As a garbage truck driver I am VERY familliar with the landfills in and around the Salt Lake valley. We do have 1 burn plant, 2 construction only non-lined landfills, 1 standard lined landfill, 4 construction recycling facilities and even 1 landfill that captures the methane gas for power and heating gas. Utah is quite the environmental underdog when it comes to waste disposal.
I imagine all of the efforts there are due to the fact that the Salt Lake and Utah valleys have absolutely horrific pollution in the winter due to strong inversion layers that form a lid over the top of the valleys that trap all the pollution inside. In fact, during the winter it's not surprising for Utah to have some of the worst pollution in the entire country. So the last thing you want is the gas created from the waste of several million people building up in nature's equivalent of a sealed bottle.
hey SciSchow!! big fan here, i've watched you guys for a long time. there actually are landfill gas to energy power plants! i know because i work at one. there are miles of piping in our local landfill and it is all run back to my power plant. we take in about 1800 to 2000 SCFM of methane along with oxygen and other balance gases and burn them in special Caterpillar engines that are hooked up to generators. currently the facility that i work at has 5 such engines, three 16 cylinder engines hooked to 800KW generators, and two 20 cylinder engines hooked to 1600KW engines. i have been at this job for a little over a year, so i'm still fairly green. but i would love to try answering any questions you might have :) the process is really interesting, and i think the community here would definitely benefit from another video explaining this.
@@blandantey They don't burn the trash in the model he's talking about. Instead, they take all biodegradable trash (food, plant matter, liquids, and sewage) and put it into a huge pit and the methane it releases is harvested for power. After a time, the degraded garbage can be used as a non-smelly fertilizer. Things that have been burned cannot be used as fertilizer.
Over the past few weeks I've suddenly become very interested in waste disposal, so this video was right on time. I didn't know that the US had WTE sites, nor that they were all so old. Learn something new every day :) Thank you Hank and thanks SciShow crew!
Because it is. US citizens don't care about progress, they only care about themselves. Europe and Asia (the rich countries like Japan and South Korea) are often much more advanced in many aspects.
Here in France there are WTE facilities in every medium sized towns I've been to. But what isn't good is that although mentalities have changed (in most countries of Europe at least) and more and more people recycle their garbage (plastics, glass), not all materials use the same recycling process. So when the recycled garbage is collected, if there's one type of plastic that isn't suitable for recycling, the whole recycling skip is thrown in the WTE site. So basically people are recycling for nothing... The recycling process is more expensive than what the WTE facilities can produce and sell to manufacturers. The greed for money is the problem at the end of the day
@@alexanderscott2456 From the WTE's perspective. Even though recycling is the right thing to do, it has a cost and sometimes that cost is considered too high
It is amazing how much I learned about waste management by playing various sim city games. Also would like to point out that around a third of our landfills are filled with construction waste, if you have ever been to a construction site you would be sick at the amount of waste. Same goes for a lot of industry and commerce, when it isn't your money going in the trash people throw out a lot more stuff. End consumers produce relatively little waste.
I really doubt that burning trash is and using the ash as raw materials for making new shit is going to require less energy inputs than reduce, reuse, repair, repurpose, recycle....
I just want to say this to the entire DFTBA enterprise (right term?), and many of their suggested channels: Thank you so very much for what you guys do. It is refreshing, enlightening, and reminds that learning something new every day keeps my brain sharp. If I had the additional funds, I would be giving to Subabble (sp?) like crazy. Now back to not reading the comments on the Internet...
As others have already told you guys: you all deserve for this to be a TV show. I'm sure such a change would involve some overhauling (and possible loss of full creative control) but I would keep the thought up there (or just take it as a compliment, which it really is). I've been keeping up with you guys for quite some time now and realized why you guys are so appealing. For a good part, it has to do with Hank's personality and speech, but I think that in a deeper way it really has to do with the passion you guys have to share your love of science with others. That passion is so damned inspiring. I, with all the honestly in my heart, feel that passion for knowledge, in all its aspects, so I started uploading videos of my own to share this love of mine. I am new to it, and I am always learning, but if you are interested feel free to give it a chance. All I can promise is to do my best but I need your feedback and support. That is all, my friends.
I remember some documentary mentioning mushrooms and fungus in general being able to break down trash very well, and thanks to breaking it all down, quickly makes it survivable for other plants like grass, and then attract things like insects thanks to the grass. They did some experiment with two piles of trash by seeding one, and the mushroom-seeded trash decomposed in a month or so to the point of being able to be used in gardens. Would something like that be applicable to more hazardous trash, factoring in the leachate and such? Since I'm all for quickly-populating things like mushrooms and ants being used everywhere. (I assume it's somewhat deadly, though the video mentions leachate having a small amount of nitrogen which is a common nutrient for mushrooms, so, well).
seriously so glad this video is here! watched some other episodes like 2 weeks ago and thought to my self "I wanna know about garbage". low and behold I come back this morning and here it is!
America doesn't recycle as much as it could though. Four years ago I traveled from Canada to St. Louis for a conference. In the airport before getting onto my plane to return home I bought a meal that included a bottled drink. After finishing the drink I went in search of a place to recycle it. In Canada there is a recycling bin next to almost every garbage bin in public places. (In my work place we have six different bins for waste in the break room. One for garbage and five for various types of recyclables) In the St. Louis airport I searched for quite some time for a recycling bin. I found one for paper, but none for bottles or other things. I started to ask around to see if anyone knew where one might be. I tried a janitor and he told me that he thought they had "one" somewhere, but he didn't know where it was. I asked a pilot thinking that he might have been in the airport a lot and could have seen one. He hadn't seen one, but told me he thought it was a cool idea. No one knew where one was. I almost gave up and thought about leaving the bottle on top of a garbage can or paper recycling bin, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I get annoyed with hippies and obsessive environmentalists where I'm from, but I just couldn't throw away the bottle. So I put it in my bag and kept it until I arrived back in Canada and found a recycling bin within a minute in the airport. America needs more recycling bins in public places.
