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As a Dane, I know exactly where my waste goes. I was born in 1984, and has only known a world where everything is sorted and recycled. There are no landfills. The only thing that isn't reused is concrete, but we're working on it. A lot of unsorted waste is incinerated, which isn't perfect, but the heat is used for district heating and generation of electricity. The smoke is “washed”, in an attempt to remove heavy metals.
By me I know all 3 landfills, Bisasar Road, now close to full, and Marianhill, also close to full, with the new Buffelsdraai landfill, set to be usable for a century or so, seeing as it is basically a massive valley between 4 hills.
im a heavy equipment mechanic at a local landfill and this is the most comprehensive explanation of the inner workings of a land fill I've ever seen *standing ovation*
I hope most of you are without that job in a decade. Not because i you aren't doing important job but because landfill usage needs to go down globally. Here in Finland we went from 200kg per person per year to close to zero when it comes to household waste going to landfills. Extensive recycling system that takes away all the recyclables and harmful waste, and the rest is burned in power plants that produce electricity or heat for district heating, and output CO2 and H2O to the air. Landfills are now used mostly for things that fit the name better: construction waste, concrete and dirt, for ex the gravel that is spread on the roads and streets to increase grip in the winter is put in landfills. So, i hope you are out of a job soon because you are needed elsewhere and the landfill is closed.
Fellow heavy equipment mechanic here from road construction industry. I love this guys videos. He answers a lot of questions the site managers and foreman don't even know.
'Okay I'm going to stop you right there" 😀 if you think that liner is impermeable you're delusional 😀 the owners _want_ to get rid of as much leachate as possible so that they don't have to mediate it. Profit is a very warm bedfellow. They don't want to "accidentally" leak too much. And the owners want to be able to say that the amount that is leaking was whoops just an accident 😀. But those liners leak significant amounts of toxic metals and everything else into our drinking water. Only to be "discovered" in our drinking water decades later. 😮
My 6 year old son sat down to watch this video with me and was mesmerized. He has now been requesting your channel daily. Thank you for presenting these concepts so well. Couldn't be happier to turn this on for him.
I was involved in the siting, design, and construction of landfills for 35 years as an engineer. This is one of the best non technical descriptions I have seen. Thank you
I've been a Garbageman for 22 years, and I personally pick up 30 tons of trash a day. People would be surprised how much waste we as Americans throw out daily. I think it's gotten worse with the poor quality of things we buy. Things just don't last as long these days. I always pay more for Quality so I don't have to add to this problem.
It's also such a shame that waste isn't separaed properly in the USA. And yes, it's so true that the average person doesn't care one bit about the incredible amount of waste their lifestyle leaves... people just don't care, it's crazy.
Obviously waste is a problem everywhere, but it was one of the things that struck me most about the states was the sheer depth of throwaway culture. Like just walking into a fast food restaurant and seeing the amount of straws, napkins, plastic cups with lids, etc. that they gave to every order only for it to immediately end up in the bin. Not to mention the cars and fuel use, or permanent heating/cooling.
@@Hex... Honestly, the only real solution might be to offer some kind of monetary incentive for people to improve how they sort their trash. Similar to how bottle return systems work in some places, but for all types of waste. Imagine large bins equipped with sensors that can estimate the amount of glass, plastic, metal, cardboard, paper, or organic material someone disposes of. The system could then print out a receipt that can be redeemed for cash or store credit at any grocery store. Just an idea that came to me. There would definitely be challenges, like the fact that not every piece of trash has a barcode for easy scanning, and people might try to game the system. But does that make it impossible?
Can you estimate how many houses, and ideally people, that the 30 tons is for? I wish the video had covered this, but I’m curious about the average trash per person both in weight and volume. And by volume, I’m curious how much volume when fully compacted.
@@Hex... we are kind of screwed over by a faction that wants to eliminate expenditure on civil infrastructure in favor of funding militairistic endeavors.
I live near a landfill, most of the time you don’t notice much, but when it rains you can smell an acrid aroma depending on which way the wind blows. I’ve often salvaged a lot of interesting things, mostly tools or machine parts. The landfill collects the methane produced by the waste and uses it to generate electricity for the site. The sad thing is the road leading to the landfill (which is a major highway) is constantly littered with trash, mainly from trucks but also from illegal dumping.
I’ve noticed a strong methane odour near a local landfill, I’ve never thought about them collecting it and using it that way. Very insightful and interesting! Funnily enough it’s right above a major aquifer in Perth ( Western Australia) and has a water treatment plant that collects from there and cleans its collected water from the landfill.
@@Sometimes7453 Some landfills aren't ventilated and those start stinking really fast. Some are ventilated improperly because of damaged gas wells, pumps, etc. Properly ventilated landfills don't smell because almost all of the gas is collected and burnt. Kudos to those that burn the gas for energy generation.
My dad passed away almost 15 years ago. He owned a hazardous waste company and one day when we went to the dump he gave me this very interesting in depth overview of how it all worked. The first few times you said “garbage juice” I was like “but there’s a name for that…what is it?” Thanks for sneaking “leachate” in there. What a funny topic to make me think of my dad and our nerdy conversations today. Thank you for this. ❤
I always thank the trash truck man & dept, every time I can. Their job may seem degrading to some, but theirs is the most important. You’d notice their absence quickly.
Definitely not the most important…lack of garbage collection means people would have to take their trash too the dump. But what would you do without farmers? Grow your own fruits vegetables and grains on your own? Not as easy as taking out the trash.
@@mvflp2218 the traffic would be horrible if everyone had to drive to the dump. Rush hour is already bad when everyone goes to work. Imagine if everyone in a city tried driving to the same building...it would be a nightmare lol
IDK about "Most" but it is a very important job yeah. I was mulling things over a little while ago and had the random thought about "I don't know what's involved in being a trash collector, which is actually sort of the point when you think about it"
@@mvflp2218 Maybe I should have said ‘one of the most’, and yes, farmers and other hard workers are important, but without trash pickup, there would be rodents like one has never seen, bugs, diseases like a pandemic, and let’s not even mention the smell. People would eventually have to wear a gas mask to breathe. Again, if not the most important, they are waaaay up at a top of the list.
I used to be a GCCS engineer (gas collection and control systems). I designed the “pipe system” inside landfills that led to and from the wells. They’re only briefly mentioned in this video but they’re critical to a landfill’s maintenance through their whole life! Some interesting things is that as a landfill is filled, naturally the weight pressing down on piping increases. We want to avoid a pinch in lines running to wells since that would lead to a pressure buildup and no suction at the well. Because of this, the pipe systems were cut and abandoned in place every >20’ of fill on top. We would often have to extend wells as well to reach the surface when there was fill on them. The pipes also need to run at a minimum grade (angle) to ensure any condensation flows downhill to a sump! If there are valleys, the condensation will pool and create another blockage. Super interesting stuff!
@@stfuyfc69420 I think you meant the opposite of what your comma makes your sentence mean. With the comma, you're making a strong argument that TomatoAnus was clearly an engineer. Without the comma, you are surprised that TomatoAnus could possibly be an engineer. EDIT: I've been convinced that the comma may actually be intentional. Not 100% sure, but I do see both sides clearly.
@@kindlin That confuse the hell out of me. It reminded me of the famous example of a similar comma usage; "let's eat, grandpa" and "let's eat grandpa".
One of the most fascinating things about landfills, that was briefly touched in here but goes much deeper, is that the internal chemistry has an entire lifecycle that has been very thoroughly studied and modeled. You can actually predict the volume and composition of leachate and gas discharge to astonishing accuracy based on just the size and what phase of "life" the landfill is in. It even informs things like what can be placed together and what has to be segregated into seperate cells, for example construction/demolition waste and food waste have to be kept as far apart as possible because the gypsum in building waste acts as a rich sulphur source that the microbes in food waste will convert to hydrogen sulphide, at certain life phases of the landfill, which is an odour hazard but more importantly is extremely toxic when concentrations get higher, like in the case of combined food-building waste!. I can honestly say, after studying landfill chemistry, I see them as essentially giant bioreactors for processing waste, rather than a static graveyard of trash.
Years ago I did some work at a landfill that primarily accepted C&D. It's the only landfill I've been at that had a flare specifically for sulfide. It is insane just how much stink gas that dry wall / wall board can lead to! If you're not already familiar with them, you may be interested to learn about anaerobic digestors. They're a new waste disposal alternative that basically makes an accelerated version of a waste processing bioreactor. Rather than taking years to reduce the carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, etc., it's done on the scale of weeks.
@@ppltlkngand anaerobic digestors can produce methane for a cogeneration engine and produce electricity with methane thats been processed. a handful of wastewater treatment plants have this setup
@daydodog you can probably get access to good case studies from professional bodies like ciwem/icheme. Water companies themselves might have some eg thames water in the uk probably have a reasonable amount of info on Beckton, a nearly 4 million population equivalent super STW that is song the biggest in the world There's a lot of useful info available if you just type into Google "anaerobic digestion case study"
I am a Leachate tech and worked in the industry for 15+ years. Nice simple video to explain this type of landfill. You should have a look at hydraulically contained landfills, by far the safest type and the most interesting. Also not mentioned but a real problem in landfill is fires, and how we fight them is really cool.
@@techiebliss it’s not common here in Australia either. Typically we have Environmental / Civil Engineers that are accredited by sitting Geosynthetics Institute short courses and exams. They’re US based but there are geosynthetic testing specialists that facilitate the courses here
Thank you for covering landfills and solid waste management! Some other current issues facing landfills include (that could be followed up in another video): PFOS, hydrogen sulfide, "black goo" (largely from diapers), lithium batteries, deep-well leachate injections, siting of new landfills vs. changing consumer disposal habits. Also there has been more investigation of resource reclamation of buried waste. Think mining of landfills. Lastly, having been a geotechnical engineer in the solid waste industry, this video just scratches the surface of the mountain of engineering that goes into landifll permitting, design, construction and operation.
Any good reading about these things? Hopefully non scholarly or jargon based books. Thought this was fascinating and totally changed my views on landfills.
@@hoolz750 I live walking distance from a Permanent Household Hazardous Waste Facility. It is something else entirely and happens to hold a lot of stuff mentioned in the comment. Oh my gosh... I'm realizing realtime that things might be different here because the immediate area is saturated with Biotech labs.
This channel and these comments always give me the feeling that any little thing I can point at in the built environment has millions of hours of study, brilliant engineering as well as blood sweat and tears put in it. My god, the engineering considerations just go on and on and on and on.
_"Lastly, having been a geotechnical engineer in the solid waste industry [...]"_ This is what I love about being an engineer myself as well: I'm way more of a general guy, I work in product R&D and knowledge far out of my studies has been useful like, daily. But then, there's some people like you who have far more specialized knowledge that is absolutely fascinating and unquestionably important to do what most people see as the most basic tasks, on the scale that we actually need with as many people as we have living on Earth. Like, an engineer can say basically "I work with trash" in the most impressive way possible.
My hometown (in Kent County, MI), had only 2 years of life left on its landfill. So they built a comprehensive waste sorting facility, where municipal waste could be sorted into combustible and recyclable waste. By burning much of the waste before it was landfilled, the county is able to generate power and increased the lifespan of the landfill to 20 years, since now it just takes in ash.
@@Axle-FIn switzerland we dont have landfills, just burning facilities. we use high performance carbon filters, recycle a lot and generate energy with it.
in Sweden we put less than 10% of the waste in landfill. A large part goes to material recycling, but the largest volume goes to incineration to provide heat and energy. The ash from the incinerated waste is taken care of at the landfill.
Greetings from Sweden, only 1% of Sweden's trash is sent to landfills. By burning trash, another 52% is converted into energy and the remaining 47% gets recycled. According to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, more than 2.5 million tons of waste is imported to Sweden each year, mostly from Norway and the UK. In the past six years, some 50% of all household waste has been treated through energy recovery.
@@skonstas4683 In the video it is said that burning methane turns it into less potent greenhouse gasses, or whatever the word he used for it. And at least we get some use for a biproduct
My dad worked in landfill until he retired a few years ago. He started out as a landfill gas engineer and ended up as site manager. They fed the gas into huge generators to burn it off and produce electricity. If the generators failed the gas had to be flared off and as a kid he let me light the flare. The gas had a very distinct odour to it and I vividly remember the wash of heat over me from the flare igniting on a cold day. In later years I worked on the landfill myself as a weigh bridge operator when I was between jobs. I was also in a band with one of the machine drivers. Landfill is an often under appreciated aspect of our modern lives and whilst a lot of people wouldn't want it in their back yard they'd be the first to complain if their trash wasn't collected. I've always found it fascinating.
