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Hello, everybody. Chuck here with your Saturday Selex Pick How Landfills Work. June twenty third. Twenty fifteen. This is a good one, everyone.

This is part of our, I guess, city works suite of podcasts and how things like landfills work is super important and very interesting and not quite as depressing as you might think a little bit.

But it's also kind of a marvel of engineering how these things actually get pulled off. So take a listen.

Take a listen. Even how landfills work right now.

Welcome to stuff you should know. A production of I thought radios HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, this Charles Dovekie, Chuck Bright, there's Gerri over there. And this is stuff you should know. Hi, how's it going? It's great. Good, good yourself.

I found this topic and I was starting to tell you before how interesting I thought it was too.

But, yeah, it's awesome. I was, like, stuffed with gold. So now I'm going to say it's awesome. It is. And landfill's. The concept of a landfill, even though it ain't perfect, is pretty neat. Yeah.

And even though we need to reduce the amount of trash, especially Americans produce, yeah. There is still going to be trash in the world and it needs to be dealt with. And this is way better than the old days when in like pre 1930, New York City. Yeah. They would dump their garbage in the ocean and then between 1930 and we still do that. You realize, well, New York City doesn't dump it right in the Atlantic Ocean.

No, but a lot of garbage is dumped in the ocean. Yeah, well, we talked about the great Pacific Garbage Patch. Yeah. And then between the 1930s, in the 1970s, they had what they called dumps, which is a big hole in the ground. Right. Covered in rats and birds. And you would just dump garbage. Yeah. To leach into everything.

Yes. Which is messed up. Yeah. And the EPA comes along and I think the 60s, definitely the 70s and was like, we need to do something better about this, but.

So the idea of the landfill was born in about the 60s, I believe. Well, the first modern sanitary landfill was in 1937 in Fresno.

OK, that's right. And it's like a national historic place or something.

Yeah, because it kind of kicked off the whole thing. But it was until the 60s and 70s that they started passing laws saying that, like, every state really needs to start doing the same thing.

Right. And like you said before, that they just dump their trash in a pit, which people have been doing for millennia. At least they were burning their trash also. Yeah, and it sounds mind bogglingly awful, and it is especially from an environmental standpoint.

But they didn't have the trash problem that we have now in the 60s.

Since the 1960s, our trash generation, municipal solid waste generation has doubled, tripled, tripled. And I was like, why is that? What's going on?

Apparently, it's the advent of cheap packaging before Styrofoam packaging, before plastic, before aluminum cans that everybody just threw away.

Everything was wrapped in a t shirt that you could wear. Exactly. And like when you weren't carrying around a slab of meat in the t shirt from the butcher to your house. Yeah, you wore your t shirt. So you reused it, right?

No, but no, you would you would have maybe like do you remember when Sam the Butcher brought Alice the Meat Beastie Boys reference?

I was just about to say Fred Flintstone driving around with two feet. I think alfalfa, which is, I guess a really weird way of putting it as barefoot. Well, that didn't rhyme bald feet anyway. He would bring it to a wrapped in, like, white butcher's paper. Yeah.

And she would throw it away and it would really not take up much space at the dump.

It would decompose. It was like Styrofoam, which lasts for 50000 years, right? Yeah.

And so starting about 1960, packaging, especially very non biodegradable packaging, took off like a rocket. Yeah.

You could still go to the butcher though. Now. I do. You can. And you get it in paper, but you go to that big chain grocery store and it's going to be plastic and Styrofoam. Right.

So between 1960 and 1990, our packaging waste increased by 80 percent. That meant that we had to do something. We had a lot more trash and we had to take care of this trash in ways that we hadn't before. And so the modern landfill, based on that Fresno model, boomed.

And fortunately, that's right. But even now they're finding. We went too far in one direction. Yeah. Now we need to adjust it, massage it a little bit, refine it. And we we're coming up with a new generation of landfill's.

That's right. So if you're talking about a landfill, the goal of the landfill is not to compost trash. And a lot of people probably know this. Yeah, it's not to compost trash such that it breaks down super quickly and biodegrades. It is the opposite of that. It is to keep it as dry as possible in an airtight environment.

Just bury it, lock it away from the surrounding world.

That's right. And so that's what a landfill is, a sanitary landfill, municipal solid waste or MSW landfill. Um, they isolate the trash from the environment, right. They don't just dump it on the dirt and let things leach. And this thus begins the landfill podcast. Is there a lot of components to that? Yeah, but that's a long and short of it. It's true.

