. In total acreage, it


is equal to 16,000 baseball diamonds [Miller 526]. By the year 2005, when


the landfill is projected to close, its elevation will reach 505 feet above


sea level, making it the highest point along the Eastern Seaboard, Florida


to Maine. At that height, the mound will constitute a hazard to air traffic


at Newark airport [Rathje 3-4].


Fresh Kills (Kills is from the Dutch word for creek) was originally a tidal


marsh. In 1948, New York City planner Robert Moses developed a highly


praised project to deposit municipal garbage in the swamp until the level of


the land was above sea level. A study of the area predicted the marsh would


be filled by the year 1968. He then planned to develop the area, building


houses and attracting light industry. Mayor Impelliteri issued a report


titled “The Fresh Kills Landfill Project” in 1951. The report stated, in


part, that the enterprise “cannot fail to affect constructively a wide area


around it.” The report ended by stating, “It is at once practical and


idealistic” [Rathje 4]. One must appreciate the irony in the fact that


Robert Moses was, in his day, considered a leading conservationist. His


major accomplishments include asphalt parking lots throughout the New York


metro area, paved roads in and out of city parks, and development of Jones


Beach, now the most polluted, dirty, overcrowded piece of shoreline in the


Northeast. In Stewart Udall’s book The Quiet Crisis, the former Secretary of


the Interior lavishes praise on Moses. The JFK cabinet member calls Jones


Beach “an imaginative solution … (the) supreme answer to the ever-present


problems of overcrowding” [Udall 163-4]. JFK’s introduction to the book


provides this foreboding passage: “Each generation must deal anew with the


raiders, with the scramble to use public resources for private profit, and


with the tendency to prefer short-run profits to long-run necessities. The


crisis may be quiet, but it is urgent” [Udall xii]. Oddly, the subject of


landfills is never broached in Udall’s book; in 1963, the issue was, in


fact, a non-issue.


A modern state-of-the-art sanitary landfill is a graveyard for garbage,


where deposited wastes are compacted, spread in thin layers, and covered


daily with clay or synthetic foam. The modern landfill is lined with


multiple, impermeable layers of clay, sand, and plastic before any garbage


is deposited. This liner prevents liquids, called leachates, from


percolating into the groundwater. Leachates result from rain water mixing


with fluids in the garbage, making a highly toxic “juice” containing inks,


heavy metals, and other poisonous compounds. Ideally, leachates are pumped


up from collection points along the bottom of the landfill and either


shipped to liquid waste disposal points or re-introduced into the upper


layers of garbage, to resume the cycle. Unfortunately, most landfills have


no such pumping system [Miller 527].


Until the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency by Nixon in 1970,


there were virtually no regulations governing the construction, operation,


and closure of landfills. As a result, 85 percent of all landfills extant in


this country are unlined. Many are located in close proximity to aquifers or


other groundwater features, or near geologically unstable sites. Many older


landfills are leaching toxins into our water supply at this very moment,


with no way to stop them. For example, the Fresh Kills landfill leaks an


estimated one million gallons of toxic ooze into the surrounding water table


every day [Miller 527]. Sanitary landfills do offer certain advantages.


Offensive odors, the mainstay of the old city dump, are dramatically reduced


by the daily cover of clay or other material. Vermin and insects, both of


the terrestrial and airborne varieties, are denied a free meal and the


opportunity to spread disease, by the daily clay layer. Furthermore, modern


landfills are less of an eyesore than their counterparts of yore. However,


the causality of these positive affects are the very reasons for some of the


significant drawbacks to landfills [Tu

rk and Turk 486]. The daily compacting


and covering of the garbage deposits effectively squeezes the available


oxygen out of the material. Whatever aerobic bacteria are present in the


garbage are soon suffocated and decomposition stops. Anaerobic bacteria, by


their very nature, are not present in appreciable numbers in our biosphere.