I'm a truck driver and can't say enough how much I love this channel!! Driving through, over, under, and around infrastructure every day and because of this channel I understand more and more. I love it
I'm so deep into my 30s that I sat here and found all of this so interesting. I wish large parts of my childhood and early adulthood weren't so focused on survival. I feel I missed out on so much learning since I didn't have leisure time to put into my interests.
Start now… it’s never too late…go all the way…we need your help and the gift that only you can deliver to the world…remember , education only fine tunes it…
One of the landfills here in Albany, Georgia is very high. It’s extremely flat here. So anything above 6 feet is a hill to us. At one of our landfills, it goes above the tree lines of our pine trees. It gives you a really interesting view of the surrounding landscape. one of the things they are doing at this landfill is putting pipelines throughout the landfill and off the methane gas. It is piped across the road to the marine logistics space and used to power turbines for electricity. It’s saving the base a ton of money and creating a lot of revenue for the city.
14:48 "I'm thankful for the sanitary engineers and the other professions involved in safely and economically dealing with our trash so we don’t have to." That's for sure!
@@DjsencereRUclips knows where you are in the video, and they are constantly refreshing the comments as you progress in the video. So whatever time stamp is closest to where you are watching will appear first in the comments.
I'm a Regional Manager for a company that designs and operates Renewable Gas plants. We specialize in landfill to natural gas and landfill to energy facilities. The amount of engineers and thought that goes into a trash mountain is crazy. This is a great video that goes over the inner workings of a landfill. I'd love the chance to run you through the system of scrubbing the raw gas from the landfill to heat homes and such. At a plant in NC, we also use a "virtual pipeline". AKA we truck the processed gas to a utility pipeline.
Those trucking costs must be high but I'm guessing less than getting a permit and construction for a new pipe line? Does the condensate from "cleaning" process get placed back into the landfills or processed separately?
@@ocko8011 the trucking cost and complexity was an underestimated factor in the project. Pipeline isn’t cheap, and in this specific instance, just the right of way would have been an astronomical undertaking. A big deal in this industry currently is a new set of government guidelines that came out a few months ago that basically go over how we have to prove that the gas these plants are producing is what we say it is. The trucking makes that process a pain. The condensate usually gets pumped right into the leachate tanks at the landfill. Most projects then take that liquid to a water treatment plant.
The environmental division of the company I work for has a deal where the collection of gasses from our landfill in Niagara Falls is captured and pipelined directly to the local General Motors plant. I haven’t been well versed with the whole process through the landfills but it is another way that they are trying to sustainably support other local industries where we operate.
Can I sell for your company at my local landfill? I mean Y'all teach me the processes (I read p&id) and I’ll just keep selling and help build the project.
My father is a sanitary engineer and worked a lot with landfills. I grew up listening to him explaining how complex and actually how amazing they are. Cool video! Reminds me of good times with my father!
And now his kids are old enough the participate. In a couple of decades it will be interesting to see what they remember since it will probably be different from their parents, of course in their case there is video.
I'm Portuguese, and in Lisbon, one of the most touristic places and high standard living in Lisbon now was a lanfill 30 ago that's was turned into a big riverside park with lot of attractions, and that decision completely changed the near neighborhood from being some poor houses and old warehouses to being one of the most high rated places in Lisbon. "Parque das nações"
@@duudsuufdAnd used to be where the poor people had to live until it was gentrified and pricing drove out the poor people to be marginalized somewhere else. So nice!
That was an impressive transformation for that area, that included run down dockyards and brown fields. I believe one of the most sucessful legacies for any Expo's.
I worked on an archeological site in eastern Arizona late 80s early 90s. The pueblo had many rooms, but one room we excavated had nothing but 'trash' in it. Turkey and deer bones, scraps of leather, busted pottery, etc. It was one of the most interesting rooms on the site!
@@Madhattersinjeans that depends on perspective. Knowing about the average Joe will fill in some gaps but how do we even describe a “society”? Usually we describe it in forms of hierarchy, celebrations, their religion, stand of technology, food and wealth, wars. All those things give us plenty of information to paint a picture for average Joe. As archeologists, we take every bit of evidence to connect puzzle pieces. A landfill can be such a piece. In particular for aliens.
I live near one of the most advanced US landfills paey 30 years and it is crazy how the area and topography changed of the area. Currently there is baseball stadium and school and apartments and parks on a landfill where my mom back in days took her trash to. Really interesting. I volunteer there once a month ! This video answered a bunch of my questions, thanks you 😊
I worked as a CQA for several landfill projects along the east coast of the U.S. The explanation here is spot on while keeping it light and relatable. I love this channel so much. THANK YOU!!
I'm a civil engineer that has worked with dozens of landfills. This is a fantastic explanation of landfill construction, operations, and maintenance. Well done and you earned a subscription from me!
Although recently retired, I worked for a regional municipality as a Waste Technical Officer as part of a team constructing, operating, environmental monitoring of two large landfills for many years. Your description of landfill operations is spot on. One thing you missed was the management of LFG (landfill gas) via flares begins from day one of the operation and in one of the landfills we collected LFG for power generation into the local grid well before the facility's end of life. Also one of the main management problems in landfills is the three types of water. Clean, dirty and the one you mentioned leachate. All three types must be managed separately. So the management of surface water and 'dirty' water via HES or High efficiency sediment basins to flock (clean) water off the construction areas before disposal to creeks and rivers is essential. Residents have always complained about the charges and the cost of disposing of waste and although we spend lots of time and money to educate, unlike those of us in the industry, most people are uninterested and generally don't appreciate the engineering, science and costs that go into landfills. Thanks for your well researched video of this fascinating, essential and environmentally sound industry.
Trash removal and Water Treatment are probably the 2 most important and undervalued jobs on the planet. I cannot fathom how fast everything plummets if those 2 groups cease for whatever reason.
I live in a big city. When I was a kid, our city trash collectors went on strike for a month. Is there such a thing as olfactory PTSD? If there is, I have it. The city did its best, designating local dump sites for everyone and telling people what to do. People complied. Everyone had a little garbage dump in their neighborhood community center parking lot for a month. It was awful. I don’t know what my local garbage collectors get paid, but I’m sure it’s not excessive considering their importance. I always treat them with respect.
12:13 I'm one of the many engineers who work on those waste-to-energy systems. I'd love to see you cover them in more detail sometime, maybe even including the other sources besides landfills. There's a ton of challenges that make it a rarer solution than you'd think but the industry is really growing these days.
I've worked in a few landfills as an electrical contractor. We actually built a pump/flare system at a landfill. The landfill sells the landfill gas to a brick plant for their ovens. The gas is flared off when the brick plant doesn't need it. We have to monitor the vacuum on the wells to keep it below certain thresholds. The same landfill also has pumps in each sump that pump the leachate back to a main holding tank. The leachate is put into water trucks and dumped back on the landfill. I was surprised how much goes into running a landfill once we became involved with a few of them.
Hey cool! I was an electrical contractor for a landfill gas plant that generated power and used flares for the remaining. It really is an interesting process!
In my city we burn all unrecyclable waste to generate electricity The only thing that gets released into the air is access steam which is just hot water and not pollutive at all
@@tplillicrap I'm sure they capture the smoke and process it if the only thing they release into the air is steam. Otherwise, OP's comment would be false.
I spent an entire career mostly dealing with landfills. It's nice to see a good description of the systems involved from layman's perspective. One of the things I want to emphasize is the fact as you mentioned that virtually every possible college degree is involved in one way or another in the process. I personally worked directly with engineers of all types, biologists, geologists, chemists, toxicologists, ecologists, lawyers, public relations, community relations, lobbyists, lawmakers, architects, and many more professions.
forgot politician which is different than a lawmaker. lawmakers are supposed to be in it for the people. Politicians are in it for themselves, passing laws that curry favor with certain lobbyists so they can get votes to be reelected.
@@AffordBindEquipment That's not true. Politician is a job, and trying to make lawmaker seem like a purer, more trustworthy version of the job is as silly as saying a police officer is different from a cop. It's better to call them corrupt politicians than try to change the meaning of existing words, since it will just turn into a new way to insult whichever politician someone dislikes regardless of what their actions or motives are. Besides, "lawmaker" sounds like a puppet, so shouldn't that be the bad version? Politicians are sup[posed to do a lot more than make laws, and anyone who limits themselves to just making laws is probably corrupt in the way you describe.
I live in Norway, and here we do a mix of deponing and incendiary. The garbage is collected to depos, then properly sorted and then handed over to incinerators. These again filter out heavy gasses etc, and since the waste was properly sorted beforehand, it's easier to control what kind of gasses that will be produced. 1Kg of waste, equals 2.5kW of energy. Deponing became illegal here in 2009. With the exception of hazardous waste, this is still being locked into big depones.
@@fh5kskalf I didn't know that it was EU wide. But dumping treatable (doesn't have to be incineration, but that's the most common) trash has been banned in Germany for decades.
I've been practicing in the Solid Waste industry for almost 20 years. Grady, as always, this was an excellent introduction to the engineering in landfills, especially the part where you said almost every college degree can factor into landfill construction and operation. In most cases, the difficulty is not the engineering, but the permitting. Succesfully permitting large expansions or new sites (greenfields) requires City/Township, County, and State approval to allow operation. Some landfill sites I manage only take in a couple thousand tons a year and don't have much money for elaborate systems, while others have massive sites and want to be at the forefront of technology, especially for leachate reduction. As with most other Civil disiplines, there is never a one-size-fits-all approach. Understanding the geologic setting and designing a landfill well-suited for it's environment is just step 1 (although definitely the most enjoyable part).
Great video. I do a lot of environmental drilling and rock coring at landfills while also installing wells and gas probes. I’m always intrigued just watching the day to day operations. Near where I live. A lot of landfills are turned into golf courses, parks, forest preserves and nature areas with hiking and bike paths.
I was happily eating breakfast while watching this video about trash, but the quick shot of Grady drinking his leachate cocktail at 7:18 really took me out and made me wonder what I was currently eating. Beautiful.
I bought new windshield wipers for my truck today after the old ones fell apart. The new ones came in a plastic sleeve that used more plastic than the wipers themselves. Reduce is the step we really are missing.
My city has a landfill that has been converted to a park. I had always wondered why there was a pond next to what used to just be a pile of trash, but understanding now that it was likely a leachate pond makes a lot of sense. Thanks for sharing.
I think leachate is always collected in tanks. Because the "trash mountain" has an impermeable cover there is a lot of runoff that is collected in sediment basins. When the cover is functioning appropriately there should not be much leachate.
“You probably don’t think too much about where your trash goes” and that’s where you are horribly mistaken my good sir. I am deeply invested in the future of my trash
Here in Virginia Beach we have "Mount Trashmore", the nation's first landfill park. The only two indicators that it used to be a landfill are the name, and a vent atop the hill, presumably to release decomposition gases. Mount Trashmore is a fun destination among locals and visitors alike to play and relax.
Wish we had this presentation back in the 1990s. I am a California Professional Civil Engineer that worked Air Force Base closing. All the closed bases had landfills. Some were abandoned before the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976 gave States control over the management. Been nice to show this at meetings.
I was a test specialist that traveled to landfills to perform sampling and analysis of both air emissions and leachate treatment systems. Fascinating places these landfills are. True fact- when you first arrive the smell can be overwhelmingly nauseating but your brain begins to ignore the bad odors through a process called olfactory fatigue. Depending on the person, within a couple of hours you don't notice the bad smells anymore. But that's not always be a good thing; your sense of smell is important in detecting toxic gases (like hydrogen sulfide) so carrying a gas meter that could sound an alarm was required for some test situations. Great video as always!
a generalized form of the concept of olfactory fatigue is the fact that all of our sensory input detects derivatives, changes, differences- not constants or absolute values. a weight is heaviest when loaded or unloaded, not carried. a constant droning noise is loudest when starting or stopping. something hot is warmer than the environment, yourself, or its recent past self. you cannot see clearly in darkness or bright light when changing from one to the other. stinky work clothes will probably smell as bad coming out of the wash as they did coming off you at the end of the shift, just like how a smoker's clothes will smell to a non-smoker more than they do to the owner, etc.