I live in Albuquerque, NM. Every home in the city was given a big blue recycling bin the same size as our trash bins. My family has been recycling for years, but now its a lot more apparent that about 2/3 of our waste is recyclable. We only need to have our trash bin emptied every other week, but our recycling bin fills up every time they come to take it away.
One thing you didn't cover is how incredible of an impact bio-waste (such as food) has on climate change. Dumps produce methane which is, as you said, way more potent than Co2. It also has much more of an impact on the climate because of its chemical structure. This is important because bio waste, besides taking a very long time to decompose in dumps, also produces methane there, instead of the co2 it would produce elsewhere. So it's actually better for the enviro,net to drop that rotting banana on the floor than throw it away.
lagging lim Jordan Le If I brought all the garbage to space, that would be taking some of Earth's finite resources off of the planet, those resources CAN be recycled somehow and someway depending on the "garbage".
I worked for a company in Louisiana called CPL that took landfill gas and sent it to plants' boilers to be fired. That was over 5 years ago, so that technology is in practice and isn't that new. Interestingly one project we worked on was reducing the amount of water content in leachate to reduce its volume and in turn the shipping cost of the landfill.
Funnily enough, I learned about the problem of flammable gas build up in dumps through a bible study. I was told that Gehenna became synonymous with hell because it was a dump that occasionally had fiery eruptions, just outside of Jerusalem. In my tiny amount of research sparked by making sure I spelt it right, I've learned that this reasoning for its association with hell is not only debatable but not very likely. Still, it was entertaining to learn about scientific problems with garbage during a bible study.
Billings Montana's landfill captures the gasses excaping the ground and uses it for power already. Surprised it was not mentioned here! LOVE SCISHOW!!!!
Interesting tidbit: a friend of mine was developing a plasma furnace for waste breakdown. Just as it sounds, this furnace would heat everything up to a plasma, then cool and all the different elements could be removed individually. They perfected the design in 2007, just before the recession hit. When they tried to sell it to counties, they were declined due to cost. My friend then retired. Perhaps one day, we will see a resurgence of this technology in recycling and reusing our waste, rather than leaving everything to rot.
Here in the Netherlands, we recycle more and more. Paper, plastic, glass and plant-based waste (Groente-, Fruit- en Tuinafval; literally vegetable, fruit and garden waste) can all be easily collected separately. With a little extra effort there are waste disposal facilities where waste can be separated even finer: things like wood and appliances like fridges and tvs are separate, as well as chemical waste like batteries, videotapes and engine oil.
I never used to recycle and didn't care where my trash was going. Only recently this year I started sorting my garbage and trying to recycle what my local center would accept and switched to reusable grocery bags. Sadly about 70% of my households trash still ends up in the county landfill. And its typical to have my dumpster full if not overflowing every week before pick up. Obviously we need a new offensive on all fronts from the average consumer to government and industry to really turn things around.
Speaking as a first year archaeologist, holes in the ground have been used as waste dumps for a long time. Like, a really long time. You can tell a lot from one, since people just throw all kinds of things into them.
In my home town (Kitchener, Ontario), there was an old landfill that had been covered over in dirt as the city grew past it. I was told the methane gases it produced were being used to power the plaza they built across the street from it. It was a pretty tall pile of trash, so when it became open to the public, it quickly turned into a favorite local tobogganing hill. It was also unofficially dubbed "Mt. Trashmore", and Canada's first Krispy Kreme tried and failed to exist on it.
Ok that is so cool! The picture you showed to illustrate the WTE facilities is from one in sweden! I have even been there, with a project we did in school - it is super awesome, does not even smell that bad in there!
As I’m listening to Hank talking about methane seeping up into basements, I’m like “yeah, like the house down the street that blew up when I was a kid in… ROCHESTER HILLS MICHIGAN!!!” So funny to hear such a seemingly unknown event from my childhood backyard talked about by Hank Green.
Furthermore: what isn't immediately recycled gets burned, and extra heat is used to generate electricity or transported to places where heat is needed (for example homes or factories that need heat, like oil refineries). Magnets are then used to filter metals from the ashes, to recycle them. Of course, there is a lot of improvement possible, but I think we're doing quite well.
Oh, the WTE plant on the picture is the one in my town, Malmö, Sweden! It's used for central heating.I went there with a course at university, it's quite cool. Sweden have even built too many of those plants, so no we import garbage to burn. Norway pay Swedish companies to take care of some of their garbage.
I'm confused. I saw something a couple months ago where they doing just as you were hoping. Biodegradable material was placed in a landfill "shell" composed of polyurethane and what-not. When filled, the shell was capped off and covered in dirt. They then showed how they were harvesting the natural gas that was generated from the decomposing material. They even built a park on top of the area after they were finished.
I went on a field trip to a landfill recently in Southern Oregon. They are already capturing the methane and running generators off it, producing up to 300 megawatts.
Honestly, it is not like the US to miss an opportunity. All our rubbish is sorted for recycling at robotic plants with only a the minimum being dumped. The plants all run a profit when markets permit. Overall it's a very profitable industry but I'm guessing the raw material suppliers won't allow anything to come in to competition with established monopolies.
I think pretty much all waste that isn't recycled in Sweden is burned to produce heat. But I still feel like burning waste is a bit ehh maybe not the best. Like it's great to have a warm house, especially now during winter but I still try to produce as little waste as possible, especially like plastic waste, I always wash and re-use plastic bags.