And what what that's called the whole idea behind that landfill that was in reaction to out of sight.

Out of mind. That's one a dry tomb is the industry lingo for it. Oh it's in it. It was created in reaction to trash just being allowed to seep into the groundwater. Sure. And methane did leak out in the air. Blow up. Yeah, sure. Apparently houses that have utility pipes that pass by old landfills, methane will get into those utility pipes and like, get mixed in with the electricity. And when you go to plug in your toaster and it sparks kaboom.

Really? Yes. It's a problem with old landfills because they are all idiots with trash, like up until the 60s, 70s, 80s. Yeah.

And even still, we have a big problem with trash, but nothing like it was before as far as taking care of it was trying to really get a handle on it. Americans produce four point six pounds of trash per day per person. Yeah.

And you know what's crazy is you'd think, well, is probably like as bad as it gets. No, the UK is America is like in the middle roughly for trash generation. We were the worst. No, the UK is the worst. What do we produce per capita? They produce. The most and they also throw away the most, they have the lowest recovery rate, although it's gone up, I believe I think they had like some sort of national initiative.

Right. Because it says here that it went up from 31 percent recovery rate, which is like recycling and that kind of stuff.

You're basically diverting it from the landfill to 50 percent. So it's actually better than America. As far as the resource recovery rate goes, Canada's the worst. I'm sorry, Ken is the worst.

Yeah, that's hard to believe.

I would think so, too. But it's true. The standout is Germany. Germany produces way more trash per person than any other country per capita, but they also have the highest recovery rate, like almost 80 percent, 80 percent of their trash gets diverted from the landfill. That's amazing. Actually, that's efficient. What's the American number on that diversion? It covers about a third, 30 percent for at least a couple of decades now, maybe three decades.

You could say Americans diverted about they divert about a third of their trash from the landfill.

You'd like to see that number get better in three decades for sure.

You know, and it's always hovers around 33, 34 percent. And it should be a lot better than that. You know, that sounds like to me whoever is in charge of doing that study is just like, let's just use last year's numbers. We can all live with that, right? Yeah. All right. So if you want a landfill in your municipality, you're going to have to start with a proposal by saying you can't just go start.

Yeah.

You got to look around and say we need the landfill, everybody. So let's, uh, do an environmental impact study. Right. And let's let's find an area let's find a lot of acreage, because I think they use the North Wake County landfill in Raleigh, North Carolina, as their go to example in this article. So our HowStuffWorks started two hundred and thirty acres of land, about 70 acres of which is the actual landfill. So you need a lot of land and you're going to have to do an environmental impact study to determine a lot of things.

How much land do you have? Yeah, if there's enough of it, sure. What type of soil you have and what bedrock is underneath it. Very important how water flows over the surface of the site. Yeah. Does it flow right down into the river, does it not completely. Right. Right, exactly. And then the the impact it's going to have on local wildlife. Sure. And if it's an historic site, like an archaeological site.

Yeah.

You don't want a landfill on an archaeological site. What's funny is if you if you go back and look at the Fresh Kills landfill, which is one of the biggest in the world, New York, right? Yeah. And it wasn't even the only one for New York. It's closed now, right?

Yes.

And the guy who created the Highline James Corner is creating a park there out of it like a massive, massive park. Interesting. I think like three times the size of Central Park. Are they calling it Cancer Park?

No, I think they're avoiding that.

I don't remember what it's called. I wrote a really interesting New York magazine article about it now. It really well-written, clever words, basically like, that's awesome. That's awesome. This guy's got this great vision and then but it's the landfill, right? You know?

Sure. At the end of the day, it's still buried garbage.

Exactly. Um, all right. So when we talked about the bedrock, that's really important, because if you have what you really want to try and prevent when you're building a landfill or operating landfill is, um, leakage and seepage. That was like that was the big thing.

Yeah. When the EPA came along and started saying, like, you can't just bury your trash anywhere. There's groundwater. Yeah. Dummies. And like, as trash decomposes, it's not just like old Coca-Cola and banana peels. When those things break down and start mixing together, some really horrific stuff like ammonia gets produced and that gets into the groundwater and all of a sudden you're drinking ammonia.

That's bad for you. Yeah, that's called the it's called leachate is the liquid or garbage. Juice in another words. Yeah. That that's a better way to say it because that defines it all in one go.