Here in Sydney we fill in old brick pits. The hole was dug decades ago, now we fill it again. There’s one near where I live that now has a golf driving range on it.
Where I live, municipal waste is either burned, recycled or goes to a biogas plant. Only 1 % of municipal lands in a landfill. In the video, there is so much plastic ending up in this landfill, I can't believe that it is cheaper to dump it somewhere, then burn it and generate electricity and heat.
Would be interesting to hear a comparison to countries that incinerate the trash. I remember when I was little and a waste disposal official from the region where I live came to our school and explained what happens with our trash and showed us what remained after the burning process. I assume that would still end up in some landfill afterwards (don't remember what they mentioned, given it was well over 30 years in the past).. I also recall them talking about filters on the smokestacks that extract toxins from the burning process.. So a comparison of the various approaches would be really interesting to learn about
Landfills for incineratable thrash has been banned in Norway since 2009 (and loads of other European countries, but as I'm Norwegian that's what I know most about). The only things that are still landfilled are certain toxic substances, incineration ash and things like building materials that can't be incinerated (cement/rocks etc). Modern incineration plants filter out the almost all toxins, the only things released to the air in any significant way is CO2 (but CCS is being developed to capture that too). Based on a quick calculation I made, a modern incineration plant, like Klemetsrud in Oslo, per ton of incinerated waste, releases about 1 ton of CO2, 750 grams NOx, 250g SO2, 50g PM, and 0.5g Mercury.
This was a great video! Thanks for making/sharing it! I grew up not too far from a landfill and we always had troubles with the smell on hot windy summer days. They converted it into a walking park, which I think is great. I also had no idea that companies were still responsible for the landfill for another 30 years or so after it closes... that's a long time without any extra revenue coming in. Another older landfill in my city was converted into a private golf course, so that was a smart way to maintain it while still making money.
Landfills are an easy thing to be cynical about. It’s one of the many cheap ways to appear sophisticated. But here’s Grady again showing us how they’re feats of human ingenuity 😂
I lived somewhere that had houses built on top of a landfill. Not recommended. The settling can make the house start sagging, and it doesn't sag uniformly. So, part of the house can droop down, causing issues. It affects the roads and the liquid sometimes leeches out during the rain.
Big business gives me 99% of my waste and they are the ones who started making the packaging part of their sales and marketing. I have nothing to do with that. And regardless of what I think about it they will continue to do it. To suggest that somehow now all of a sudden it’s the consumer’s responsibility to lower trash trends is like telling, a toddler to not draw on the walls but every day you give them a new package of markers and stick them in an empty room. In fact, I think we should place 99% of responsibility on these big businesses, the resources they take, the illnesses they cause, the problems they inflict upon individuals and the environment, yet there is seldom if any accountability.
Here in Melbourne Australia, there were many basalt and clay quarries in the northern suburbs. They were developed from early settlement (1830s) till the 1950s. Pretty much all of our urban parks in this area are a result of basalt and clay quarries that ware eventually filled in with rubbish. My house sits right next to a park that was a small clay hole in the late 1800 and was filled in by the 1930s, ive always wanted to dig up the park to find out what kind of stuff was thrown away
I used to work in a landfill site in my civil engineering training many year ago. Waste management is a multi-engineering operation business, It includes site formation works, earth moving, rock blasting, slope stabilzation wall, sewwall, pier construction, biological treatment plants, gas collection system, leatchage pipe laying, liner laying and etc. Planning, construction, operation, decomission, restallation of a landfill site may lasting more than 50 years....Because the site is so huge, design phase, construction phase, operational phase, decomissioning phase and restoration phase are all happening in different portion of the site. There are lots of things to learn in solid waste management business.
I’ve worked with landfills that accepted a bunch of old wallboard from demolished houses along with municipal waste. There were a lot more issues with hydrogen sulfide generation compared to other sites, requiring a special treatment system to capture the sulfur. Flaring it off creates huge amounts of SO2, which is an air quality issue. Another great episode!
Our city/county solution for closing a landfill was to cap it with two feet of soil, and abandon it. No further use of the area was allowed, until approximately 20 years after it was closed, the model airplane club requested the officials for authorization for the club to use it as a flying field. Permission was granted, and the club had exclusive use of the ares, with specific rules of no digging or disruption of the soil, no smoking, open fires or grills, and driving and parking in selected areas only. Each member of the club had the combination to the lock on the gates that was to remain closed at all times except for flying activities. The model airplane club had a lease with the city for one dollar per year for rent, for the ability to access the site. This was a great position for the club and the city, and after about ten years, the club was allowed to install a 25' x 400' runway and pilot stands and tables. A covered patio with a metal open-walled shelter was also constructed. The activity at the former landfill was a benefit to the community, and soon after that, two very large areas were fenced in for a dog park - one for big dogs, and the other for small dogs. The former landfill is now open to the public, just like a regular city park, and roads have been paved throughout the area to further enhance its utility to the community. This is an example of how a landfill can become an asset to the community.😀🛩️🐕
Reminds me of my wish for a solar punk factory game where all the 'machines' are living things. Over here is my community of leachate drinking Gradys. They balance well with the aerial Billys who need plenty of diseased air to stay healthy
Great, informative video. Took a dirty topic and made it interesting and easy to understand. One point to consider: there are thousands of closed landfills that do not meet the standards described as normal or typical in this video. There are playgrounds, parks, and other recreational sites with built over old landfills and testing positive for dangerous levels of arsenic or led or other unsafe materials in the surface soils. New regs don’t necessarily address existing dangers. New regs also aren’t always followed. There’s a reason landfills worry people.
I love how you explain it in such an easy to understand why. BTW, you said landfills are turned into parks. There is one near where I grew up. They built a park, golf course, and pond on it. I remember remember taking pop cans there to be recycled when I was a kid. Now that area is a parking lot. Absolutely mind blowing.
About 70 years ago before regulations my father's friends wanted him to invest in a new land fill he thought it was a bad idea and didn't invest . They bought low value Canyon land and terraced the sides to cover the trash. When it was full they built a golf course on top of the fill and built up scale houses overlooking the golf course . The investors became very rich. I know of 2 housing tracts built in this area on top of land fills and law suits started when tires and gas leaks appeared .
When you said apartments built on top I’m like ugh not a good idea to live on a land fill . I know the engineers do great work but it’s not an easy problem and u don’t wanna find out and get cancer or sick 10 years later
As someone who works in compliance this is a very positive perfect world take on the system. Many older landfills do not have proper barriers, and the gas and leachate have tendencies to leak out. It is important to keep in mind who does the dumping too, and there are landfills that contain toxins such as vinyl chloride and benzene. Landfills in remission with poor barriers need to have constant gas pull and constant leachate pull to stop off gasing and leaching. They also have to have the surface monitored for the same type of toxins coming through the top cover. Some cities have even allowed building of houses and apartments next to these kind of landfills. After what I've seen I would neither want to live near a landfill, nor go to a park at one. Landfills are toxic and are not safe even in remission, they are an unfortunate burden of the society we have built.
I’m 65 years old but just found out about what happens after the landfills receive our trash! Your explanation was very clear and concise which was a great way to find out! Thanks
I have been to my local landfill twice. The second time I was required to drive to the top. I was disposing a decades old sofa. It was super confusing and disgusting! Everyone was rude. But to sit upon all the disgust of our community gave me a new perspective!
As a solid waste engineer designer/consultant in western NC, I really appreciated this video! Well done and enjoyed the summary of solid waste management and landfill design. Will be sharing with new engineers in the office that aren't familiar with the intricacies of landfill design!
One of my favorite things is seeing value and purpose extracted from even the smallest or most worthless thing. So seeing generators running off the trash and the land reused for parks is fantastic. Though I do wish we had a better system of separation to extract even more i.e. burnables going to generation plants, organics going to digestors, metals getting pulled out. Ideally we'd have no need for landfills because that's really the roughest way to put something back in the cycle but it's good to see us managing to make them a bit better.
@@seanworkman431 For a good portion of it, I agree. I've heard there is a lot of fake recycling and just general lack of interest because it doesn't really maintain quality. So we'd be better off burning it and switching our plastic source from oil to plant based sources. As long as the exhaust is properly treated, then I don't see it being worse than coal or gas plants.
Wastewater treatment operator here. I used to work at a ~3 million gallons/day plant that was primarily landfill leachate. Interesting comparisons: -the collection system was not a main with branches but a grid of 138 vaults (50,000gal each) that were selectively opened as they filled up >treatment plants are designed to remove certain pollutants, usually it's 1-2 pages long, this one was a full 7 pages >we had to test solid waste from the treatment process (basically dead bacteria, spongy dirt) for radioactivity just in case >we had a contract with the local municipal/residental waste plant to buy their wastewater (the pipes were in place for them to send us water) in order for us to dilute the landfill leachate >we had a very long treatment process because each step was basically done twice (two aerobic tanks, two anoxic, two filters, etc) in order to meet pollutant removal requirements >the plant would frequently flood and lose power when it rained really hard because the sewer main was used as a backup to the storm drain and the local power plant was poorly made, a common problem in the east coast
WW treatment plants never seem to be sized with enough reserve capacity to handle anything more than 25 year storms. In the Midwest many WW plants have outright refused to take landfill leachate due to PFOS/PHAS. Trash and liquids should be kept as separate as possible.
@@ocko8011 You have zero idea what you're talking about. Treatment plants are never designed with reserves (fermenting waste = bio and explosive hazards), the state will either force private companies to take it or build public plants (to comply with federal or self regulation), and PFOS/PFAS have been banned for 60 years, not to mention being relatively simple to treat.
In Switzerland, Landfills are almost non-existent. All waste that can be burned gets incinerated and provides local heating. Landfills are only for materials that can't be incinerated, such as ashes, concrete, etc. Many incineration plants are connected to the railways with sidings so that the trash can be collected outside in the train stations and then transported into the incineration plant by train, reducing the amount of truck journeys considerably.
same here...seems so crazy that people still just bury trash and pretend its not there...or even make artificial islands of it as in Japan. No wonder theres microplastics everywhere
A major landfill for the Dallas area is in Melissa, TX. There are $300K - $400K homes right across the street from it and the stench is unbelievable. I can only assume the people buying the homes have no sense of smell or spend a sizable chunk of their income on Glade Plug-Ins. It blows my mind that people are willing to spend that much money for the privilege of sleeping next to a dumpster every night.
The first step to waste avoiding a landfill is to make it worth it and possible to reuse and, if that is not an option, recycle things. Even incinerating waste will allow us to be able to recover a lot of energy that would otherwise be unrecoverable, plus it allows metal to be easily separated out of our waste. Other inert debris(bricks, rocks, etc) may be too contaminated for it to be worth separating though.
I live near a trash incinerator and I know a few things: it reduces the garbage to 10% of the original volume. So it takes in about 100 truckloads a day, but still generates 10 truckloads a day of ash, that is brought to a landfill.
@@EthanPerkins-qq9qh I wonder if the ash can be used to lower costs in certain concrete constructions, I don't know the math or anything behind this but maybe if I figure this out I can find out how many Fallout 76 disks I can put in a concrete highway barrier.
@@EthanPerkins-qq9qh Interesting to know the size reduction. The trash is toxic anyways so I am thinking why not extract the energy and metals contained within it. The only reasons I can think of why more people don't do this is because of people who don't want to give a permit to an incineration facility and/or that a landfill is cheaper. But in the end, reduction is the best, reuse is the second best and the most practical, and recycling is the easiest but generates a lot more waste and loses the value of the original object(which is likely a lot higher than the produced one)
@ElectroTree01 Yes, it's absolutely true that reduce and reuse are the best options. We as consumers should buy high quality, long lasting, repairable things. We should also take the time to learn how to do simple repairs on the things we own. As far as the recycling goes, glass,metal, and cardboard are presently highly recycled. The big problem is plastics. We barely recycle any plastic. It is best to avoid plastic packaging if you can.
@ElectroTree01 To address your comment on incinerators, both of your thoughts are true: there was a lot of community pushback and anger when the incinerator was put in, and it costs far more to dump a truckload at the burner than the landfill. A truckload at the burner costs close to a thousand dollars, that same load costs about 400 dollars to dump at the landfill. (I work for a garbage company)
i love the fact this channels always makes me sleep a little better at night, i'm so dumb but this channels helps me understand things i had no idea how they worked! thanks Practical Engineering
Interesting as always. The process that generates h2s and ch4 is anaerobic digestion of organic waste. It is more expensive to put it in a specialized digestion facility but instead of the digestate(essentially fertilizer) being contaminated and becoming leachate, it is able to remain as digestate and act as fertilizer.