Diana Peña Just remember that you need to use the reusable bag hundreds of times before it's environmental impact per use is the same as a plastic bag that is used once or twice and then used as garbage bag. This assuming that the plastic bag is recycled or combusted under controlled circumstances.
Diana Peña No but I mean like, plastic bags that I use to store bread in, like I get a plastic bag when I buy something in a shop, like carrots or something, but when the carrots are finished I wash out the bag, and then I might use it to store bread or frozen berries or whatever in.
Here in Columbus, OH they have built a public golf course over an old landfill complete with power generators that capture and use some of the escaping methane
Awesome episode Hank & Co.! I recall seeing an article about bacteria that eat plastics and their possible role in reducing plastic wastes. If possible, I'd like to see an episode or a segment about that.
In some Australian landfills they do have methane retrieval processes where they collect the gas and run a small electricity plant using the methane collected.
As a part 2 of this and your piece about the "Door to hell", you should do something about catastrophic mistakes in human history. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Centralia, PA mishap. (since this is the garbage episode)
You should do an episode on exploding casket syndrome. Its very interesting how people expect to completely seal a body in a casket and not have it turn into body soup.
Side note on bio gas. Here in Sweden i work in a company named Gothenburg Energy (Göteborg Energi in swedish). There they have a factory producing bio gas out of wood, named GoBiGas (stands for Gothenburg bio gas). I don't work at this plant but i think you would find the chemistry in there pretty interesting.
My parents spent a few months in Linköping, and coming from America were consistently amazed (and delighted) at just how little waste there was. The idea of burning trash to have heated, snow-free bike paths in the winter is fantastic and something that I wish we would utilize in our colder cities here.
ToastAndJellyfish Fun to hear that you have visited Sweden! I myself is quite impressed by this as well, it's not easy to build up the infrastructure required to have these systems. I'm happy that you liked it here. I only wish sometimes that Sweden was a bit less protective of the nature and knew more about scientific developments. Because we really need more nuclear powerplants. And since the development in that area have come far since chynobyl it would be pretty safe :). That's something we could learn from Americans in the energy area.
2 Kg = almost 4.5 #/day Although this segment is rather old, it can be informative and useful going forward. Honestly I was amazed that many years after going to college and hearing so much about recycling, the town we moved to had a dump - not a transfer station or any kind of limit on what was "deposited", just a dump. At the start it was drive in, dump bags, drive out. Before they finally switched to transfer station and recycling a few years later, it was drive UP, dump and drive down! Not even a large town at that time. As long as the waste facility used recycles, my regular trash is way less than the 4.5#/day. Often only 1 large 33 gal trash bag is produced every 2 months. Although lookup says it can hold 50-60#s, no way could I lift that into the bin. Mine is more likely 20 or maybe up to 30#. Recently our transfer station has included more plastic in the plastic bag container, aka plastic wrapping on various products (nothing icky like meat wrappers!) This helped reduce the trash bag contents, especially in winter as the pellet bags can be recycled now. Trash middens were/are gold mines for archaeologists. In antiquity, especially pre-history, these would not be quite as toxic, although there likely were nasty things produced and dumped, but not to the extent that "civilized" societies go! There were also a lot less people involved. The dig I was on (final course, Harvard Yard - yes, THAT Harvard Yard) was searching for any remains of the building known as Indian college. The pit I ended up working on was the literal trash pit. Walk a bit behind living quarters and *DUMP*. We had to dig down a few feet before reaching ye olden dump, documenting more recent stuff as many areas in/around Boston have had a lot of land fill added - this can contain old artifacts, but are out of context. Once the "pristine" surface was reached, this pit was so rich it was extended as far as possible (sidewalk prevented going further.) It ended up being about 8' deep, with a solid clay original surface bottom. Everything but the kitchen sink! Fish bones, beef bones, rat teeth, clam shells, broken glass, bottles and pottery of various types, broken spoon, boar tusk, with one layer being what I called the fireplace cleaning dump layer - several inches of damp ashy gray stuff full of clay pipe pieces. Every handful of soil included a LOT of refuse. At the very bottom was the total remains of a broken Bellarmine jug, dating it to early days of Puritan occupation. Sadly many "transfer" stations ship the regular trash off to other locations, which can be dumps or burn facilities rather than some kind of recycle/better processing facility. There needs to be much more invested into "processing" this refuse in better ways. As for Arthur Clarke's comment - whittle that down to just "We're too stupid".... I would hazard a guess that too many people DON'T bother recycling and just toss everything. No consideration for how much that waste will accumulate and impact the future. Sadly information as informative as this might be, we aren't going to change their minds. Their brains are composed of cement - permanently set.
It is already very common for landfills to burn landfill gas in turbines to produce energy. In fact, if a landfill has enough organic material in it, it can produce enough gas to make energy production a cost effective solution for up to 50 years after closure (but most last around 25 years after closure). I have worked on the engineering and management side of the solid waste industry for several years.
I worked on Landfill in the UK for a while as an environmental monitoring technician. Thank you for doing this video Hank people really need to know how bad a solution it is. Leachate is disgusting stuff part of my job was to draw off samples of it. One particular sites leachate had such strong chemical and biological reactions going on in it that it was constantly hot and had the consistency and colour of thick pea soup.
Well, if anyone is looking to help out waste management issues, know that a lot of trash comes from people just buying and keeping too many stuff at home (assuming you're at least middle class), so looking into minimalism may help around that, so maybe look up some minimalism blogs, minimalism videos, minimalism podcasts, and minimalism books if you're curious about this.
im working my thesis on this subject, and this video was very helpfull to make think again my topic is relevant. ja, its easy to think your works stinks when you work a whole year on it ):
bottom line on this is that we're doing all we can to make garbage disposal efficient now. And remember sometimes it costs more to, "recycle" something than it's worth.