Right.

And the whole point of each other dry to landfill was to do everything you could to prevent this garbage that you're burying from reaching the water table.

Right. So you studied that bedrock. If it's too fractured, it's not going to work because it's going to seep into that junk. No mines, no quarries, because they probably already have broken through the water table before they were abandoned. That's right. But at the same time, you also need to be able to sink wells in various points so you can't the bedrock needs to allow for that as well. That's right. Like you're really looking for a specific area.

Uh, when we talked about the water flow, of course, you don't want it flowing near wetlands or any kind of rivers or streams. That's a no brainer for spills.

Fresh Kills is an old marshland that they just filled the marshes and lakes and with garbage, what did they name it that is at the area or like that kills is a. Dutch word for stream.

OK, because I was about to say that's like the worst I know name for anything totally, unless it was a butcher, but it really means fresh stream, fresh kills, charcuterie for fresh stream garbage dump.

Yeah, that makes sense. Now, what does kill mean stream. Oh Dutch word. Because you've heard it like like Fourie means fish kill farm. Yeah. Really. Yes. That would be fish stream.

That makes a lot more sense now. Yeah. A fresh kills.

I wondered about that for years now you know, start. All right. So uh, local wildlife, they're going to really study that to see what kind of, um, you know, can't be in the area of a migrate like migratory route for birds or like a nesting area. Like a marsh like Fresh Kills landfill.

That's right.

And then once you figured all this out and they say, oh, wait, wait, you skipped over the historical or archaeological site, well, you already mentioned that like Fresh Kills landfill. OK, apparently, I think it was they did it all wrong, huh?

Henry David Thoreau said that arrowheads were the surest crop to dig from the ground at Fresh Kills before it was in landfill. Yeah. Wow.

So archaeological site wetland. And very close to the ground, water seeping right into it. Unbelievable. Um, and I believe that was a large bunny rabbit population that they just dumped it right on top of.

All right. So once you figured it out, this is not fresh kills. It's actually a great spot. You're going to get your permits. You're going to raise your money. This one in North Carolina costs about 19 million to build cheap. That seems a little cheap, but I don't think that one's brand new.

Yeah, it's probably from the 90s. Yeah. And then you probably have a public vote because you're probably going to be using public dollars and no one will know that that vote takes place and you're going to get a landfill built.

Exactly. Boom. Yeah, they just build it in the night.

All right. So let's take a little break here and we will talk about building that landfill right after this.

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Hey, this is. All right, so you've got your permits, you've got your money raised, it's time to build a landfill. Yeah, you shouted down the old guy at the Board of commissioners meeting who objects.

Yeah, old man MacLane. Right. The tree hugger. Yeah.

Let's recycle all our garbage crackpot.

So we will list the basic parts of a landfill and then go over them in detail. How's that sound?

Sounds like a bullet hit list. Do you got the bottom line or system? You've got the cells, you've got the storm water drainage. You've got the leachate collection system, a.k.a. garbage juice, methane collection system. And you've got the cap, the covering Kaboom.

Actually, that's the opposite of what you want to happen with the cap coverage system. You don't want to.

So start with the bottom line.

I mean, again, this is the original purpose of all landfills that are in use today, unless they're bioreactor, although it's part of it. But this dry toome landfill, yeah, it's the main part is the bottom liner to use a very thick like sometimes 100 millimeter thick, very sturdy, like polyethylene liner.

Yeah.

Synthetic plastic that they line the whole place with puncture resistant, strong, able to withstand a lot of trash being dumped on it.

And just to be 100 percent certain, they'll often use some sort of like fabric mat. Yeah. That they'll lay down first and then put the the the liner on and then put another mat on top of that to help prevent it from being punctured by rocks or garbage rocks below or garbage above.

Everything is trying to puncture this mat. Yeah, it's a moisture barrier. Right.

But that liner is the main component, the the initial component of the landfill. That's right. Next, we have our cell and a cell is basically the day's garbage. Yeah, it's the day's garbage that you dump in there. You compact it. Airspaces is key. That's where the more air space you have, the more trash you can bury. Right. So they want to keep it as compact as possible. And they do this by rolling over it with bulldozers and flatliners and rollers and graders.

Right. And they smush it down.