Oh man, you're cracking me up! I'm 67 years old and I've been using the term "garbage juice" since I was a kid! Really, the first time I saw a trash truck going down the road and liquid was dripping out of it, I called it "Garbage Juice", and you see the same "juice" leaking out of dumpsters. I changed the phrase a bit years ago when my first child was born, and I started calling it "gobbage jooze" and we'd always have fun, if we smelled something funky, it was always attributed to 'gobbage jooze'. Great video! When we go by the local "Mt. Trashmore" I always tell the kids (look! There's where your poopy diapers go!" (we have twin 6 yr old granddaughters). Now when they see the landfill or a trash truch, they should 'GOBBAGE JUICE'!!!
My mother is dying in front of my eyes here at the hospital. She's hanging on but she won't make it. Thank you for such a calming, and positive RUclips channel to take my mind off things. RUclips is so full of hate but it feels more hateful when you feel so vulnerable. Yours is a diamond on this platform. Love yall.
@nmda9578 She passed the day after my comment. It's still hard. She lived with us. My wife took care of her and my kids played with her every day. We'll be okay but thank you for the kind words. I mean it, this channel seems to draw kind people to it. I haven't always been a kind person myself but I think everyone can change. Love yall.
How timely! I was driving past our county landfill just yesterday and saw they were in the middle of implementing some kind of elaborate hillside drainage (?) system with large areas of industrial black plastic sheeting like at 14:19 . I'm guessing it was their garbage juice collection system! I was going to Google 'landfill design', but now I won't have to. 🙂
I grew up in Key West, and my first elementary school was located next to the landfill that locals refer to as Mt. Trashmore. It was an actively used landfill at the time of my attendance at the school. They would sometimes cancel school due to the overwhelming odor that came from it. That landfill has since retired and looks like the one in this video in LA, a grass covered mound. This video gave me a perspective of this field of engineering I didn't know about.
I worked on a garbage truck for a temp service. We went to the landfill multiple times. On one route we went back to the same streets to get recyclables. I actually got a little happy, because I thought I would see the recycling center. We went right back to the landfill!🤦🏿♂️ why even have people separate their trash if you are going to dump it all in the exact same spot?🤷🏿♂️
Because people buy it. "We have it under control" is what you're ought to believe. The existence of landfills on their own prove we have no clue how to properly handle our waste. And by burying our trash we have lost the connection to the problem and are teaching the population to just go on. Stupidity is bliss.
Did you pay attention to any conversation between the driver and dump workers? or notice if you dumped the recyclables to the same spot as the trash? Many municipalities have recycling sorted at the dump. It makes sense to do so because some of those recyclables are not actually recyclable and sorted into trash. There's a whole continuum of how much processing gets done at the municipal level. Depending on the grade they are able to achieve, It gets sold and moved around to other processors or it gets trashed if there are no buyers.
Many landfills are in former sand or gravel quarries, so you do not have to dig a hole specifically for the landfill. The life cycle goes like this: Quarry -> Landfill -> Park.
We have a now closed landfill that is an inner city recreation area with a ski hill. We call it Mount Garb-age (like mirage). If you say it with a French accent, it sounds much more attractive and inviting.
I remember going to a landfill on a field trip in my gifted class. The teacher was CONVINCED that the entire thing was a horrid blight on the landscape, and used it to really drill us into the Reduce Reuse Recycle business. While, of course, it would be ideal if we didn't need Landfills, learning about their implementation, and the steps we've taken to make them as good as POSSIBLE is an eye opener. Something my teacher never actually TAUGHT us.
Yeah I mean, the nitty gritty of waste collection is maybe not as overarching a lesson as “reduce waste.” Everyone interacts with waste but few people are going to be a part of the engineering around keeping our trash hidden.
@@jajefan123456789 well in many categories they exist and usually they are the least sold products. So maybe you like this (as do I) but overwhelmingly people do not, as demonstrated by their purchasing preferences.
A few miles from me a developer built a subdivision on top of a old landfill. 5 years ago was a very wet year and several of the homes slid off the hill. The homeowners had no idea that was what their homes were built on, and homeowners insurance doesn't cover soil movement.....many of the folks have big mortgages and no home.
Insurance companies will literally refuse to sell you the insurance you need. Live on a hill side? No landslides coverd. Live in a flood zone? No flood insurance. Live in the mountains? No avalanches for you. Live at the coast? No storm and hurricane damage.
I'd like more details or a further series on this topic. It affect everyone and I think most of us are pretty ignorant to the details of landfills - even though we all probably live relatively close to one.
I worked at a small landfill and got to do all the stuff mentioned in the video. we used converted chevy truck engines to run the blowers that ran on the methane. An engine would last about two years with this extremely dirty gas. The site was flaring 2 million feet a day of gas and it was used to heat some green houses and now a company has built a small electric plant. If you are having a bad day jumping into one of the compactors for and hour or so was a good break.
Mt. Trashmore in Virginia Beach is an old landfill that was turned into a city park decades ago. I remember when they did a core sample of the hill to test the degradation of the waste. I was in high school at the time and we went to see it done. We were expecting recognizable trash from the 50s or something like that. It looked like just dirt with rust in it.
I'd Love to see a video where you discuss the various types of trailers that Semi trucks can tow. You know, similar to how you did that video on train cars!
@@Vastafari34 You can can get a physical copy or download a copy of the Emergency Response Guidebook....or simply use a search engine to look up any warning placard on a trailer. While it won't tell you the exact products within it'll give you an awareness of what type of product is in the trailer and what, if any, danger it poses.
@@cruisinguy6024 I know the placards can tell you what in a trailer, but i'm talking more about how the trailers are designed and why they are that way for the loads they carry.
I think it would be easy for Grady to come up with a list of lets say 10 or 15 trailer designs and explain how they are optimized for their intended loads, and I bet it would be really interesting.
Worked for several years at a mineral products plant in eastern Oregon processing wholesale sodium bentonite sealant for projects such as this. Also made several grades of zeolite products for use in water filtration, chemical spill cleanup, and livestock feed supplement.
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⚡I have more than 20 videos about soil! ruclips.net/p/PLTZM4MrZKfW-A419dqGZVtw6CAANqKR1f
🌌Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: go.nebula.tv/Practical-Engineering
Is this on nebula?
As a Dane, I know exactly where my waste goes. I was born in 1984, and has only known a world where everything is sorted and recycled. There are no landfills. The only thing that isn't reused is concrete, but we're working on it. A lot of unsorted waste is incinerated, which isn't perfect, but the heat is used for district heating and generation of electricity. The smoke is “washed”, in an attempt to remove heavy metals.
By me I know all 3 landfills, Bisasar Road, now close to full, and Marianhill, also close to full, with the new Buffelsdraai landfill, set to be usable for a century or so, seeing as it is basically a massive valley between 4 hills.
@@Alex-vr8gw I can't see it on nebula either. The link in the description is broken.
Loved seeing Brady doing the Obama sip.
im a heavy equipment mechanic at a local landfill and this is the most comprehensive explanation of the inner workings of a land fill I've ever seen *standing ovation*
Thank you. Waste management is far more important than the average citizen thinks.
Thank you for your services!
I hope most of you are without that job in a decade. Not because i you aren't doing important job but because landfill usage needs to go down globally. Here in Finland we went from 200kg per person per year to close to zero when it comes to household waste going to landfills. Extensive recycling system that takes away all the recyclables and harmful waste, and the rest is burned in power plants that produce electricity or heat for district heating, and output CO2 and H2O to the air. Landfills are now used mostly for things that fit the name better: construction waste, concrete and dirt, for ex the gravel that is spread on the roads and streets to increase grip in the winter is put in landfills.
So, i hope you are out of a job soon because you are needed elsewhere and the landfill is closed.
@@squidcaps4308 strange request but i get it
Fellow heavy equipment mechanic here from road construction industry. I love this guys videos. He answers a lot of questions the site managers and foreman don't even know.
All those times as a kid that my parents said my room "looked like a dump" were secretly compliments for my curiosity of engineering. Fascinating 💪
lmao
parents always see the best in us!
I'm proud of you son!
'Okay I'm going to stop you right there" 😀 if you think that liner is impermeable you're delusional 😀 the owners _want_ to get rid of as much leachate as possible so that they don't have to mediate it. Profit is a very warm bedfellow. They don't want to "accidentally" leak too much. And the owners want to be able to say that the amount that is leaking was whoops just an accident 😀. But those liners leak significant amounts of toxic metals and everything else into our drinking water. Only to be "discovered" in our drinking water decades later. 😮
Dammit, I'm the 999th like. Somebody, anybody, like this comment! Help get this comment to 1K!
My 6 year old son sat down to watch this video with me and was mesmerized. He has now been requesting your channel daily. Thank you for presenting these concepts so well. Couldn't be happier to turn this on for him.
Introduce him to scishow and the green brothers if he's interested! Another amazing resource for learning at any age
I loved landfills when I was kid too. It's still pretty interesting
Dad with overwatch profile pic. Man I'm getting old.
Future engineer on your hands 😁
which branch of engineering is his favorite?
I was involved in the siting, design, and construction of landfills for 35 years as an engineer. This is one of the best non technical descriptions I have seen. Thank you
I've been a Garbageman for 22 years, and I personally pick up 30 tons of trash a day. People would be surprised how much waste we as Americans throw out daily. I think it's gotten worse with the poor quality of things we buy. Things just don't last as long these days. I always pay more for Quality so I don't have to add to this problem.
It's also such a shame that waste isn't separaed properly in the USA. And yes, it's so true that the average person doesn't care one bit about the incredible amount of waste their lifestyle leaves... people just don't care, it's crazy.
Obviously waste is a problem everywhere, but it was one of the things that struck me most about the states was the sheer depth of throwaway culture. Like just walking into a fast food restaurant and seeing the amount of straws, napkins, plastic cups with lids, etc. that they gave to every order only for it to immediately end up in the bin. Not to mention the cars and fuel use, or permanent heating/cooling.
@@Hex... Honestly, the only real solution might be to offer some kind of monetary incentive for people to improve how they sort their trash. Similar to how bottle return systems work in some places, but for all types of waste. Imagine large bins equipped with sensors that can estimate the amount of glass, plastic, metal, cardboard, paper, or organic material someone disposes of. The system could then print out a receipt that can be redeemed for cash or store credit at any grocery store. Just an idea that came to me.
There would definitely be challenges, like the fact that not every piece of trash has a barcode for easy scanning, and people might try to game the system. But does that make it impossible?
Can you estimate how many houses, and ideally people, that the 30 tons is for? I wish the video had covered this, but I’m curious about the average trash per person both in weight and volume.
And by volume, I’m curious how much volume when fully compacted.
@@Hex... we are kind of screwed over by a faction that wants to eliminate expenditure on civil infrastructure in favor of funding militairistic endeavors.
I live near a landfill, most of the time you don’t notice much, but when it rains you can smell an acrid aroma depending on which way the wind blows. I’ve often salvaged a lot of interesting things, mostly tools or machine parts. The landfill collects the methane produced by the waste and uses it to generate electricity for the site. The sad thing is the road leading to the landfill (which is a major highway) is constantly littered with trash, mainly from trucks but also from illegal dumping.
I’ve noticed a strong methane odour near a local landfill, I’ve never thought about them collecting it and using it that way. Very insightful and interesting! Funnily enough it’s right above a major aquifer in Perth ( Western Australia) and has a water treatment plant that collects from there and cleans its collected water from the landfill.
at least you'll never go hungry. :D
I call bs.... I drive 2 miles away from a landfill everyday and it's the most disgusting smell ever!
@@Sometimes7453 Some landfills aren't ventilated and those start stinking really fast. Some are ventilated improperly because of damaged gas wells, pumps, etc. Properly ventilated landfills don't smell because almost all of the gas is collected and burnt. Kudos to those that burn the gas for energy generation.
@@jameswilliams1398you may be smelling the hydrogen sulfide. Methane is odorless.