For the trash issue, I think we need to find a way to separate plastics and glass into their separate elements so they can be used to make new things. For example breaking polyurethane into pure hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen (I think that's what's in it (I'm not a chemist)) which can be used to make new things.
Glass can be melted and just formed into new glassware, and plastics could theoretically be either separated mechanically and used again or be heated which breaks the polymers down into monomers (pyrolysis) to make new polymers
6:21 That reminds me of something I have said about LoL and SC2. "All ins are just aggressive builds that are not perfected yet." Basically, a rough idea that noobs can pull off. And if you are good, a scary game winning ability.
SYSAV! Yes! They're the ones taking care of the garbage here, in my region, and they provide heating for the houses in the nearby towns/citys here :) They also recently started a project where the leftover food that otherwise would have been burnt now is used to produce methain and then burnt to in turns produce electicity! Although my region was defenetly not the first in Sweden with type of food waste to methain to electricity I was very exited when they started this project :) (yes, I'm a environmental engineer, so this type of projects makes me super happy). potato peels -> electricity
Space Junk Sucks Too! imagine sleeping and space junk crashes through your bedroom from outer space,kinda scary and it happens more and more as time goes by!
I once had a Twinkie during a hostess worker's strike. My Dad told me if the myth no new Twinkies had been made in the last 30 years anyways. In the words of Apu: "You cannot destroy a Twinkie!"
If they're that worried about how long it's going to take garbage to decompose, just put the dump on a subduction zone and let plate tectonics deal with it. ;)
+Y2KNW Subduction zones are found on the ocean floor, any trash put there would float to the top. If we somehow found a way to keep it there, I think we could all agree not to fuck with plate tectonics. It could cause poisonous man-made gases to be released through volcanoes and could seriously change the way in which continents move.
мαℓςσℓм єgσ "poisonous man-made gases to be released through volcanoes" You do know what comes out of volcanoes normally, right? And I was trying to be silly, but I guess I didn't make that part clear enough, sorry.
As a garbage truck driver I am VERY familliar with the landfills in and around the Salt Lake valley. We do have 1 burn plant, 2 construction only non-lined landfills, 1 standard lined landfill, 4 construction recycling facilities and even 1 landfill that captures the methane gas for power and heating gas. Utah is quite the environmental underdog when it comes to waste disposal.
This is fascinating! Thank you for sharing!!
I imagine all of the efforts there are due to the fact that the Salt Lake and Utah valleys have absolutely horrific pollution in the winter due to strong inversion layers that form a lid over the top of the valleys that trap all the pollution inside. In fact, during the winter it's not surprising for Utah to have some of the worst pollution in the entire country.
So the last thing you want is the gas created from the waste of several million people building up in nature's equivalent of a sealed bottle.
Thank you for taking care of all the crap we throw out!
The way he says "Delicious" at 7:14 is the most amazing thing ever. I literally burst out laughing.
Mr.chang cooler laughing so hard omg
Also "trash hole explosions"
Also "trash hole explosions"
Also turbine. He says "Tur-bin"
"delisyus"
hey SciSchow!! big fan here, i've watched you guys for a long time. there actually are landfill gas to energy power plants! i know because i work at one. there are miles of piping in our local landfill and it is all run back to my power plant. we take in about 1800 to 2000 SCFM of methane along with oxygen and other balance gases and burn them in special Caterpillar engines that are hooked up to generators. currently the facility that i work at has 5 such engines, three 16 cylinder engines hooked to 800KW generators, and two 20 cylinder engines hooked to 1600KW engines. i have been at this job for a little over a year, so i'm still fairly green. but i would love to try answering any questions you might have :) the process is really interesting, and i think the community here would definitely benefit from another video explaining this.
+clayton bourne Explain EVERYTHING! I need more knowledge.
No doubt. At least up here in the Northeast MOST landfills burn their gas in some way for useable energy.
is their a way to take the ash from burning the thrash mass and use it as fertilizer for the ground plants?
Hell yea👍
@@blandantey They don't burn the trash in the model he's talking about. Instead, they take all biodegradable trash (food, plant matter, liquids, and sewage) and put it into a huge pit and the methane it releases is harvested for power. After a time, the degraded garbage can be used as a non-smelly fertilizer.
Things that have been burned cannot be used as fertilizer.
Sometimes i get drunk and watch these videos, and then i dont pay any attention to what he says.
Its soothing for me.
weird ... or understandable?
Weird and understandable
I'd like to see more episodes about waste management. I love the space stuff, but waste is really interesting too.
Over the past few weeks I've suddenly become very interested in waste disposal, so this video was right on time. I didn't know that the US had WTE sites, nor that they were all so old. Learn something new every day :) Thank you Hank and thanks SciShow crew!
I feel like the US is always behind on things
Because it is. US citizens don't care about progress, they only care about themselves. Europe and Asia (the rich countries like Japan and South Korea) are often much more advanced in many aspects.
Here in France there are WTE facilities in every medium sized towns I've been to. But what isn't good is that although mentalities have changed (in most countries of Europe at least) and more and more people recycle their garbage (plastics, glass), not all materials use the same recycling process. So when the recycled garbage is collected, if there's one type of plastic that isn't suitable for recycling, the whole recycling skip is thrown in the WTE site. So basically people are recycling for nothing... The recycling process is more expensive than what the WTE facilities can produce and sell to manufacturers. The greed for money is the problem at the end of the day
It seems like what you said was that people were ignorantly putting their stuff in the wrong barrel. How does that translate to greed?
