[greenyes] Impact of Bioreactor Landfills on Recycling and Composing

["Peter Anderson" <anderson@no.address>]

As the fact that today's inexpensive liner-based landfills are fatally 
flawed becomes inescapable, the waste industry is attempting to keep 
landfills at the center of our material management policy by pushing 
bioreactors.  In a bioreactor, instead of attempting to keep the waste load 
dry, the site is deliberately flooded in an attempt to increase 
stabilization of the site before it is abandoned. If the problem is the 
organic fraction of the discard stream (the 67% of the material landfilled 
today consisting largely of unrecycled paper, food scraps and green wastes) 
that keeps the landfill biologically active for long periods of time, the 
alternative is to source separate the organics for composting, just like we 
separate the bottles, cans and newspapers for recycling.

Here is an excerpt from a landfill engineering conference on that choice:



From Presentation at the NZ Conference on Environmental Geotechnics, 
Newcastle, Australia, 28-30 November 2001.

Bioreactor landfills: Do they work?

by S.T.S. Yuen

University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

"The recent trend in solid waste management, including Australia, to divert 
decomposable waste such as green waste away from landfills has certain 
implications. The concept of bioreactor landfills is logically incompatible 
with recycling/composting of organic waste. The two approaches belong to two 
extreme alternatives of an integrated management system - we need to dispose 
decomposable waste into landfills in order to make them bioreactors, which 
contradicts the idea of filtering out degradable waste for 
recycling/composting."





_________________________
Peter Anderson, President
RECYCLEWORLDS CONSULTING
4513 Vernon Blvd. Suite 15
Madison, WI 53705-4964
Ph: (608) 231-1100
Fax: (608) 233-0011
Cell: (608) 698-1314
eMail: anderson@no.address
web: www.recycleworlds.net

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