It pays to go green. It’s a simple truth the world is slowly accepting, and credit should be given where it’s due. Today’s landfills and refuse centers, the places where we send our trash, are not the same “dumps” our grandparents used. Trash is no longer necessarily left and forgotten. Modern waste management is going green. Like the American Indians before us, we are learning to use everything. Today’s waste can generate power, be rendered inert, or even atomized. That being said, there are still problems, dumps that shouldn’t exist in the first place. But at least there are strides being made, and technologies on the horizon to get us there faster.

Puente Hills Landfill

Puente Hills Landfill - Let’s start off with a big one, the one and only current largest landfill in the United States, the Puente Hills Landfill. In 2005 the Puente Hills Landfill, outside Los Angeles, CA, accepted almost four million tons of waste. The landfill gas created by this dump is utilized by the Puente Hills Gas-To-Energy Facility, which generates over 50 megawatts of Electricity that is then sold to Southern California Edison. This is enough electricity to power 70,000 homes. In 2006, construction was completed on phase two of this facility, providing an extra 7 megawatts of power. To maximize the project’s value, a direct line was built from the facility to the San Jose Creek Water Reclamation Plant, which treats up to 100 million gallons per day of waste water from the San Gabriel Valley. This displaces $3-4 million a year the water reclamation plant would have had to spend on retail electricity. Besides providing electricity, the landfill gas from Puente Hills is also reclaimed and converted into Liquefied Natural Gas for fuelling alternative fuel vehicles. This includes vehicles within Puente Hills’s own fleet. This gas is at lest a dollar a gallon cheaper to produce than gasoline and surpasses the quality of commercially available natural gas.

The Linde Group/Waste Management Natural Gas Facility

The Linde Group/Waste Management Natural Gas Facility – Not necessarily a dump, but being one of the “World’s Largest” in relation to trash, I felt it deserved mentioning here. In 2009 as part of a joint venture between The Linde Group and Waste Management Inc., the world’s largest plant for the conversion of landfill gas into environmentally friendly natural gas will open in Livermore, California. The facility is expected to produce approximately 50,000 liters of liquefied natural gas a day. Among many other uses, the gas will be utilized by Waste Management Inc. as fuel for their fleet of 300 trash and recycling collection vehicles in the state of California.

Bandeirantes Landfill Site

Bandeirantes Landfill Site – Located 18 miles from San Paolo, Brazil, the Bandeirantes Landfill is possibly the largest landfill in all of South America. What it definitely has is South America’s largest landfill gas recuperation plant. Gas from the landfill fuels 24 turbines generating 925 kilowatts each with a combined output of roughly 23 megawatts. This is enough electricity for approximately 23,000 homes. To date, the plant has been averaging 170,000 megawatts a year.

Fresh Kills Landfill

Fresh Kills Landfil – Located on the New York City borough of Staten Island, the Fresh Kills Landfill was the largest landfill in the world until it closed in March of 2001. The landfill would be temporarily reopened, however, a few months later to receive and process much of the debris from the destruction of the World Trade Center. The landfill opened in 1948 and became New York City’s primary landfill for the second half of the 20th century. At 4.6 square miles with a peak 25 meters higher than the Statue of Liberty, the Fresh Kills Landfill could easily be regarded as the largest man made structure in the world. Its volume exceeds both the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Egypt. That’s a lot of trash. The site gets its name from the “Fresh Kills estuary”, which it sits along the banks of. Current plans for the retired largest landfill in the world call for it to be converted into reclaimed wetlands and a public park with recreational facilities. A September 11th memorial will also be built. Development of the park is expected to last approximately 30 years and be done in three phases. The Fresh Kills Park will be three times the size of Central Park. This sheer land area will allow for horseback riding, hiking trails, canoeing, and various other activities all within minutes of the heart of New York City.

The Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches

The Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches – Or as they’re sometimes collectively known, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Sounds like a dump, and it is by all accounts the world’s absolute largest landfill. Only problem is, it’s not a dump; it’s the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a clockwise spiral of currents that moves slowly in the Pacific Ocean. The Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches are two large, ever-accumulating masses of garbage floating on the oceans surface. The western patch floats between Japan and Hawaii, while the eastern patch floats between Hawaii and California. The eastern patch alone is estimated to be twice the size of Texas. How does it work? Imagine filling up your bathtub. Now imagine that island of foam that forms in the middle of the tub. Now imagine your tub is the ocean and that foam is garbage. The garbage patches are huge environmental disasters and capable of belching trash on beaches throughout the pacific. The number one culprit behind this mass of trash? (Besides us of course.) Plastic. Plastic can take decades, even centuries to degrade on land. In the ocean it can take even longer. Worse, the plastic breaks down into small plankton sized pieces called “nurdles”. In some areas of the ocean these nurdles can outweigh the actual plankton by six to one. And it still gets worse. Plastic absorbs toxins in the water. Ingesting the plastic alone is bad enough, but now they are effectively poison pills for the marine life. What can be done? Start cleaning it up, and stop letting plastic get into our oceans.

Pietarsaari

Pietarsaari – Beginning its commercial operation at the end of 2001, the world’s largest dry biomass cogeneration site is located in Pietarsaari on the west coast of Finland. Cogneration is the utilization of either a heat engine or power station to simultaneously generate both electricity and contained heat. Regular power plants vent their heat into the environment. Cogeneration plants reclaim that heat and use it for industrial and domestic heating purposes. This, of course, makes the facility exceptionally efficient. The plant in Pietarsaari utilizes biofuels such as bark, saw dust, and other wood products, along with 10% oil or coal to generate up to 240 megawatts of electrical power, 60 megawatts of district heating, and 100 megawatts of process steam.

APP Gasplasma Facility

APP Gasplasma Facility – Located in Swindon, Wiltshire, England, APP’s Gasplasma facility is the first of its kind in the world. What gasplasma does is combine in sequential order, gasification, plasma gas treatment, and syngas polishing followed by gas engine power generation. Full scale plants are estimated to be capable of treating 100,000 tons of waste a year. They would generate enough electricity for 100,000 homes, enough heat for 700 homes and divert 99% of all feedstock waste away from landfills. Byproducts include a high quality aggregate glass. Couple this with the fact that the plants would have a negative carbon footprint, and it really gets impressive. But there’s more. The average plant would be only 150meters long, 50 meters wide, and for the most part only 10 meters high. In other words, tiny. What gasplasma does to the trash is subject it to an inert gas that has been super-heated up to 25,000 degrees Fahrenheit by an electrical arc. Within this extreme temperature, most refuse is atomized. The process is done in a vacuum, allowing for a gaseous removal system. Any remaining solids are inert and easily removed. The exhaust gas is “syngas”, a gas mixture containing a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen that can be refined into various fuels.

Regardless of the technology, or size of our waste management centers, what is most intriguing, most inspiring, is the hope they bring. If even our dumps, the very symbols of waste, can go green, then perhaps everything else can too.