@@alexanderscott2456 From the WTE's perspective. Even though recycling is the right thing to do, it has a cost and sometimes that cost is considered too high
Landfills: The environmentalist nightmare and future archaeologist's wet dream.
Landfills are actually good for the environment. Better to put all the trash in one spot than have it spread out all over the place.
@@joegillian314 Yeah but not when they're everywhere and not when they leach into groundwater
@@littlebitwonky grape in the mouth?
Brilliant lol.
Great video!
It's nice to be *President of Space* :)
Kudos!
Now that you've become President, what are your plans for space?
Wraithguard92 To take over the universe of course!! :)
How do I always end up reading something in the comments at the exact same time it's being said in the video?
I for one welcome you as our new exalted leader!
It is amazing how much I learned about waste management by playing various sim city games.
Also would like to point out that around a third of our landfills are filled with construction waste, if you have ever been to a construction site you would be sick at the amount of waste. Same goes for a lot of industry and commerce, when it isn't your money going in the trash people throw out a lot more stuff. End consumers produce relatively little waste.
WTE facilities are such an important part of building our sustainable future :D I'm so glad it's really starting to catch on.
I read WTF facilities
tutracrafty lol
tutracrafty LO)LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
I really doubt that burning trash is and using the ash as raw materials for making new shit is going to require less energy inputs than reduce, reuse, repair, repurpose, recycle....
In Copenhagen they have begun makeing a WTE plant that u can skie on and puffs rings of smoke... thats a wtf plant.
you deserve a show on television
Television is dead
Bruh
@Giuseppe Cordero i'll get back to you in 7 years
"All that delicious trash juice". Laughter ensued :D
Oh look, a science video about me!
Neko tato You aren't high enough quality trash to be included in the word trash when used by Hank.
I just want to say this to the entire DFTBA enterprise (right term?), and many of their suggested channels:
Thank you so very much for what you guys do. It is refreshing, enlightening, and reminds that learning something new every day keeps my brain sharp. If I had the additional funds, I would be giving to Subabble (sp?) like crazy.
Now back to not reading the comments on the Internet...
As others have already told you guys: you all deserve for this to be a TV show. I'm sure such a change would involve some overhauling (and possible loss of full creative control) but I would keep the thought up there (or just take it as a compliment, which it really is).
I've been keeping up with you guys for quite some time now and realized why you guys are so appealing. For a good part, it has to do with Hank's personality and speech, but I think that in a deeper way it really has to do with the passion you guys have to share your love of science with others.
That passion is so damned inspiring. I, with all the honestly in my heart, feel that passion for knowledge, in all its aspects, so I started uploading videos of my own to share this love of mine. I am new to it, and I am always learning, but if you are interested feel free to give it a chance. All I can promise is to do my best but I need your feedback and support. That is all, my friends.
3:12 Wow Hank, you look way too happy when you say that!
I remember some documentary mentioning mushrooms and fungus in general being able to break down trash very well, and thanks to breaking it all down, quickly makes it survivable for other plants like grass, and then attract things like insects thanks to the grass. They did some experiment with two piles of trash by seeding one, and the mushroom-seeded trash decomposed in a month or so to the point of being able to be used in gardens.
Would something like that be applicable to more hazardous trash, factoring in the leachate and such? Since I'm all for quickly-populating things like mushrooms and ants being used everywhere. (I assume it's somewhat deadly, though the video mentions leachate having a small amount of nitrogen which is a common nutrient for mushrooms, so, well).
Now we put our trash on MTV
it is spilling over to quite a few other channels too
wades623 like Fox News
There's a huge leak of it onto MSNBC.
4:31
15 year old hotdog in a 20 year old bun??
Lol that guy was in no hurry
seriously so glad this video is here! watched some other episodes like 2 weeks ago and thought to my self "I wanna know about garbage". low and behold I come back this morning and here it is!
4:10 "Trash hole explosions"
I blame my kids, or my wife, or the dog, or my co-workers, or my friends for all of my trash hole explosions.
America doesn't recycle as much as it could though. Four years ago I traveled from Canada to St. Louis for a conference. In the airport before getting onto my plane to return home I bought a meal that included a bottled drink. After finishing the drink I went in search of a place to recycle it. In Canada there is a recycling bin next to almost every garbage bin in public places. (In my work place we have six different bins for waste in the break room. One for garbage and five for various types of recyclables) In the St. Louis airport I searched for quite some time for a recycling bin. I found one for paper, but none for bottles or other things. I started to ask around to see if anyone knew where one might be. I tried a janitor and he told me that he thought they had "one" somewhere, but he didn't know where it was. I asked a pilot thinking that he might have been in the airport a lot and could have seen one. He hadn't seen one, but told me he thought it was a cool idea. No one knew where one was. I almost gave up and thought about leaving the bottle on top of a garbage can or paper recycling bin, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I get annoyed with hippies and obsessive environmentalists where I'm from, but I just couldn't throw away the bottle. So I put it in my bag and kept it until I arrived back in Canada and found a recycling bin within a minute in the airport. America needs more recycling bins in public places.
Thank you, Hank and the scishow team for, unlike Vsauce and your brother, keeping on making videos for us who are not partying our heads off.
wait wtf does this mean?
@@AnarchoCatBoyEthan the video was uploaded between christmas time and new years and i probably commented around new years, when everyone was partying
I live in Albuquerque, NM. Every home in the city was given a big blue recycling bin the same size as our trash bins. My family has been recycling for years, but now its a lot more apparent that about 2/3 of our waste is recyclable. We only need to have our trash bin emptied every other week, but our recycling bin fills up every time they come to take it away.