And a cell is it's a it's a it's a hole in the ground. Apparently, the North Carolina landfill that HowStuffWorks went to back in the day cell is 50 feet long, 50 feet wide, 14 feet deep. Yep. And all the trash is put in there. Like you said, there's heavy equipment that rolls over and compacts it. And did you read the Atlantic article I sent you about point-I hills? Yes. They said that there's an added benefit of compacting trash.

Not just does it take up less space, it also kills about 50 percent of the rats in there.

Oh, good. And then at the end of the day, when the cell is filled, they cover it over with about six inches of dirt that they then compact.

That kills the other 50 percent of rats. Oh, that's where the other half goes.

And that makes that type of landfill what's called the sanitary landfill, which means 100 percent rat free because they're all dead. Yes, they're squished or they're suffocated. Yes.

By this process of compacting and covering over and the by covering over this stuff every day, you protect it from being blown away by the wind, but being carried away by the rain. You protect it from being dug up by coyotes or trash scavengers. Right. And so that's what makes it a sanitary drive to landfill is what we've described so far.

That's right. And to get this thing as compact as possible, they're going to weed out things like that huge roll of carpet that you took out of your 1970s bedroom. Right. Or that mattress that has a, you know, brown stained like looks like the map of Asia from the sticks.

Right, because you raised that one lady from hell raiser from the dead.

Yeah. So, again, you take out all that stuff and make it, you know, all the yard waste and make it as compatible as possible. And then that is compacted at a rate depending on where you are, about 500 pounds per cubic yard. Yes, it's a flat. Dirt is over it now and now we need to worry about drainage.

Yeah. Basically once you created that cell, you've just completed a portion of the landfill, right? Yes.

For the day one day's trash. It's so weird. It's like your Tuesdays. All right. 365 days a year. Yeah, well, that's the Point Hills people in that Atlantic article were saying that they, in retrospect, figured out that they could have predicted the economic crisis. Oh, interesting, because about a little less than a year before it happened that they would fill up their days, sell by like 1:00 p.m. and closed. Now they say up until 5:00 and it's not even necessarily full.

So they know it's like a material downturn in building materials and consumer waste, like a year or two before the actual crisis happen, before they collapse.

Well, you know, the old saying, if you want to know the state of the country's economics, go to landfill. The good thing that's what I think Jimmy Carter said that.

So you don't want liquids in that solid waste as much as possible. So they test the solid waste for liquids. Right. And if it's not liquid, then it's fine to go in the hole. Right.

So they put that in there the other way that they want to keep liquids out. And again, what they're doing is trying to prevent garbage juice from forming. That's right. Is to have storm stormwater runoff drainage going on. So all of the first of all, you never want a flat landfill ever.

Oh, really? Are they out? And you want to mounded at least slightly. You never want a plateau.

Yeah. And so you want the water to run off. And then when it runs off, you want to collect it in the pipes. You want to basically create an even system like you have on the roof of your house and shoot it all down to some concrete gulches. Yeah. Or if you believe French drains at your house, arroyos, chaparral, what else?

Uh. Gutters. Yeah, haberdasher, right, and all that goes to a collection pond. That's right. This is not the kind of thing you want to swim in. What they wait for there is for the suspended particles to kind of settle on the bottom right. And then they will test the water for those the garbage juice. And depending on how nasty it is and riddled with chemicals, they'll go from there. They may treat it like regular wastewater.

Well, that depends. Like if they if just the stormwater shows some leachate, they'll send it to a leachate collection pond. Yeah.

If if it turns out to just be normal stormwater, then they'll let it flow out of there. That's right. Like whatever river, whatever.

Yeah. And sometimes it's gravity or sometimes they use a pump. Right. Depends on the lay of the land.

But if it's leachate they have a separate collect collection system for leachate. Yes. Which is basically perforated pipes that are running through the cells. Yeah.

And the leachate is going to happen like they try and prevent it as much as possible. But there is no hole in the ground where you're not going to have any garbage use. Right, exactly. So they collect that garbage just as it's forming and they run it out to a separate collection pond. That's the leachate collection pond. And if you don't want to swim in the stormwater collection permanently, don't think you don't even want to look at the leachate collection pond.

No. So, again, they let the particles settle. They test the concentration of the leachate in the pond, and then they send it either to an onsite water remediation system like a wastewater plant. Yeah. Or else they send it to the local city or county wastewater plant for treatment.

Yeah. Boy, we got to do one on wastewater treatment at some point. You got to talk about fascinating.

