I regret that I've been tied up
on a project and have not kept current with the backdraft from some of the
newspaper articles that I have posted. Having just begun to catch up,
though, I would very much like to make a stab at clearing the air, beginning
with an explanation of the relationship between global warming and recycling,
and finishing with my mea culpa on evangelicalism.
For those whose interests lie in
recycling writ small and narrow, you can just pass on or delete all
this.
RELATIONSHIP OF GLOBAL WARMING
TO RECYCLING
Seventeen years after the Mobro
barge slipped out of Long Island Sound looking for a home for its cargo of
trash, recycling (other than for high grade paper, non-ferrous metals and those
who have ridden recent export markets) largely still hangs on by tender
hooks when market highs are averaged with the inevitable lows that
follow.
Along with those for virgin
materials, the environmental and tax subsidies for landfilling heads the list of
reasons why this is so, because diversion competes most directly with
disposal. If landfilling is underpriced, recycling finds it that much more
difficult to compete in the marketplace, whose winds recycling is increasingly
prey to as policy mandates wane.
Among the many environmental
subsidies why this is so, and that I have endeavored to raise over the
years, is the near complete failure of today's landfill designs under Subtitle D
of RCRA to prevent the release of toxic substances into the environment,
especially in the future.
Included in that litany
is the inability to prevent
the contemporaneous release of most of the gases generated in landfills,
46%-50% of which is methane, a greenhouse gas more than 21 times as virulent as
CO2. Although hard data does not exist, based upon what is known, almost
certainly less than 25%, and probably less than 20% of the lifetime
emissions are actually captured. The vast majority of methane emitted from
in landfills, which does not exist in the garbage we discard, but instead
is generated in significant quantities only in the anaerobic (or oxygen
starved) conditions of large lined landfills, adds substantially to
mankind's climate-changing gases, very
likely in the U.S. greater than 10% of the total.
Compounding all this is the fact
that the landfill industry has essentially acknowledged that current landfill
designs based upon liners intended to stabilize the waste only postpones rather
than prevents pollution. That is because, eventually, those barrier systems will
degrade. Indeed, Europe has recognized that we are unable to safely manage
decomposable matter in the ground because we cannot contain the leachate and
gases that mobilize the hazardous and dangerous compounds from trash. For that
reason, in 1999, the EC issued a Landfill Directive ordering the phase out of
organics in landfills. One of the ways that this is being met is by
significantly increasing composting. Another is by energy recovery from
separated organic streams, and yet another by incineration.
In the U.S., on the other hand,
where solid waste regulation has long since ceased to exist, the landfill
industry has succeeded in getting a rule from EPA which, in direct violation of
RCRA that mandates the agency to issue federal minimum standards, has delegated
to the States whether to allow, and if so whether to impose any substative
requirements on, a second generation version of landfilling, called
bioreactors.
Completing reversing their
position, landfill companies now concede that it is impossible to stabilize a
landfill by keeping it dry over the long term, and instead, now argue that,
rather than attempting to keep the waste dry and stable, it should be flooded
with liquids in an attempt to accelerate decomposition. Raising moisture
levels from 20% to 45%-65% in landfills, most of which today are manmade
mountains several hundred feet high held back by little more than a 2 foot berm
and plastic tarp, essentially liquifies it to the consistency of a
marsh.
In addition to major questions
over whether the mountain of trash, embracing tens of millions of tons of
garbage, will come crashing down in massive landslides, as has already happened
on a small scale during limited testing -- beyond concerns about how the
liner and leachate collection systems will hold up with all those recirculating
liquids -- is the question about what hapens to gas
collection.
The same rapid decomposition not
only compresses much of the lifetime gas collection to the early years of a
landfill's life, but, in the heterogenous environment of a landfill, causes
differential settlement, making it very difficult to maintain collection
piping. In addition, a seal in the form of a final cover
including a plastic sheet is delayed in bioreactors for more than 10 years --
the same time period during which much of the lifetime gas generation is
compressed -- in order increase profits by recovering airspace, even though
gas collection systems, that depend upon a vacuum to draw gases, don't work
without it. In the absence of a seal, oxygen from the surface is
inadvertently also drawn into the perforated piping and mixed with the methane,
a highly explosive and dangerous situation. Taken together, gas collection in
bioreactors is problemmatic at best, and destined to dramatically increase the
uncontrolled release of near term climate change gases over dry tomb
landfills.
We are in the midst of
finalizing a major report documenting this statement, and when that is done,
I'll post it on the web, and email notice of that to Greenyes for those who
would like to become more informed about the technical details.
With global warming taking
center stage -- and rightly so -- it is landfill's inability to prevent adding
so much to climate change gases that will carry recyclers message to a far
greater degree than the more commonly understood issues of drinking water
contamination.
In hindsight, I should have
prefaced the plethora of clips I've thown over Greenyes's transom on global
warming with this explanation of its relevance to recyclers. You may
see from the length of this posting why I hesitated so long to do
so.
.
MEA CULPA FOR ANY UNTOWARD
INFERENCE TO EVANGELICALS
Although raised in a secular
household, I've read most of the library shelf on Jesus, not in an evangelical
sense, but, in awe, to feel and, somewhat, to understand the beauty to
which humanity at its best can rise.
While I still believe that
religion and science should respect the province of the other, and for that
reason wither at suggestions that evolution taught in biology classes should
bend to the Christian Bible, after the election I've come to the conclusion that
both sides are leading our society over the cliff.
True, the evangelical side is in
the cat bird's seat today, but I am old enough to remember the 60's
and 70's when the shoe was on the other foot, and people like David Suskind on
public television would snottily look his nose down at the religious.
There are few saints in the
political melee that followed Roe v. Wade, but that doesn't change the salient
fact that we all need to appreciate going forward.
Namely, that is this. We
all co-habitate in the same country, and there we breath the same air and drink
the same water, as will our children and, we hope, our children's
children. In the end, whether we like it or not, we need to find a way to
live in comity with each other in mutual respect instead of conniving to find a
knock out punch of the other side. For neither side is going to be packed
off and sent away somewhere, no matter who wins any particular
election.
When, as Rev. Leroy Hedman's letter
demonstrates, there are so many many overlaps, it would be a crying shame to
pass up the challenge.
Global warming, with its
connections to creation and sustainability would be a grand place to
start.
Peter
____________________________
Peter Anderson RECYCLEWORLDS CONSULTING 4513 Vernon Blvd. Suite 15 Madison, WI 53705 (608) 231-1100 / Fax 233-0011 anderson@no.address |