"Guys, there's poop in the street. We've got to do something about the poop in the street."
camramaster extra credits? That episode about the sewers?
Moritz Gaßan
Exactly.
You know nothing, Jon Snow!
HAHA I get the back to the future reference. I remember doc brown’s mr fusion on the delorean. The mr fusion thing creates power from trash, lol.
One thing you didn't cover is how incredible of an impact bio-waste (such as food) has on climate change. Dumps produce methane which is, as you said, way more potent than Co2. It also has much more of an impact on the climate because of its chemical structure. This is important because bio waste, besides taking a very long time to decompose in dumps, also produces methane there, instead of the co2 it would produce elsewhere. So it's actually better for the enviro,net to drop that rotting banana on the floor than throw it away.
Really? I had no idea that food waste was any type of problem in a landfill. I need to go do some reading on this. Thanks for sharing!
No problem. It is quite an interesting topic. The conditions in a landfill are suitable for a different type of bacteria than normal.
That's a lot better, but since composts are still large piles of stuff, it's less than ideal conditions
I LOVE THIS CHANNEL. Thank you for all the information Scishow.
this is how you get smart, superman!
We can use this information to dispose of our garbage more efficiently with less pollution.
Superman00221 why dont u just bring all the garbage into space u are after all superman
lagging lim Bit it might land on a survivor of krypton
lagging lim Jordan Le If I brought all the garbage to space, that would be taking some of Earth's finite resources off of the planet, those resources CAN be recycled somehow and someway depending on the "garbage".
I worked for a company in Louisiana called CPL that took landfill gas and sent it to plants' boilers to be fired.
That was over 5 years ago, so that technology is in practice and isn't that new.
Interestingly one project we worked on was reducing the amount of water content in leachate to reduce its volume and in turn the shipping cost of the landfill.
Funnily enough, I learned about the problem of flammable gas build up in dumps through a bible study. I was told that Gehenna became synonymous with hell because it was a dump that occasionally had fiery eruptions, just outside of Jerusalem. In my tiny amount of research sparked by making sure I spelt it right, I've learned that this reasoning for its association with hell is not only debatable but not very likely. Still, it was entertaining to learn about scientific problems with garbage during a bible study.
The president of space. That had me in tears. Good one Hank.
Billings Montana's landfill captures the gasses excaping the ground and uses it for power already. Surprised it was not mentioned here! LOVE SCISHOW!!!!
Hank and Co., you're doing such a great job with this project! Thank you! Happy 2014!
Is it just me, or did the "Sometimes Expload-y" thing catch you eye?
Interesting tidbit: a friend of mine was developing a plasma furnace for waste breakdown. Just as it sounds, this furnace would heat everything up to a plasma, then cool and all the different elements could be removed individually. They perfected the design in 2007, just before the recession hit. When they tried to sell it to counties, they were declined due to cost. My friend then retired. Perhaps one day, we will see a resurgence of this technology in recycling and reusing our waste, rather than leaving everything to rot.
Here in the Netherlands, we recycle more and more. Paper, plastic, glass and plant-based waste (Groente-, Fruit- en Tuinafval; literally vegetable, fruit and garden waste) can all be easily collected separately. With a little extra effort there are waste disposal facilities where waste can be separated even finer: things like wood and appliances like fridges and tvs are separate, as well as chemical waste like batteries, videotapes and engine oil.
You rock Hank! I got a WWSD poster from DFTBA.com for xmas and it makes me so happy ^^
Please don't stop doing this for a while!
I never used to recycle and didn't care where my trash was going. Only recently this year I started sorting my garbage and trying to recycle what my local center would accept and switched to reusable grocery bags. Sadly about 70% of my households trash still ends up in the county landfill. And its typical to have my dumpster full if not overflowing every week before pick up. Obviously we need a new offensive on all fronts from the average consumer to government and industry to really turn things around.
I burst out laughing at "delicious" 😂
Is it just me or did he get super excited when he first mentioned gas explosions?
I like what Arthur says "Solid waste are raw materials we're too stupid to use"
I'm always amazed by the "mountains" outside of Chicago
"Trash juice" and "trash hole" are my new favorite phrases.
This is actually fascinating.
You are awesome Hank.
Love how excited he gets when he talks about the explosions.
Arthur C Clarke, is the man. Love him!
Nice to see the city where I live get mentioned in a video, although it was for landfill gas house explosions...
Have a Trash to Steam plant kinda close here. When the wind is blowing the right way and it is humid can get a whiff of it.
Speaking as a first year archaeologist, holes in the ground have been used as waste dumps for a long time. Like, a really long time. You can tell a lot from one, since people just throw all kinds of things into them.
I love scishow thanks for making it! I will give you money soon I promise.
In my home town (Kitchener, Ontario), there was an old landfill that had been covered over in dirt as the city grew past it. I was told the methane gases it produced were being used to power the plaza they built across the street from it.
It was a pretty tall pile of trash, so when it became open to the public, it quickly turned into a favorite local tobogganing hill. It was also unofficially dubbed "Mt. Trashmore", and Canada's first Krispy Kreme tried and failed to exist on it.
Ok that is so cool! The picture you showed to illustrate the WTE facilities is from one in sweden! I have even been there, with a project we did in school - it is super awesome, does not even smell that bad in there!
As I’m listening to Hank talking about methane seeping up into basements, I’m like “yeah, like the house down the street that blew up when I was a kid in… ROCHESTER HILLS MICHIGAN!!!” So funny to hear such a seemingly unknown event from my childhood backyard talked about by Hank Green.
Furthermore: what isn't immediately recycled gets burned, and extra heat is used to generate electricity or transported to places where heat is needed (for example homes or factories that need heat, like oil refineries). Magnets are then used to filter metals from the ashes, to recycle them.