My dad passed away almost 15 years ago. He owned a hazardous waste company and one day when we went to the dump he gave me this very interesting in depth overview of how it all worked. The first few times you said “garbage juice” I was like “but there’s a name for that…what is it?” Thanks for sneaking “leachate” in there. What a funny topic to make me think of my dad and our nerdy conversations today. Thank you for this. ❤
I'm guessing you didn't take over your father's company what did you end up doing and why?
Is your name Meadow by any chance?
@@aaron4340i think it’s AJ, meadow went away to college so she wouldn’t be a criminal…
May your father rest in peace
@@aaron4340there is no garbage industry!
I always thank the trash truck man & dept, every time I can. Their job may seem degrading to some, but theirs is the most important. You’d notice their absence quickly.
Definitely not the most important…lack of garbage collection means people would have to take their trash too the dump.
But what would you do without farmers? Grow your own fruits vegetables and grains on your own? Not as easy as taking out the trash.
@@mvflp2218 the traffic would be horrible if everyone had to drive to the dump.
Rush hour is already bad when everyone goes to work.
Imagine if everyone in a city tried driving to the same building...it would be a nightmare lol
IDK about "Most" but it is a very important job yeah.
I was mulling things over a little while ago and had the random thought about "I don't know what's involved in being a trash collector, which is actually sort of the point when you think about it"
@@mvflp2218 Maybe I should have said ‘one of the most’, and yes, farmers and other hard workers are important, but without trash pickup, there would be rodents like one has never seen, bugs, diseases like a pandemic, and let’s not even mention the smell. People would eventually have to wear a gas mask to breathe. Again, if not the most important, they are waaaay up at a top of the list.
Anyone who wants to argue, I'll just refer you to the trash strike in the UK in 2022 😂 it was a fuckin disaster
I used to be a GCCS engineer (gas collection and control systems). I designed the “pipe system” inside landfills that led to and from the wells. They’re only briefly mentioned in this video but they’re critical to a landfill’s maintenance through their whole life! Some interesting things is that as a landfill is filled, naturally the weight pressing down on piping increases. We want to avoid a pinch in lines running to wells since that would lead to a pressure buildup and no suction at the well. Because of this, the pipe systems were cut and abandoned in place every >20’ of fill on top. We would often have to extend wells as well to reach the surface when there was fill on them. The pipes also need to run at a minimum grade (angle) to ensure any condensation flows downhill to a sump! If there are valleys, the condensation will pool and create another blockage. Super interesting stuff!
No way, tomatoanus was an engineer
@@stfuyfc69420 lol
@@stfuyfc69420 I think you meant the opposite of what your comma makes your sentence mean.
With the comma, you're making a strong argument that TomatoAnus was clearly an engineer.
Without the comma, you are surprised that TomatoAnus could possibly be an engineer.
EDIT: I've been convinced that the comma may actually be intentional. Not 100% sure, but I do see both sides clearly.
Wait your the speed run guy
@@kindlin That confuse the hell out of me. It reminded me of the famous example of a similar comma usage; "let's eat, grandpa" and "let's eat grandpa".
"I have a scale model of a landfill in my garage"
Me: Me, too! ...Oh... that's what he meant.
😂😂 @danielcpeters wins the Internet
Can relate lol
Hahaha Good one!
Such an underrated comment 😄
If only I could attach a picture, I would win "Best landfill in garage" award!
One of the most fascinating things about landfills, that was briefly touched in here but goes much deeper, is that the internal chemistry has an entire lifecycle that has been very thoroughly studied and modeled. You can actually predict the volume and composition of leachate and gas discharge to astonishing accuracy based on just the size and what phase of "life" the landfill is in. It even informs things like what can be placed together and what has to be segregated into seperate cells, for example construction/demolition waste and food waste have to be kept as far apart as possible because the gypsum in building waste acts as a rich sulphur source that the microbes in food waste will convert to hydrogen sulphide, at certain life phases of the landfill, which is an odour hazard but more importantly is extremely toxic when concentrations get higher, like in the case of combined food-building waste!. I can honestly say, after studying landfill chemistry, I see them as essentially giant bioreactors for processing waste, rather than a static graveyard of trash.
Years ago I did some work at a landfill that primarily accepted C&D. It's the only landfill I've been at that had a flare specifically for sulfide. It is insane just how much stink gas that dry wall / wall board can lead to!
If you're not already familiar with them, you may be interested to learn about anaerobic digestors. They're a new waste disposal alternative that basically makes an accelerated version of a waste processing bioreactor. Rather than taking years to reduce the carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, etc., it's done on the scale of weeks.
@@ppltlkngand anaerobic digestors can produce methane for a cogeneration engine and produce electricity with methane thats been processed. a handful of wastewater treatment plants have this setup
Amazing!
I would love to read more about this, do you have any recommendations for further reading?
@daydodog you can probably get access to good case studies from professional bodies like ciwem/icheme. Water companies themselves might have some eg thames water in the uk probably have a reasonable amount of info on Beckton, a nearly 4 million population equivalent super STW that is song the biggest in the world
There's a lot of useful info available if you just type into Google "anaerobic digestion case study"
I am a Leachate tech and worked in the industry for 15+ years. Nice simple video to explain this type of landfill. You should have a look at hydraulically contained landfills, by far the safest type and the most interesting. Also not mentioned but a real problem in landfill is fires, and how we fight them is really cool.
I’m a landfill design / CQA Engineer, and this guy has bloody nailed it! Appreciate the content mate 👍
We don’t have many waste management college programs here in the US 😞 if any at all. I was really interested in the field.
@@techiebliss it’s not common here in Australia either. Typically we have Environmental / Civil Engineers that are accredited by sitting Geosynthetics Institute short courses and exams. They’re US based but there are geosynthetic testing specialists that facilitate the courses here
@@lebowski6061 thank you for this info
Thank you for covering landfills and solid waste management!
Some other current issues facing landfills include (that could be followed up in another video): PFOS, hydrogen sulfide, "black goo" (largely from diapers), lithium batteries, deep-well leachate injections, siting of new landfills vs. changing consumer disposal habits.
Also there has been more investigation of resource reclamation of buried waste. Think mining of landfills.
Lastly, having been a geotechnical engineer in the solid waste industry, this video just scratches the surface of the mountain of engineering that goes into landifll permitting, design, construction and operation.
Any good reading about these things? Hopefully non scholarly or jargon based books. Thought this was fascinating and totally changed my views on landfills.
And the mountain is made of trash! Fascinating.
@@hoolz750 I live walking distance from a Permanent Household Hazardous Waste Facility. It is something else entirely and happens to hold a lot of stuff mentioned in the comment. Oh my gosh... I'm realizing realtime that things might be different here because the immediate area is saturated with Biotech labs.
This channel and these comments always give me the feeling that any little thing I can point at in the built environment has millions of hours of study, brilliant engineering as well as blood sweat and tears put in it. My god, the engineering considerations just go on and on and on and on.
_"Lastly, having been a geotechnical engineer in the solid waste industry [...]"_ This is what I love about being an engineer myself as well: I'm way more of a general guy, I work in product R&D and knowledge far out of my studies has been useful like, daily. But then, there's some people like you who have far more specialized knowledge that is absolutely fascinating and unquestionably important to do what most people see as the most basic tasks, on the scale that we actually need with as many people as we have living on Earth.
Like, an engineer can say basically "I work with trash" in the most impressive way possible.
My hometown (in Kent County, MI), had only 2 years of life left on its landfill. So they built a comprehensive waste sorting facility, where municipal waste could be sorted into combustible and recyclable waste. By burning much of the waste before it was landfilled, the county is able to generate power and increased the lifespan of the landfill to 20 years, since now it just takes in ash.
I wonder how the carbon emissions compare with burning to landfilling.
As someone who grew up in grandville I never knew this! Do you know when this all happened?
@@Axle-FIn switzerland we dont have landfills, just burning facilities. we use high performance carbon filters, recycle a lot and generate energy with it.
@@sinn6719 What happens to the ash in Switzerland?
@@abhinrsvIt goes into asphalt mixes and concrete
in Sweden we put less than 10% of the waste in landfill. A large part goes to material recycling, but the largest volume goes to incineration to provide heat and energy. The ash from the incinerated waste is taken care of at the landfill.
As a Chinese, I had dealt with a couple of Swedish people, I have to say, very smart people, very clean designs, they always are time savers.
I just want to say that the U.S. is almost 22 times the size of Sweden.
@@JackMills003can produce 22 times the energy then
@@iTubersssthat's a lot of burning garbage, and I can't imagine that would be the fix you're thinking it is
But then how can the corporations make large sums of money when they have to spend money on recycling? That’s no fun.
Greetings from Sweden, only 1% of Sweden's trash is sent to landfills. By burning trash, another 52% is converted into energy and the remaining 47% gets recycled.
According to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, more than 2.5 million tons of waste is imported to Sweden each year, mostly from Norway and the UK. In the past six years, some 50% of all household waste has been treated through energy recovery.
Also don’t forget that the food goes in a seperate bin that is turned into biogas for busses! At least that is how it is in Skåne where I live.
@@operatoralex5926 Burning bio-fuels add other "trash", in a gas form, in the atmosphere.
@@skonstas4683 In the video it is said that burning methane turns it into less potent greenhouse gasses, or whatever the word he used for it. And at least we get some use for a biproduct
This is the way!
Exactly, why other countries can’t just use your country’s model 🙉🙉
My dad worked in landfill until he retired a few years ago. He started out as a landfill gas engineer and ended up as site manager. They fed the gas into huge generators to burn it off and produce electricity. If the generators failed the gas had to be flared off and as a kid he let me light the flare. The gas had a very distinct odour to it and I vividly remember the wash of heat over me from the flare igniting on a cold day. In later years I worked on the landfill myself as a weigh bridge operator when I was between jobs. I was also in a band with one of the machine drivers. Landfill is an often under appreciated aspect of our modern lives and whilst a lot of people wouldn't want it in their back yard they'd be the first to complain if their trash wasn't collected. I've always found it fascinating.
You say weigh bridge, we say scale house.
I'm a truck driver and can't say enough how much I love this channel!! Driving through, over, under, and around infrastructure every day and because of this channel I understand more and more. I love it
I'm so deep into my 30s that I sat here and found all of this so interesting. I wish large parts of my childhood and early adulthood weren't so focused on survival. I feel I missed out on so much learning since I didn't have leisure time to put into my interests.
It's not too late to learn. Enjoy learning!
Bro same! It’s so interesting!
Start now… it’s never too late…go all the way…we need your help and the gift that only you can deliver to the world…remember , education only fine tunes it…
One of the landfills here in Albany, Georgia is very high. It’s extremely flat here. So anything above 6 feet is a hill to us. At one of our landfills, it goes above the tree lines of our pine trees. It gives you a really interesting view of the surrounding landscape. one of the things they are doing at this landfill is putting pipelines throughout the landfill and off the methane gas. It is piped across the road to the marine logistics space and used to power turbines for electricity. It’s saving the base a ton of money and creating a lot of revenue for the city.
That is so cool!
I also live in a flat area, one of our old landfills is one of two big hills in the city and has become a city park with great views.
Hows it doing for your aquifer
Interesting to know if Methane would be listed as renewable energy.
@@lactoseintolerantgaming2711 lol
14:48 "I'm thankful for the sanitary engineers and the other professions involved in safely and economically dealing with our trash so we don’t have to." That's for sure!
Timestamp is suspicious
How come I opened the comments as soon as it hit this part word for word reading it was like he was reading your comment😂
@@DjsencereRUclips knows where you are in the video, and they are constantly refreshing the comments as you progress in the video. So whatever time stamp is closest to where you are watching will appear first in the comments.
I'm a Regional Manager for a company that designs and operates Renewable Gas plants. We specialize in landfill to natural gas and landfill to energy facilities. The amount of engineers and thought that goes into a trash mountain is crazy. This is a great video that goes over the inner workings of a landfill. I'd love the chance to run you through the system of scrubbing the raw gas from the landfill to heat homes and such. At a plant in NC, we also use a "virtual pipeline". AKA we truck the processed gas to a utility pipeline.
Those trucking costs must be high but I'm guessing less than getting a permit and construction for a new pipe line? Does the condensate from "cleaning" process get placed back into the landfills or processed separately?