What few manage to enter and survive in the garbage deposits are slow-acting


and perform little in the way of breaking down the materials. In other


words, rather than the giant compost heap most people imagine, a landfill is


actually a huge mummification center. Hot dogs and bananas, decades old,


have been recovered from landfills, still recognizable in their mummified


splendor [Rathje 111-12]. What little decomposition does occur in landfills


generates vast amounts of methane gas, one of the significant greenhouse


effect gasses. Some landfills have built-in processes to reclaim the


methane. The Fresh Kills landfill pipes methane gas directly into thousands


of homes, but in most instances, the gas is either burned off or leaked


directly into the atmosphere. Based on ice core samples from Antarctica, the


methane concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere, over the past 160,000


years, has fluctuated between 0.3 and 0.7 parts per million. In 1987, the


methane count was 1.7 ppm [McKibben 17-17].


The modern landfill is not alone in its defiance of decomposition. The


excavation in 1884 of an ancient Roman dump had to be halted periodically so


the workers could get fresh air, so unbearable was the stench from the


still-extant refuse [Rathje 113]. In today’s landfills, decomposition is


negligible. While the total tonnage of garbage decreases over years, due


mostly to dessication, the volume varies less than ten percent. Most of the


actual short-term rotting is from scraps of prepared food. Plastics


biodegrade not at all. Biodegradable plastic is an oxymoron at best; the


most unstable plastic requires intense sunlight to decompose, and sunlight


is denied in a sanitary landfill. Newspapers from before World War Two are


still readable; they have, in fact, become important date markers for


scientists examining garbage strata in landfills [Rathje 112-13].


The public is sadly misinformed as to what comprises the bulk of municipal


garbage. A typical survey shows that the average American sees the


disposable diaper as the number one culprit for the premature closing of our


landfills. This is a sad and costly misconception. According to the most


recent scientific studies, disposable diapers account for only 0.53 to 1.28


percent of all landfill deposits, by volume [Rathje 162-63].


If burning garbage and dumping garbage at sea are unacceptable, what are the


alternatives? Of the landfills, sanitary and otherwise, open for business in


1979, 85 percent are now closed [Miller 527]. Where is all the garbage


going? Some municipalities are shipping garbage to other cities, or even


other states, a costly proposition. Larger metropolitan agencies have even


taken to shipping garbage to third world countries, strapped for cash and


eager for the infusion of Yankee dollars. This, of course, only transfers


the problem from one population to the other. Stories of wandering garbage


barges and orphaned garbage trains have made splashes in American newwpaper


headlines. Covert garbage disposal has become a lucrative business, as the


plethora of medical waste washed up along the New Jersey shoreline proves.


These anecdotes, while shocking and perversely entertaining, are hardly


representative.


Recycling really is making a difference. Newspapers, which used to make up


25 to 40 percent of the garbage volume of a typical city, are now


effectively banned from household garbage. Aluminum can recycling has become


a profitable sideline, both for economically disadvantaged and for the


average homeowner trying to offset the ever-increasing cost of garbage


collection. Construction waste is now barred from landfills in most locales;


this high volume material is now recycled or put to Earth-friendly uses,


such as making barrier reefs. Plans for the safe incineration of refuse to


generate electric power have presented some highly contentious issues. The


ash from such incinerators is normally highly toxic, since it concentrates


existing toxins, and must be disposed of as such. Citizens object to these


plants, in a frenzy of Not-In-My-Backyard syndrome. A clear-cut answer is


probably non-existent. Several effective programs, enacted in unison, will


probably lead us to success.


Works Cited:


Gore, Senator Al. Earth in the Balance. New York: Houghton, 1992.


MacKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989.


Miller, G. Tyler, Jr. Living in the Environment. Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 1994.


Rathje, William and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish!. New York: Harper, 1992.


Turk, Jonathan. Environmental Science. New York: Holt, 1984.


Udall, Stewart. The Quiet Crisis. New York: Holt, 1963.

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