Of course, there is a lot of improvement possible, but I think we're doing quite well.
same in Australia! Sunday isn't complete without a scrounge through the dump to find freebies.
I don't think anything other than this video has made me excited to get rid of trash.
Oh, the WTE plant on the picture is the one in my town, Malmö, Sweden! It's used for central heating.I went there with a course at university, it's quite cool. Sweden have even built too many of those plants, so no we import garbage to burn. Norway pay Swedish companies to take care of some of their garbage.
I'm confused. I saw something a couple months ago where they doing just as you were hoping. Biodegradable material was placed in a landfill "shell" composed of polyurethane and what-not. When filled, the shell was capped off and covered in dirt. They then showed how they were harvesting the natural gas that was generated from the decomposing material. They even built a park on top of the area after they were finished.
Was that the Penne & Teller episode on Recycling? Because they showed the same thing on that show.
I went on a field trip to a landfill recently in Southern Oregon. They are already capturing the methane and running generators off it, producing up to 300 megawatts.
Honestly, it is not like the US to miss an opportunity. All our rubbish is sorted for recycling at robotic plants with only a the minimum being dumped. The plants all run a profit when markets permit. Overall it's a very profitable industry but I'm guessing the raw material suppliers won't allow anything to come in to competition with established monopolies.
I think pretty much all waste that isn't recycled in Sweden is burned to produce heat. But I still feel like burning waste is a bit ehh maybe not the best. Like it's great to have a warm house, especially now during winter but I still try to produce as little waste as possible, especially like plastic waste, I always wash and re-use plastic bags.
Just get reusable grocery bags. Less effort...
Diana Peña Just remember that you need to use the reusable bag hundreds of times before it's environmental impact per use is the same as a plastic bag that is used once or twice and then used as garbage bag. This assuming that the plastic bag is recycled or combusted under controlled circumstances.
Diana Peña
No but I mean like, plastic bags that I use to store bread in, like I get a plastic bag when I buy something in a shop, like carrots or something, but when the carrots are finished I wash out the bag, and then I might use it to store bread or frozen berries or whatever in.
Petitesser
Ah.
Here in Columbus, OH they have built a public golf course over an old landfill complete with power generators that capture and use some of the escaping methane
Awesome episode Hank & Co.! I recall seeing an article about bacteria that eat plastics and their possible role in reducing plastic wastes. If possible, I'd like to see an episode or a segment about that.
This is awesome! thank you!
In some Australian landfills they do have methane retrieval processes where they collect the gas and run a small electricity plant using the methane collected.
As a part 2 of this and your piece about the "Door to hell", you should do something about catastrophic mistakes in human history. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Centralia, PA mishap. (since this is the garbage episode)
You should do an episode on exploding casket syndrome. Its very interesting how people expect to completely seal a body in a casket and not have it turn into body soup.
Side note on bio gas. Here in Sweden i work in a company named Gothenburg Energy (Göteborg Energi in swedish). There they have a factory producing bio gas out of wood, named GoBiGas (stands for Gothenburg bio gas). I don't work at this plant but i think you would find the chemistry in there pretty interesting.
My parents spent a few months in Linköping, and coming from America were consistently amazed (and delighted) at just how little waste there was. The idea of burning trash to have heated, snow-free bike paths in the winter is fantastic and something that I wish we would utilize in our colder cities here.
ToastAndJellyfish Fun to hear that you have visited Sweden! I myself is quite impressed by this as well, it's not easy to build up the infrastructure required to have these systems. I'm happy that you liked it here. I only wish sometimes that Sweden was a bit less protective of the nature and knew more about scientific developments. Because we really need more nuclear powerplants. And since the development in that area have come far since chynobyl it would be pretty safe :). That's something we could learn from Americans in the energy area.
1:20 typo with degree*
2 Kg = almost 4.5 #/day
Although this segment is rather old, it can be informative and useful going forward.
Honestly I was amazed that many years after going to college and hearing so much about recycling, the town we moved to had a dump - not a transfer station or any kind of limit on what was "deposited", just a dump. At the start it was drive in, dump bags, drive out. Before they finally switched to transfer station and recycling a few years later, it was drive UP, dump and drive down! Not even a large town at that time.
As long as the waste facility used recycles, my regular trash is way less than the 4.5#/day.
Often only 1 large 33 gal trash bag is produced every 2 months. Although lookup says it can hold 50-60#s, no way could I lift that into the bin. Mine is more likely 20 or maybe up to 30#.
Recently our transfer station has included more plastic in the plastic bag container, aka plastic wrapping on various products (nothing icky like meat wrappers!) This helped reduce the trash bag contents, especially in winter as the pellet bags can be recycled now.
Trash middens were/are gold mines for archaeologists. In antiquity, especially pre-history, these would not be quite as toxic, although there likely were nasty things produced and dumped, but not to the extent that "civilized" societies go! There were also a lot less people involved. The dig I was on (final course, Harvard Yard - yes, THAT Harvard Yard) was searching for any remains of the building known as Indian college. The pit I ended up working on was the literal trash pit. Walk a bit behind living quarters and *DUMP*. We had to dig down a few feet before reaching ye olden dump, documenting more recent stuff as many areas in/around Boston have had a lot of land fill added - this can contain old artifacts, but are out of context. Once the "pristine" surface was reached, this pit was so rich it was extended as far as possible (sidewalk prevented going further.) It ended up being about 8' deep, with a solid clay original surface bottom. Everything but the kitchen sink! Fish bones, beef bones, rat teeth, clam shells, broken glass, bottles and pottery of various types, broken spoon, boar tusk, with one layer being what I called the fireplace cleaning dump layer - several inches of damp ashy gray stuff full of clay pipe pieces. Every handful of soil included a LOT of refuse. At the very bottom was the total remains of a broken Bellarmine jug, dating it to early days of Puritan occupation.
