Waste not, want not
Read the full story in Sustainable Industries Journal.
During the 1980s, East Coast cities efforts to deal with trash could have been a comedy of errors if they weren’t such a serious problem. In one story still told in waste management circles today, a barge filled with more than 3,000 tons of trash sailed between New York City and Belize for more than six months while city officials tried to find a landfill to take the waste.
Things are different now. Although the amount of waste the United States generates each day rose by about one pound per person between 1980 and 2006, increased recycling and recover rates meant the amount headed to landfills decreased by about a pound as well. Still, 138.2 million tons of waste are sent to the nation’s 1,754 operating landfills annually. Seattle alone sends a mile-long train filled with garbage to Oregon every day.
On the West Coast, there’s an estimated1.5 million tons of capacity left in the region’s landfills, which currently accept 64 million tons of waste annually. That’s enough to last about 24 years.
However, landfill operators are now finding new ways to increase landfill capacity — and also limit environmentally and financially costly problems after a landfill is closed — by turning to waste-to-energy technologies that have finally come of age.