Yes. You poop in the water and eventually you treat water. It's pretty remarkable what we've learned to do, you know.

Yeah.

So the other big thing that we mentioned earlier was methane. And that is a byproduct that's a gaseous byproduct, um, of anaerobic decomposition.

And about 50 percent of your your gas is coming out of this thing are going to be methane, about 50 percent carbon dioxide. And they say a little bit of nitrogen, a little bit of oxygen. It gets not even enough to be a percentage point, almost negligible. So methane is can be dangerous and hazardous, but it can also be very useful. So these days, they're finding ways to harness this methane and use it as fuel. Right.

Which is pretty great.

Yeah, it is very great. And actually, there's a lot of money in it. They're finding to. Sure, especially if you go to the trouble of building an on site power plant. Yeah. Where you just basically extract the methane from the landfill gas LFG is what it's called. And then you burn the methane. You can power, you can create electricity. Right. You can power a turbine and boom, there's electricity being produced. And actually at Fresh Kills, New York City gets ten million bucks a year from a company that has exclusive rights to extract the methane from this place.

It's pretty great. Tamilian, that's not nothing to sneeze at. And Lincoln, Nebraska, did a pilot study in 2010 and found that they could make about three hundred thousand dollars a year from methane collection from their landfill. That's awesome.

So if you're a city that's trying to figure out ways to at least keep your landfill open, methane collection, I call my my worst days LFG.

Actually, when I have landfill gas, it's the worst. Worst.

So then you've got your covering and your or your cap is the final piece of the puzzle here. Right. And it depends on what kind of a landfill it is. Generally it's going to be covered with six inches at least of compacted soil. And that's to keep, you know, rats and stuff out, the ones that aren't killed and getting back into the trash. But, um, like we said earlier, is key. So six inches, if they could find a way to make that one inch, that would be much better.

And so they've been experimenting with that, too, like paper or cement emulsions instead that you just spray on top instead of that six inches of soil. Yeah, it's like a quarter inch. Yeah.

And then all of a sudden you have five and three quarters extra inches. Four extra inches for more trash.

That's a lot man. Yeah, sure it is. It adds up you can about this. Yeah. Which we are right now. Absolutely. Uh and then eventually though when you will have a permanent cap, some sort of polyethylene cap right on top.

And so even after it's closed, that points Hills landfill outside of L.A., that was the focus of the Atlantic article or fresh kills out in New York.

When that when it's closed, you don't just walk away from a landfill. You plant stuff on it. Well, yes, you have to plant stuff on it because when you cover it over with dirt, you want to plant something with a low root system that won't go into the landfill, but we'll still hold the dirt in place to prevent it from eroding. So, like. Ass kudzu is great, not trees, no, don't want to plant trees, but you also have to stick around and leave some people behind to monitor the ground water for temperature changes.

Yeah, uh, change in temperature suggests that it's, um. There's leachate that's intruded. Yeah. Sometimes you can see the leachate seeping up through the ground. Yeah. It's gross. And that means that there's you need to address an issue.

It looks like the Beverly Hillbillies thing where DJed shot and missed that rabbit. Yeah. And instead oil comes up. That's what leachate kind of looks like. Yeah. Bubbles up.

But you have to keep an eye on this place for decades and decades and decades. Yeah. I think they sit in here like 30 years. It needs to be maintained and monitored. Yeah. At least. At least I think that's definitely in the zone.

So we'll talk a little more about operating a landfill and how to. Well I guess alternatives to landfills is a way to put it. Yeah, right after this.

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Hey, guess. So, Chuck, let's say you are Tommy Landfill and you want to fulfill your birthright and open your own landfill, Tommy landfill, and you got everything all set, you get the municipal bonds, old man. What was it? MacTavish McBain?

Something like that. McLaine McClain. Yeah, he he's been shouted down. You get the place open. How are you going to operate it day to day?

Well, what you're going to do is it's going to be open to a couple of different things. It's going to be open to the municipality that collects the trash, of course. Sure. It's going to be open to demolition companies, construction companies. And many of them, including the one I go to, is open to you and me. OK, so let's say I'm doing work on my house, which I've done. Yes. And I end up with a bunch of junk in the back of my pickup truck through what's called construction waste.

Yes. Construction debris, which I try and raise as much as I can. But you still end up with construction debris.

Did we do like a green renovation episode once? Yeah, I think so. OK.