@@ocko8011 the trucking cost and complexity was an underestimated factor in the project. Pipeline isn’t cheap, and in this specific instance, just the right of way would have been an astronomical undertaking. A big deal in this industry currently is a new set of government guidelines that came out a few months ago that basically go over how we have to prove that the gas these plants are producing is what we say it is. The trucking makes that process a pain. The condensate usually gets pumped right into the leachate tanks at the landfill. Most projects then take that liquid to a water treatment plant.
The environmental division of the company I work for has a deal where the collection of gasses from our landfill in Niagara Falls is captured and pipelined directly to the local General Motors plant. I haven’t been well versed with the whole process through the landfills but it is another way that they are trying to sustainably support other local industries where we operate.
Can I sell for your company at my local landfill? I mean Y'all teach me the processes (I read p&id) and I’ll just keep selling and help build the project.
So trash becomes fuel? Like a power plant? 😊
My father is a sanitary engineer and worked a lot with landfills. I grew up listening to him explaining how complex and actually how amazing they are. Cool video! Reminds me of good times with my father!
"and I have scale model in my garage" - always the most exciting part in every video
Who doesn't have a scale model of a landfill somewhere?
Jon: You tried to escape!
Excavator: Of couas. I am an excavator.
Every teenager has a scale model in their bedroom
And now his kids are old enough the participate. In a couple of decades it will be interesting to see what they remember since it will probably be different from their parents, of course in their case there is video.
That's why it's called excavator and not escapator.. ;-)
I'm Portuguese, and in Lisbon, one of the most touristic places and high standard living in Lisbon now was a lanfill 30 ago that's was turned into a big riverside park with lot of attractions, and that decision completely changed the near neighborhood from being some poor houses and old warehouses to being one of the most high rated places in Lisbon. "Parque das nações"
I looked it up on G Earth. I would not call it a park. It is a big stadium and many paved walkways with some tree lines between.
@@duudsuufdAnd used to be where the poor people had to live until it was gentrified and pricing drove out the poor people to be marginalized somewhere else. So nice!
@@jeffclark5268someone has to be marginalized. Might as well be poor people, they already know how to deal with it.
Yeah. We had a guy do that here in America. His name was Walt Disney. Your story is nothing special.
That was an impressive transformation for that area, that included run down dockyards and brown fields. I believe one of the most sucessful legacies for any Expo's.
I worked on an archeological site in eastern Arizona late 80s early 90s. The pueblo had many rooms, but one room we excavated had nothing but 'trash' in it. Turkey and deer bones, scraps of leather, busted pottery, etc. It was one of the most interesting rooms on the site!
Are you saying aliens won’t judge us by our advancements in technology, but by the contents of our landfills?
@@TheCornucopiaProject-bd5jkArchaeologists and their middens ... laid down in convenient daily/weekly layers and with included dated material.
@@Madhattersinjeans that depends on perspective. Knowing about the average Joe will fill in some gaps but how do we even describe a “society”? Usually we describe it in forms of hierarchy, celebrations, their religion, stand of technology, food and wealth, wars. All those things give us plenty of information to paint a picture for average Joe.
As archeologists, we take every bit of evidence to connect puzzle pieces. A landfill can be such a piece. In particular for aliens.
... Yup...
@@TheCornucopiaProject-bd5jk
I live near one of the most advanced US landfills paey 30 years and it is crazy how the area and topography changed of the area. Currently there is baseball stadium and school and apartments and parks on a landfill where my mom back in days took her trash to. Really interesting. I volunteer there once a month ! This video answered a bunch of my questions, thanks you 😊
I worked as a CQA for several landfill projects along the east coast of the U.S. The explanation here is spot on while keeping it light and relatable. I love this channel so much. THANK YOU!!
I'm a civil engineer that has worked with dozens of landfills. This is a fantastic explanation of landfill construction, operations, and maintenance. Well done and you earned a subscription from me!
Although recently retired, I worked for a regional municipality as a Waste Technical Officer as part of a team constructing, operating, environmental monitoring of two large landfills for many years. Your description of landfill operations is spot on. One thing you missed was the management of LFG (landfill gas) via flares begins from day one of the operation and in one of the landfills we collected LFG for power generation into the local grid well before the facility's end of life.
Also one of the main management problems in landfills is the three types of water. Clean, dirty and the one you mentioned leachate. All three types must be managed separately. So the management of surface water and 'dirty' water via HES or High efficiency sediment basins to flock (clean) water off the construction areas before disposal to creeks and rivers is essential.
Residents have always complained about the charges and the cost of disposing of waste and although we spend lots of time and money to educate, unlike those of us in the industry, most people are uninterested and generally don't appreciate the engineering, science and costs that go into landfills. Thanks for your well researched video of this fascinating, essential and environmentally sound industry.
0:12 *I WONDER HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE BURIED IN THAT LANDFILL*
I'm buried in that landfill
Thats what im sayin 😅
Trash removal and Water Treatment are probably the 2 most important and undervalued jobs on the planet.
I cannot fathom how fast everything plummets if those 2 groups cease for whatever reason.
considering how the world's going, we'll be seeing more and more trash soon
Poop removal is more important than either of those
@@jjlpinctpoop removal is covered by both trash removal and water treatment
@@ogfoxhound neither of those "two jobs" include sanitary drainage.
I live in a big city. When I was a kid, our city trash collectors went on strike for a month. Is there such a thing as olfactory PTSD? If there is, I have it.
The city did its best, designating local dump sites for everyone and telling people what to do. People complied. Everyone had a little garbage dump in their neighborhood community center parking lot for a month. It was awful.
I don’t know what my local garbage collectors get paid, but I’m sure it’s not excessive considering their importance. I always treat them with respect.
12:13 I'm one of the many engineers who work on those waste-to-energy systems. I'd love to see you cover them in more detail sometime, maybe even including the other sources besides landfills. There's a ton of challenges that make it a rarer solution than you'd think but the industry is really growing these days.
I've worked in a few landfills as an electrical contractor. We actually built a pump/flare system at a landfill. The landfill sells the landfill gas to a brick plant for their ovens. The gas is flared off when the brick plant doesn't need it. We have to monitor the vacuum on the wells to keep it below certain thresholds. The same landfill also has pumps in each sump that pump the leachate back to a main holding tank. The leachate is put into water trucks and dumped back on the landfill. I was surprised how much goes into running a landfill once we became involved with a few of them.
@brent4adv Thanks for your additional information. It appears to be far more complicated and interesting than I’ll bet most of us ever expected.
Hey cool! I was an electrical contractor for a landfill gas plant that generated power and used flares for the remaining. It really is an interesting process!
In my city we burn all unrecyclable waste to generate electricity
The only thing that gets released into the air is access steam which is just hot water and not pollutive at all
That's an amazing way to cut down on waste in landfill! But what about the smoke? Does it pollute the air or does that get managed well too?
@@tplillicrap I'm sure they capture the smoke and process it if the only thing they release into the air is steam. Otherwise, OP's comment would be false.
I spent an entire career mostly dealing with landfills. It's nice to see a good description of the systems involved from layman's perspective. One of the things I want to emphasize is the fact as you mentioned that virtually every possible college degree is involved in one way or another in the process. I personally worked directly with engineers of all types, biologists, geologists, chemists, toxicologists, ecologists, lawyers, public relations, community relations, lobbyists, lawmakers, architects, and many more professions.
thanks for the first hand insight
I bet you have lots of stories of all sorts of people and attitudes.
Having a simular career, it's always amazed me how many highly educated people are needed to build a mountain (of waste).
forgot politician which is different than a lawmaker. lawmakers are supposed to be in it for the people. Politicians are in it for themselves, passing laws that curry favor with certain lobbyists so they can get votes to be reelected.
@@AffordBindEquipment That's not true. Politician is a job, and trying to make lawmaker seem like a purer, more trustworthy version of the job is as silly as saying a police officer is different from a cop. It's better to call them corrupt politicians than try to change the meaning of existing words, since it will just turn into a new way to insult whichever politician someone dislikes regardless of what their actions or motives are. Besides, "lawmaker" sounds like a puppet, so shouldn't that be the bad version? Politicians are sup[posed to do a lot more than make laws, and anyone who limits themselves to just making laws is probably corrupt in the way you describe.
I live in Norway, and here we do a mix of deponing and incendiary. The garbage is collected to depos, then properly sorted and then handed over to incinerators. These again filter out heavy gasses etc, and since the waste was properly sorted beforehand, it's easier to control what kind of gasses that will be produced.
1Kg of waste, equals 2.5kW of energy.
Deponing became illegal here in 2009. With the exception of hazardous waste, this is still being locked into big depones.
entire video about landfills, yet not a second about decomposition. goes to show what americans are smoking
Literally just commented about the energy recovery you folks and Japan have there, were on the same page dude.
Samme i sweden. I belive we actually started to import thrash because we want to burn it for electricity and heating in the winter.
Yeah, it's an EU wide thing, building new landfills for incinerateable thrash is banned.
@@fh5kskalf I didn't know that it was EU wide. But dumping treatable (doesn't have to be incineration, but that's the most common) trash has been banned in Germany for decades.
I've been practicing in the Solid Waste industry for almost 20 years. Grady, as always, this was an excellent introduction to the engineering in landfills, especially the part where you said almost every college degree can factor into landfill construction and operation. In most cases, the difficulty is not the engineering, but the permitting. Succesfully permitting large expansions or new sites (greenfields) requires City/Township, County, and State approval to allow operation. Some landfill sites I manage only take in a couple thousand tons a year and don't have much money for elaborate systems, while others have massive sites and want to be at the forefront of technology, especially for leachate reduction.
As with most other Civil disiplines, there is never a one-size-fits-all approach. Understanding the geologic setting and designing a landfill well-suited for it's environment is just step 1 (although definitely the most enjoyable part).
Great video. I do a lot of environmental drilling and rock coring at landfills while also installing wells and gas probes. I’m always intrigued just watching the day to day operations. Near where I live. A lot of landfills are turned into golf courses, parks, forest preserves and nature areas with hiking and bike paths.
I was happily eating breakfast while watching this video about trash, but the quick shot of Grady drinking his leachate cocktail at 7:18 really took me out and made me wonder what I was currently eating. Beautiful.
Well technically speaking, with few exceptions, all water is recycled water. 🤔
Mmmm, garbage juice
There is no doubt we stick a lot of garbage in our mouths, particularly at breakfast if it include cereal.
It madd me think of Obama drinking Flint water 😂
He had me at 'Garbage Juice'. @@howarddavies136
I bought new windshield wipers for my truck today after the old ones fell apart. The new ones came in a plastic sleeve that used more plastic than the wipers themselves.
Reduce is the step we really are missing.
My city has a landfill that has been converted to a park. I had always wondered why there was a pond next to what used to just be a pile of trash, but understanding now that it was likely a leachate pond makes a lot of sense. Thanks for sharing.
I think leachate is always collected in tanks. Because the "trash mountain" has an impermeable cover there is a lot of runoff that is collected in sediment basins. When the cover is functioning appropriately there should not be much leachate.
The leachate is collected. I think you might have noticed if that pond were pretty smelly.
“You probably don’t think too much about where your trash goes” and that’s where you are horribly mistaken my good sir. I am deeply invested in the future of my trash
Could you please make a video about different recycling methods, incineration, carbonization and thermocracking in vacuum? Thank you!
Here in Virginia Beach we have "Mount Trashmore", the nation's first landfill park. The only two indicators that it used to be a landfill are the name, and a vent atop the hill, presumably to release decomposition gases. Mount Trashmore is a fun destination among locals and visitors alike to play and relax.
It's also a nice concert venue.
I came to make a similar comment. I was hoping he would have mentioned it since it is an operating park that was a landfill.
Some good memories there :)
How's that air quality?
@@thewatersaviorno issues I don’t live to far from it and you wouldn’t know what it was if it wasn’t named what it is
Wish we had this presentation back in the 1990s. I am a California Professional Civil Engineer that worked Air Force Base closing. All the closed bases had landfills. Some were abandoned before the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976 gave States control over the management. Been nice to show this at meetings.
We had a local dump covered up 3 decades ago. Now they are building condos on top of it and charging almost a million for 2 bedrooms.