Sadly many "transfer" stations ship the regular trash off to other locations, which can be dumps or burn facilities rather than some kind of recycle/better processing facility. There needs to be much more invested into "processing" this refuse in better ways. As for Arthur Clarke's comment - whittle that down to just "We're too stupid".... I would hazard a guess that too many people DON'T bother recycling and just toss everything. No consideration for how much that waste will accumulate and impact the future. Sadly information as informative as this might be, we aren't going to change their minds. Their brains are composed of cement - permanently set.
It is already very common for landfills to burn landfill gas in turbines to produce energy. In fact, if a landfill has enough organic material in it, it can produce enough gas to make energy production a cost effective solution for up to 50 years after closure (but most last around 25 years after closure). I have worked on the engineering and management side of the solid waste industry for several years.
president of space XD
thouroughly enjoyed this episode, these are always super entertaining and informative
Reminds you of Vsause anyone?
I worked on Landfill in the UK for a while as an environmental monitoring technician. Thank you for doing this video Hank people really need to know how bad a solution it is. Leachate is disgusting stuff part of my job was to draw off samples of it. One particular sites leachate had such strong chemical and biological reactions going on in it that it was constantly hot and had the consistency and colour of thick pea soup.
Thank you
4:30 Wait... Who would make a hotdog with a 5 year old bun?
I hope a Subbable person suggests doing a video about the problems of freezing time.
Stopping time is simple: just launch yourself into orbit right at the event horizon of a black hole and try not to get any closer to it xD
A good idea for a video is explaining the concept of calories and what exactly they are. Great vid hope to see more :)
Steam powered turbans! Ha, you really do learn something new every day.
Well, if anyone is looking to help out waste management issues, know that a lot of trash comes from people just buying and keeping too many stuff at home (assuming you're at least middle class), so looking into minimalism may help around that, so maybe look up some minimalism blogs, minimalism videos, minimalism podcasts, and minimalism books if you're curious about this.
Yaaayyyy! He said a whole other! Instead of whole nother! Thank you for not being dumb
Rundle Park where I live used to be a landfill. Now it's actually a pretty park
From Hobart, Australia, our city land fill has a methane power station onsite! Only small but produces about a MW
im working my thesis on this subject, and this video was very helpfull to make think again my topic is relevant. ja, its easy to think your works stinks when you work a whole year on it ):
You are awesome, my man
bottom line on this is that we're doing all we can to make garbage disposal efficient now. And remember sometimes it costs more to, "recycle" something than it's worth.
For the trash issue, I think we need to find a way to separate plastics and glass into their separate elements so they can be used to make new things. For example breaking polyurethane into pure hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen (I think that's what's in it (I'm not a chemist)) which can be used to make new things.
there are already metods to convert some types of plastic into oil derivates and you can just re-melt the glass as it is
we have some pretty boss recycling stations that do Just that here in Norway and other parts of Europe. We freaking recycle everything....
Glass can be melted and just formed into new glassware, and plastics could theoretically be either separated mechanically and used again or be heated which breaks the polymers down into monomers (pyrolysis) to make new polymers
Delicious! You should be on TV Hank!
Nicely stated thewolfhowling!
Should do a followup about garbage island and what is being done to remove garbage from the ocean if anything is being done at all.
6:21
That reminds me of something I have said about LoL and SC2.
"All ins are just aggressive builds that are not perfected yet."
Basically, a rough idea that noobs can pull off. And if you are good, a scary game winning ability.
SYSAV! Yes! They're the ones taking care of the garbage here, in my region, and they provide heating for the houses in the nearby towns/citys here :) They also recently started a project where the leftover food that otherwise would have been burnt now is used to produce methain and then burnt to in turns produce electicity! Although my region was defenetly not the first in Sweden with type of food waste to methain to electricity I was very exited when they started this project :) (yes, I'm a environmental engineer, so this type of projects makes me super happy). potato peels -> electricity
Space Junk Sucks Too! imagine sleeping and space junk crashes through your bedroom from outer space,kinda scary and it happens more and more as time goes by!
I once had a Twinkie during a hostess worker's strike. My Dad told me if the myth no new Twinkies had been made in the last 30 years anyways. In the words of Apu: "You cannot destroy a Twinkie!"
Ha! I live in Northern New Jersey. I know more than you want to hear about garbage. I live with it (and I don't mean just the politicians).
I am a simple man.
I see "SciShow" and "explode" in a video title, I watch the video.
If they're that worried about how long it's going to take garbage to decompose, just put the dump on a subduction zone and let plate tectonics deal with it. ;)
+Y2KNW All subduction zones are in the ocean.
+Y2KNW Subduction zones are found on the ocean floor, any trash put there would float to the top. If we somehow found a way to keep it there, I think we could all agree not to fuck with plate tectonics. It could cause poisonous man-made gases to be released through volcanoes and could seriously change the way in which continents move.
мαℓςσℓм єgσ "poisonous man-made gases to be released through volcanoes"
You do know what comes out of volcanoes normally, right?
And I was trying to be silly, but I guess I didn't make that part clear enough, sorry.
Y2KNW Well, more poisonous than those that are already ejected. Introducing man-made plastics into the atmosphere would be terribly idiotic.
Y2KNW I did not see that you were joking. I guess my brain was all caught up in the smart-talk.
3:15 Yeah every time we Drive by Rochester Hills my Father usually says how polluted that area is for being a "Supposedly" nice area to live in.