And I will drive my truck out there to the landfill in DeKalb County. Right. And I will drive up onto a platform. Is the very first thing you do with a it's a way station.

Does it make you go up on two wheels and then you drive through the landfill just to real.

That's just showing off the Stuttgart scene. Um, and he drive up on the way station and they way your truck or your car or whatever with full of trash, you go dump it. There's going to be various stations. There's like a recycling station. There's here's where yard waste goes. Kissing booth, the kissing booth. There's a dunk tank. Right. You know, the traditional landfill.

I told Catholic School Carnival, um, the one in DeKalb County, there is actually free mulch and compost if you want to pick up stuff, which is kind of neat, but then eventually you'll will be directed to here is your dump and I pull up my truck and dump it in a big dumpster and that dumpsters then taken to the cell. I imagine I don't follow the route, but that's what's supposed to happen.

Does it make that that Bugs Bunny conveyor belts on it? Yeah, someone wrote in and had a bunch. That song was powerhouse.

Yeah. Powerhouse. If you look up, is that the one that you were thinking?

Yes, totally. OK, I can't remember the composer's name, but it was a 20th century composer who I think was old man. It was something that McClaine something quintet.

Yeah. I can't remember the guy's name. But anyway, look up. There's something something quintet powerhouse. Yeah. And then I think it starts about almost a minute and a half and you'll be like, yep, that's it. Yeah. And it ain't you know I'm talking.

Oh yeah, absolutely. When I heard it it was unmistakably Looney Tunes. Yeah. So I dump all my garbage and then I drive back out onto another platform and then they reweigh my truck, they do the math and when they weigh it they charge you a tipping fee. Yeah. Which is usually a per ton amount. Right. Yeah. And so, you know, it's not that much money. Like I have a truck full of junk, go dump it and then it's like ten or twelve bucks.

Got you. And of course it depends on how heavy the junk is. Right. But in my case it was always, you know, uh, like wood and stuff like that that I couldn't reuse. Yeah. Nails.

So that's that's basically everything we just described as a dry tomb. Landfill, right? That's right. But as far as companies like waste management and local municipalities have figured out, like, hey, there's actually money in this rotting garbage, they've been looking into ways to get more methane out of it. And what they figured out is that you don't want a dry tomb. You want a kind of moist, a little wet to 35 percent moisture.

Yeah, I was really surprised that this isn't how it's done by now because you can they said, you know what could take decades in a dried tube to break down. It can take just a few years. Yeah.

If you just had a little water, just a little bit of water, like there's already about ten to fifteen percent moisture in a dry tomb. No matter how much you try to keep it out, there's going to be about ten to 15 percent. They figured out that if you add another 20, 25 percent water, you're going to greatly increase anaerobic decomposition.

Yeah, and it can be leachate. It it's not like they have springwater. Exactly.

It can be that stormwater you're collecting. It can be leachate. It can be gas condensation from the gas that's coming off. And basically what you're doing is you're speeding up that anaerobic decomposition that's already going on. So these things are breaking down, that organic stuff, the banana peels and the grass clippings and all that stuff that's already in there. They're not breaking down the Styrofoam, at least not very quickly. So that's still going to be left behind.

But that's kind of that Burián walkaways mentality as well. Still right. But at least the the density of your landfill is going to increase. Tremendously as all that other stuff decomposes and you're going to have the added benefit of a lot more methane production.

Yeah, and a lot more methane and a lot shorter time span. So what they've had to do, because this is basically accelerated production, is create collection systems that can handle they can't just throw the old methane collection system in there that's used to collecting slowly but surely. Right. Right. They have to do something, collect a lot and a little bit of time. Yeah.

Because they used to collect the methane in that they would harvest it and then burn it, which is sounds horrible because you're just releasing all that stuff into the atmosphere.

Yeah, but it's better than just venting it. You're just venting methane. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than even like CO2 like by far.

So you don't want to just vent that stuff. So you'd burn it off. But even better, if you're going to burn it, at least use it to power stuff.

Yeah. So by adding just a little bit of water, you can create this, you can accelerate the anaerobic decomposition and this is the anaerobic decomposition is what makes the landfill like a moving, living, evolving pile. Once that's done in 10 years, you've got all the methane you're going to get from it, the things that are going to settle anymore and you can walk away without monitoring it for the next 50 years.

Yeah. So the bioreactor model seems like far and away the wave of the future, right? For sure. Um, I guess it's just a matter of like building more of them.