I was a test specialist that traveled to landfills to perform sampling and analysis of both air emissions and leachate treatment systems. Fascinating places these landfills are. True fact- when you first arrive the smell can be overwhelmingly nauseating but your brain begins to ignore the bad odors through a process called olfactory fatigue. Depending on the person, within a couple of hours you don't notice the bad smells anymore. But that's not always be a good thing; your sense of smell is important in detecting toxic gases (like hydrogen sulfide) so carrying a gas meter that could sound an alarm was required for some test situations. Great video as always!
a generalized form of the concept of olfactory fatigue is the fact that all of our sensory input detects derivatives, changes, differences- not constants or absolute values. a weight is heaviest when loaded or unloaded, not carried. a constant droning noise is loudest when starting or stopping. something hot is warmer than the environment, yourself, or its recent past self. you cannot see clearly in darkness or bright light when changing from one to the other. stinky work clothes will probably smell as bad coming out of the wash as they did coming off you at the end of the shift, just like how a smoker's clothes will smell to a non-smoker more than they do to the owner, etc.
Here in Sydney we fill in old brick pits. The hole was dug decades ago, now we fill it again. There’s one near where I live that now has a golf driving range on it.
The only suitable place for golfers
Where I live, we fill gravel pits, sand pits, and other already dug holes like that.
there are so many empty open-pit mines in the US that i'm surprised we don't do that more often. some might be just too far out of the way.
Where I live, municipal waste is either burned, recycled or goes to a biogas plant. Only 1 % of municipal lands in a landfill.
In the video, there is so much plastic ending up in this landfill, I can't believe that it is cheaper to dump it somewhere, then burn it and generate electricity and heat.
@@ogfoxhoundinfected with anti-golfer brainrot
Would be interesting to hear a comparison to countries that incinerate the trash. I remember when I was little and a waste disposal official from the region where I live came to our school and explained what happens with our trash and showed us what remained after the burning process. I assume that would still end up in some landfill afterwards (don't remember what they mentioned, given it was well over 30 years in the past).. I also recall them talking about filters on the smokestacks that extract toxins from the burning process.. So a comparison of the various approaches would be really interesting to learn about
Landfills for incineratable thrash has been banned in Norway since 2009 (and loads of other European countries, but as I'm Norwegian that's what I know most about). The only things that are still landfilled are certain toxic substances, incineration ash and things like building materials that can't be incinerated (cement/rocks etc). Modern incineration plants filter out the almost all toxins, the only things released to the air in any significant way is CO2 (but CCS is being developed to capture that too). Based on a quick calculation I made, a modern incineration plant, like Klemetsrud in Oslo, per ton of incinerated waste, releases about 1 ton of CO2, 750 grams NOx, 250g SO2, 50g PM, and 0.5g Mercury.
I worked in a waste to energy plant. The ash went to constructing road beds.
" that extract toxins from the burning process"... interesting. and then the toxins just magically disappear. don't have to put *them* anywhere.
@@fh5kskalf mercury is a problem. CO2 isn't a pollutant
Toxins simply transform to gaseous state from solid. One is fooling oneself by thinking this is any kind of solution.
This was a great video! Thanks for making/sharing it! I grew up not too far from a landfill and we always had troubles with the smell on hot windy summer days. They converted it into a walking park, which I think is great. I also had no idea that companies were still responsible for the landfill for another 30 years or so after it closes... that's a long time without any extra revenue coming in. Another older landfill in my city was converted into a private golf course, so that was a smart way to maintain it while still making money.
I love just how genuinely excited Grady is in every video to share what he's learned/setup. It gets me excited to learn it.
Landfills are an easy thing to be cynical about. It’s one of the many cheap ways to appear sophisticated. But here’s Grady again showing us how they’re feats of human ingenuity 😂
his optimism for trash parks has me skeptical
sounds like he's paid off by big trash
@@shamanschlong as a civil engineer he almost certainly is, as a matter of fact…🤔😂
Well, I didn't expect this on my feed, but here we are. And I'm into it.
I lived somewhere that had houses built on top of a landfill. Not recommended. The settling can make the house start sagging, and it doesn't sag uniformly. So, part of the house can droop down, causing issues. It affects the roads and the liquid sometimes leeches out during the rain.
That sounds like it was a terrible idea from the start
Big business gives me 99% of my waste and they are the ones who started making the packaging part of their sales and marketing. I have nothing to do with that. And regardless of what I think about it they will continue to do it. To suggest that somehow now all of a sudden it’s the consumer’s responsibility to lower trash trends is like telling, a toddler to not draw on the walls but every day you give them a new package of markers and stick them in an empty room. In fact, I think we should place 99% of responsibility on these big businesses, the resources they take, the illnesses they cause, the problems they inflict upon individuals and the environment, yet there is seldom if any accountability.
Here in Melbourne Australia, there were many basalt and clay quarries in the northern suburbs.
They were developed from early settlement (1830s) till the 1950s.
Pretty much all of our urban parks in this area are a result of basalt and clay quarries that ware eventually filled in with rubbish.
My house sits right next to a park that was a small clay hole in the late 1800 and was filled in by the 1930s, ive always wanted to dig up the park to find out what kind of stuff was thrown away
The Western Victorian Lava Plain is the third largest on Earth. Yep, lots of bluestone in Victoria.
I used to work in a landfill site in my civil engineering training many year ago. Waste management is a multi-engineering operation business, It includes site formation works, earth moving, rock blasting, slope stabilzation wall, sewwall, pier construction, biological treatment plants, gas collection system, leatchage pipe laying, liner laying and etc. Planning, construction, operation, decomission, restallation of a landfill site may lasting more than 50 years....Because the site is so huge, design phase, construction phase, operational phase, decomissioning phase and restoration phase are all happening in different portion of the site. There are lots of things to learn in solid waste management business.
I’ve worked with landfills that accepted a bunch of old wallboard from demolished houses along with municipal waste. There were a lot more issues with hydrogen sulfide generation compared to other sites, requiring a special treatment system to capture the sulfur. Flaring it off creates huge amounts of SO2, which is an air quality issue. Another great episode!
Our city/county solution for closing a landfill was to cap it with two feet of soil, and abandon it. No further use of the area was allowed, until approximately 20 years after it was closed, the model airplane club requested the officials for authorization for the club to use it as a flying field. Permission was granted, and the club had exclusive use of the ares, with specific rules of no digging or disruption of the soil, no smoking, open fires or grills, and driving and parking in selected areas only. Each member of the club had the combination to the lock on the gates that was to remain closed at all times except for flying activities. The model airplane club had a lease with the city for one dollar per year for rent, for the ability to access the site.
This was a great position for the club and the city, and after about ten years, the club was allowed to install a 25' x 400' runway and pilot stands and tables. A covered patio with a metal open-walled shelter was also constructed. The activity at the former landfill was a benefit to the community, and soon after that, two very large areas were fenced in for a dog park - one for big dogs, and the other for small dogs.
The former landfill is now open to the public, just like a regular city park, and roads have been paved throughout the area to further enhance its utility to the community. This is an example of how a landfill can become an asset to the community.😀🛩️🐕
7:11 We should just pay Grady for his leachate disposal services 😂
I certainly hope that leachate tasted more like leachaide, but I'd be willing to bet it tastes like garbage.
you mean garbage juice?
Reminds me of my wish for a solar punk factory game where all the 'machines' are living things. Over here is my community of leachate drinking Gradys. They balance well with the aerial Billys who need plenty of diseased air to stay healthy
NileRed moment
Or not….
Great, informative video. Took a dirty topic and made it interesting and easy to understand. One point to consider: there are thousands of closed landfills that do not meet the standards described as normal or typical in this video. There are playgrounds, parks, and other recreational sites with built over old landfills and testing positive for dangerous levels of arsenic or led or other unsafe materials in the surface soils. New regs don’t necessarily address existing dangers. New regs also aren’t always followed. There’s a reason landfills worry people.
1:31 and I have a full-sized model of a landfill in my room every day
Honey, it's spring again. Would you clean up the garage a little?
No, I have a 1:31
I love how you explain it in such an easy to understand why. BTW, you said landfills are turned into parks. There is one near where I grew up. They built a park, golf course, and pond on it. I remember remember taking pop cans there to be recycled when I was a kid. Now that area is a parking lot. Absolutely mind blowing.
About 70 years ago before regulations my father's friends wanted him to invest in a new land fill he thought it was a bad idea and didn't invest . They bought low value Canyon land and terraced the sides to cover the trash. When it was full they built a golf course on top of the fill and built up scale houses overlooking the golf course . The investors became very rich. I know of 2 housing tracts built in this area on top of land fills and law suits started when tires and gas leaks appeared .
That's good! Wait that's bad! Wait that's good! Wait that's bad! Wait that's good! Wait that's bad! Wow what a roller coaster ride :O
When you said apartments built on top I’m like ugh not a good idea to live on a land fill . I know the engineers do great work but it’s not an easy problem and u don’t wanna find out and get cancer or sick 10 years later
Oh, dear. Those investors never heard of Love Canal, huh? What an unfortunate set of decisions.
@@Beryllahawk They probably got rich enough to afford some good lawyers. Too bad for the home owners, tho....
Did the guy who invested in the landfill go belly up?
As someone who works in compliance this is a very positive perfect world take on the system. Many older landfills do not have proper barriers, and the gas and leachate have tendencies to leak out. It is important to keep in mind who does the dumping too, and there are landfills that contain toxins such as vinyl chloride and benzene. Landfills in remission with poor barriers need to have constant gas pull and constant leachate pull to stop off gasing and leaching. They also have to have the surface monitored for the same type of toxins coming through the top cover. Some cities have even allowed building of houses and apartments next to these kind of landfills. After what I've seen I would neither want to live near a landfill, nor go to a park at one. Landfills are toxic and are not safe even in remission, they are an unfortunate burden of the society we have built.
Wow wow
Yeah - he way he immediately handwaved the waste of our consumerism as a byproduct of the "human condition" was NPC as hell.
I’m 65 years old but just found out about what happens after the landfills receive our trash! Your explanation was very clear and concise which was a great way to find out! Thanks
I have been to my local landfill twice. The second time I was required to drive to the top. I was disposing a decades old sofa. It was super confusing and disgusting! Everyone was rude. But to sit upon all the disgust of our community gave me a new perspective!
As a solid waste engineer designer/consultant in western NC, I really appreciated this video! Well done and enjoyed the summary of solid waste management and landfill design. Will be sharing with new engineers in the office that aren't familiar with the intricacies of landfill design!
7:20 drinking the forbidden kool-aid
Did not expect that from Grady 😂
Tasty glass of Lich-monate.
Blue Bull Synergy Drink
It had to be done.
He will now get super powers and turn into Garbage man!
Great vídeo. I am a environmental engineering from Brazil, this vídeo remembered some classes a I had.
One of my favorite things is seeing value and purpose extracted from even the smallest or most worthless thing.
So seeing generators running off the trash and the land reused for parks is fantastic.
Though I do wish we had a better system of separation to extract even more i.e. burnables going to generation plants, organics going to digestors, metals getting pulled out.
Ideally we'd have no need for landfills because that's really the roughest way to put something back in the cycle but it's good to see us managing to make them a bit better.
Plastic is made from oil, may as well burn that too.
@@seanworkman431 For a good portion of it, I agree. I've heard there is a lot of fake recycling and just general lack of interest because it doesn't really maintain quality. So we'd be better off burning it and switching our plastic source from oil to plant based sources.
As long as the exhaust is properly treated, then I don't see it being worse than coal or gas plants.
Wastewater treatment operator here. I used to work at a ~3 million gallons/day plant that was primarily landfill leachate.
Interesting comparisons:
-the collection system was not a main with branches but a grid of 138 vaults (50,000gal each) that were selectively opened as they filled up
>treatment plants are designed to remove certain pollutants, usually it's 1-2 pages long, this one was a full 7 pages
>we had to test solid waste from the treatment process (basically dead bacteria, spongy dirt) for radioactivity just in case
>we had a contract with the local municipal/residental waste plant to buy their wastewater (the pipes were in place for them to send us water) in order for us to dilute the landfill leachate
>we had a very long treatment process because each step was basically done twice (two aerobic tanks, two anoxic, two filters, etc) in order to meet pollutant removal requirements
>the plant would frequently flood and lose power when it rained really hard because the sewer main was used as a backup to the storm drain and the local power plant was poorly made, a common problem in the east coast
WW treatment plants never seem to be sized with enough reserve capacity to handle anything more than 25 year storms. In the Midwest many WW plants have outright refused to take landfill leachate due to PFOS/PHAS.
Trash and liquids should be kept as separate as possible.
@@ocko8011 You have zero idea what you're talking about. Treatment plants are never designed with reserves (fermenting waste = bio and explosive hazards), the state will either force private companies to take it or build public plants (to comply with federal or self regulation), and PFOS/PFAS have been banned for 60 years, not to mention being relatively simple to treat.
In Switzerland, Landfills are almost non-existent. All waste that can be burned gets incinerated and provides local heating. Landfills are only for materials that can't be incinerated, such as ashes, concrete, etc. Many incineration plants are connected to the railways with sidings so that the trash can be collected outside in the train stations and then transported into the incineration plant by train, reducing the amount of truck journeys considerably.
A lot of ash is produced when rubbish is incinerated. I imagine that landfills are more common than you think.
same here...seems so crazy that people still just bury trash and pretend its not there...or even make artificial islands of it as in Japan. No wonder theres microplastics everywhere
When I was in Switzerland there were truckloads of trash constantly trucked to Italy.
Trading land pollution for air pollution. Not as good a brag as you intended. Even with pollution capture… still not the perfect solution.
Same in The Netherlands. No space to create landfills.
I work in solid waste and this is an expertly scripted video. Thank you!
A major landfill for the Dallas area is in Melissa, TX. There are $300K - $400K homes right across the street from it and the stench is unbelievable. I can only assume the people buying the homes have no sense of smell or spend a sizable chunk of their income on Glade Plug-Ins. It blows my mind that people are willing to spend that much money for the privilege of sleeping next to a dumpster every night.
Right by Sister Grove Creek, witch runs in to lake lavon . City water.
"garbage juice" is now a go-to engineering term. 😂
Waiting for the next version of the text books.
Although it will probably appear in journals first.
Yes, and now we've peer-reviewed it and approved it for
... general consumption 😂
And in the comments section we can assume it's an interdisciplinary review as well.
😂never thought the term Garbage Juice would be used by others as well
It has to be made into a proper term!!
bin juice, and of course bin chickens to drink it
The first step to waste avoiding a landfill is to make it worth it and possible to reuse and, if that is not an option, recycle things.
Even incinerating waste will allow us to be able to recover a lot of energy that would otherwise be unrecoverable, plus it allows metal to be easily separated out of our waste. Other inert debris(bricks, rocks, etc) may be too contaminated for it to be worth separating though.
I live near a trash incinerator and I know a few things: it reduces the garbage to 10% of the original volume. So it takes in about 100 truckloads a day, but still generates 10 truckloads a day of ash, that is brought to a landfill.
@@EthanPerkins-qq9qh I wonder if the ash can be used to lower costs in certain concrete constructions, I don't know the math or anything behind this but maybe if I figure this out I can find out how many Fallout 76 disks I can put in a concrete highway barrier.
@@EthanPerkins-qq9qh Interesting to know the size reduction.
The trash is toxic anyways so I am thinking why not extract the energy and metals contained within it. The only reasons I can think of why more people don't do this is because of people who don't want to give a permit to an incineration facility and/or that a landfill is cheaper.
But in the end, reduction is the best, reuse is the second best and the most practical, and recycling is the easiest but generates a lot more waste and loses the value of the original object(which is likely a lot higher than the produced one)
@ElectroTree01 Yes, it's absolutely true that reduce and reuse are the best options. We as consumers should buy high quality, long lasting, repairable things. We should also take the time to learn how to do simple repairs on the things we own. As far as the recycling goes, glass,metal, and cardboard are presently highly recycled. The big problem is plastics. We barely recycle any plastic. It is best to avoid plastic packaging if you can.
@ElectroTree01 To address your comment on incinerators, both of your thoughts are true: there was a lot of community pushback and anger when the incinerator was put in, and it costs far more to dump a truckload at the burner than the landfill. A truckload at the burner costs close to a thousand dollars, that same load costs about 400 dollars to dump at the landfill. (I work for a garbage company)
i love the fact this channels always makes me sleep a little better at night, i'm so dumb but this channels helps me understand things i had no idea how they worked! thanks Practical Engineering
Please make a video on the design, construction, maintenance, and failures of tailings dams.
And as always, keep up the great content!!
Red mud floods? Yes please.
Interesting as always.
The process that generates h2s and ch4 is anaerobic digestion of organic waste.
It is more expensive to put it in a specialized digestion facility but instead of the digestate(essentially fertilizer) being contaminated and becoming leachate, it is able to remain as digestate and act as fertilizer.
Oh man, you're cracking me up! I'm 67 years old and I've been using the term "garbage juice" since I was a kid! Really, the first time I saw a trash truck going down the road and liquid was dripping out of it, I called it "Garbage Juice", and you see the same "juice" leaking out of dumpsters. I changed the phrase a bit years ago when my first child was born, and I started calling it "gobbage jooze" and we'd always have fun, if we smelled something funky, it was always attributed to 'gobbage jooze'. Great video! When we go by the local "Mt. Trashmore" I always tell the kids (look! There's where your poopy diapers go!" (we have twin 6 yr old granddaughters). Now when they see the landfill or a trash truch, they should 'GOBBAGE JUICE'!!!
Were you around when the local radio station said Trashmore was about to explode (on April Fools Day)?
they shout*
Hauled trash in a tpper trailer for years. Landfills really are a site to see and understand
My mother is dying in front of my eyes here at the hospital. She's hanging on but she won't make it. Thank you for such a calming, and positive RUclips channel to take my mind off things. RUclips is so full of hate but it feels more hateful when you feel so vulnerable. Yours is a diamond on this platform. Love yall.
so sorry to hear this, man. may she go gently. look after yourself
@@billwall267 What do I get for a top RUclips comment? Nothing. Just want to share my appreciation for the content and how much it means to me.
@@billwall267 jesus is a femboy.
It’s so hard. Sending you calm and peace during this time.
@nmda9578 She passed the day after my comment. It's still hard. She lived with us. My wife took care of her and my kids played with her every day. We'll be okay but thank you for the kind words. I mean it, this channel seems to draw kind people to it. I haven't always been a kind person myself but I think everyone can change. Love yall.
I am studying Landfills management and this video is uploaded yesterday. Excellent timing !
How timely! I was driving past our county landfill just yesterday and saw they were in the middle of implementing some kind of elaborate hillside drainage (?) system with large areas of industrial black plastic sheeting like at 14:19 . I'm guessing it was their garbage juice collection system! I was going to Google 'landfill design', but now I won't have to. 🙂
I grew up in Key West, and my first elementary school was located next to the landfill that locals refer to as Mt. Trashmore. It was an actively used landfill at the time of my attendance at the school. They would sometimes cancel school due to the overwhelming odor that came from it. That landfill has since retired and looks like the one in this video in LA, a grass covered mound. This video gave me a perspective of this field of engineering I didn't know about.
I worked on a garbage truck for a temp service. We went to the landfill multiple times. On one route we went back to the same streets to get recyclables. I actually got a little happy, because I thought I would see the recycling center. We went right back to the landfill!🤦🏿♂️ why even have people separate their trash if you are going to dump it all in the exact same spot?🤷🏿♂️
Because people buy it. "We have it under control" is what you're ought to believe. The existence of landfills on their own prove we have no clue how to properly handle our waste. And by burying our trash we have lost the connection to the problem and are teaching the population to just go on.
Stupidity is bliss.
To build a habit when one is built
because "climate change" in 2020 is like "pollution" in 2010. thats to say that people genuinely thought recycling would "save the planet"
Did you pay attention to any conversation between the driver and dump workers? or notice if you dumped the recyclables to the same spot as the trash? Many municipalities have recycling sorted at the dump. It makes sense to do so because some of those recyclables are not actually recyclable and sorted into trash. There's a whole continuum of how much processing gets done at the municipal level. Depending on the grade they are able to achieve, It gets sold and moved around to other processors or it gets trashed if there are no buyers.
It's the grift that keeps on grifting .
Many landfills are in former sand or gravel quarries, so you do not have to dig a hole specifically for the landfill. The life cycle goes like this: Quarry -> Landfill -> Park.
Hey we have something like that here in Allen park near an old clay mining pit that ford used for their car models, it was Quarry -> Landfill -> Mall
We have a now closed landfill that is an inner city recreation area with a ski hill.
We call it Mount Garb-age (like mirage). If you say it with a French accent, it sounds much more attractive and inviting.
how is it a cycle if you dont end where you started?
@@Defender90210 Interesting point. It's more of an arc.
@@Defender90210 Starts and ends as publicly accessible recreational land.
I remember going to a landfill on a field trip in my gifted class. The teacher was CONVINCED that the entire thing was a horrid blight on the landscape, and used it to really drill us into the Reduce Reuse Recycle business.
While, of course, it would be ideal if we didn't need Landfills, learning about their implementation, and the steps we've taken to make them as good as POSSIBLE is an eye opener. Something my teacher never actually TAUGHT us.
"In my gifted class" really needed to add that on. Didnt ya 😂
Many teachers are self-righteous morons.
You saw that by visiting the dump. We should all Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. What a great teacher you had to teach and encourage you.
Yeah I mean, the nitty gritty of waste collection is maybe not as overarching a lesson as “reduce waste.” Everyone interacts with waste but few people are going to be a part of the engineering around keeping our trash hidden.
Landfills are absolutely dystopian, she was right
Wow this was very informative and I love your practical demo
14:45 yeah, I'd love it if things lasted longer than just after the warranty period is over
Are you happy to pay maybe several times the price?
@mynameisben123 Yes, because if it lasts several times longer than the cheaper version, then I’ve essentially paid the same, no?
If only there was law to make the product repairable by design, by third party...
@@mynameisben123 I would personally love to return to more expensive but longer lasting products.
@@jajefan123456789 well in many categories they exist and usually they are the least sold products. So maybe you like this (as do I) but overwhelmingly people do not, as demonstrated by their purchasing preferences.
A few miles from me a developer built a subdivision on top of a old landfill. 5 years ago was a very wet year and several of the homes slid off the hill. The homeowners had no idea that was what their homes were built on, and homeowners insurance doesn't cover soil movement.....many of the folks have big mortgages and no home.
I smell a lawsuit....
Insurance companies will literally refuse to sell you the insurance you need. Live on a hill side? No landslides coverd. Live in a flood zone? No flood insurance. Live in the mountains? No avalanches for you. Live at the coast? No storm and hurricane damage.
@@FLF20M2i think thats illegal. You have the right to be insured
@@PatriotBelgicamoney talks
@@PatriotBelgica What are you gonna do, if the flood insurance is then magically a $3000 premium?
I'd like more details or a further series on this topic. It affect everyone and I think most of us are pretty ignorant to the details of landfills - even though we all probably live relatively close to one.
I worked at a small landfill and got to do all the stuff mentioned in the video. we used converted chevy truck engines to run the blowers that ran on the methane. An engine would last about two years with this extremely dirty gas. The site was flaring 2 million feet a day of gas and it was used to heat some green houses and now a company has built a small electric plant. If you are having a bad day jumping into one of the compactors for and hour or so was a good break.
Mt. Trashmore in Virginia Beach is an old landfill that was turned into a city park decades ago. I remember when they did a core sample of the hill to test the degradation of the waste. I was in high school at the time and we went to see it done. We were expecting recognizable trash from the 50s or something like that. It looked like just dirt with rust in it.
I'm really surprised Trashmore wasn't mentioned!
I'd Love to see a video where you discuss the various types of trailers that Semi trucks can tow. You know, similar to how you did that video on train cars!
There's so, so, so many different types of semi trailers - most of which are pretty self apparent
My son and I always see these crazy looking tankers, different from your standard fuel oil tankers, and wonder what the heck they're hauling.
@@Vastafari34 You can can get a physical copy or download a copy of the Emergency Response Guidebook....or simply use a search engine to look up any warning placard on a trailer. While it won't tell you the exact products within it'll give you an awareness of what type of product is in the trailer and what, if any, danger it poses.
@@cruisinguy6024 I know the placards can tell you what in a trailer, but i'm talking more about how the trailers are designed and why they are that way for the loads they carry.
I think it would be easy for Grady to come up with a list of lets say 10 or 15 trailer designs and explain how they are optimized for their intended loads, and I bet it would be really interesting.
10:29 the forbidden ravioli ☠️
😂
😕
Worked for several years at a mineral products plant in eastern Oregon processing wholesale sodium bentonite sealant for projects such as this. Also made several grades of zeolite products for use in water filtration, chemical spill cleanup, and livestock feed supplement.