Yes. Uh, so we got a couple of more things here before we close for sure. This is very interesting. One neat thing that I didn't know. I think I knew about Giant Stadium, but I didn't know that. I just heard Jimmy Hoffa was buried there.

Well, he might have just been in the in the landfill, right? Yeah. Apparently some sports arenas like Miski and Chicago Mile High Stadium in Denver, Giant Stadium in New Jersey, built on landfills because they're cheap. Yeah. Cheap land.

Yes. And some speculation that it might give athletes cancer. Yeah, apparently there are a lot of Giants players or several, um, that came down with cancer, that one of the linebackers, Harry Carson, told The New York Times, um, it makes you wonder what's going on around here, referencing the fact that it was built on an old landfill. Yeah, and apparently there was a game at Comiskey Park in Chicago where there was a, uh, I think a shortstop.

Yeah. Like ran into a piece of metal sticking up from the diamond. Mm hmm. And like, started like kicking away. I didn't realize it was getting bigger and bigger and the ground crew came out and investigated it. It was Jimmy Hoffa, right? It was a copper kettle. Yeah.

From the landfill that moved its way up in that crazy. Yeah. So they had to dig it up and then refill it. Unbelievable.

I'm sure that was a lovely break for the fans. Yes. Because like the sit around so fast moving that they needed they needed a breather.

Uh, I read an article on Slate called Go West Garbage Can. Exclamation point, and the main gist of it is, when are we going to run out of space? It's a great question. You can't keep bearing trash, right? Um, apparently you can, because what they're doing now is they're there are fewer landfills than ever before. They're making these huge landfills. Yeah. So in gangs. Yeah. In 19 in 1986, there were close to 7700 dumps in the U.S. By 2009, there were just under two thousand seventy five percent decline and less than 25 years.

And so essentially what they're creating are these super landfills, um, which is kind of cool if you were landfills. Right. But what's the problem?

Um, you know, stinkier landfills. What the problem is, is you're now trucking garbage sometimes 500 miles away. Yeah. To dump in the landfill because your state may not even have one. So then they are looking at, you know, how much CO2 is used to do that. Like, is it really greener to have fewer landfills and truck your garbage on a train or in a truck every day? Right. And they basically say they don't really know which to go back to burning.

Yeah. Which is more environmentally friendly. Um, and different states. Apparently there's a lot of money in it. Different states have way more room than others. And then some states don't even want that stuff. Of course, in the northeast like Massachusetts, they're like we don't want landfills right in our state, right. Rhode Island, same way. So they send it to Springfield, they send it to Kentucky. Well, no, remember the commissioner episode.

Yeah, except that other states waste. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Right.

Um, let me see. Arkansas has enough capacity for more than 600 years of trash without any more facilities being opened. There you go. We'll just send it all Arkansas. Whereas Rhode Island only has 12 years remaining. New York State only has 25 years of capacity left. Send it to Arkansas. So that's what they're doing. Kentucky is 29 dollars per ton. I'm making about six billion dollars a year. Ohio, twenty one billion dollars a year of available landfill space because Ohio knows how to negotiate.

That's right. The Buckeye State. That's right. Don't tread on me. Right. That's New Hampshire. Is that because the Tea Party? No, I think it's either New Hampshire, Vermont, one of those.

You know, New Hampshire is live free or die. Oh, right. Make their inmates make those license plates. Yeah. Don't tread on me. Wasn't a state motto is that was just a flag with the cutups nake, right.

That the Tea Party adopted. Remember. Did they adopt that. Yeah. So yeah, if you see a bumper sticker with one of those flags on it, they're not just like a history buff or anything.

Yeah. Or if it says who is John Galt. Yeah. They'll tell you something about the driver of that vehicle. Was that a Tom Cruise movie? No. John Galt was the main character in Atlas Shrugged. Oh, yeah. Ayn Rand. I'm thinking of Jack Reacher. Yeah. If you want to know more about landfill's, you can type that word into the search bar, HowStuffWorks dot com. And I said search. It's time for listener mail.

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Hey guys, two weeks ago, my amazing and wonderful father in law, Walter, passed away. We had to drop everything, my husband and son and I and fly from Florida to Germany where he lived. He's been in my world for 24 of my 50 years. And I was so sad. I felt like I was going to throw up all the time. When we arrived in Germany, walking through the front door of the family home without him, there was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.

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