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GARBAGE: municipal actions:
Landfills:
Would you mind living near a landfill dump?
Of course not! No one likes to live near them because there are risks involved.
Landfills are holes the municipality makes into the ground. The hole is covered with a protection to avoid
leachage as much as possible. Then garbage is piled in strips about 8 feet high and covered with a layer of
earth. When the site is full, a thick top layer of soil is added on top.
As the waste decomposes it produces methane and this gas has to be gotten rid of before it can
build up and cause an explosion or endanger people’s lives. Furthermore, leachates (liquid leaks from
landfills) pollute the underground and rivers and lakes.
Some landfills have means to control leachates; the methane coming from it is collected and used as fuel.
Unfortunately, these sophisticated landfills are not the majority of landfills because the installation costs a
lot of money.
Landfills are dangerous; they can catch fire and can attract rats, flies that carry diseases. Nonetheless,
landfills are the cheapest means for countries to store their garbage.
Actually 67% of our wastes are dumped into landfills, 16% are incinerated, and only 17% are recycled.
We run out of space, we do not know where to throw our garbage anymore, so boats of garbage float over
the oceans from one continent to another to find a country that, at last, would accept to take the load! Most
of the time, these country recipients accept our garbage because they are in need of the money.
All that could be avoided if each household would take the time and effort to limit waste, and recycle!
In the US, a household trash contains per year:
13,000 pieces of paper, 1,800 plastic items, 500 aluminum cans and 500 glass bottles.
Every day, each person in the US throws three and a half pounds of trash, which means that in all the US,
people fill 100.000 garbage trucks!
Every year, we waste in garbage:
43.000 tons of food, 20.000 cars, 4 million ballpoint pens, 20.000 TV sets, 4.000 trucks and buses,
548.000 tires, 48 million disposable diapers.
How could this be avoided?
Did engineers find some solutions?
Describe:
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These numbers are impressive, especially if you know how long it takes for many objects to decompose:
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1
5
20
40
100
350
400
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
years
Decomposition Time of Materials
that can be Recycled
Saving energy can limit nuclear wastes:
1)
Look at the graph below.
What are the machines that use most of the energy in an average household?
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Which machines, in your opinion, are the most useful?
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Which machine can be used less in order to save energy?
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Which ones can be used less in order to save energy, and how would you replace these energies?
_____________________________________________________________________________________
How much KHW per month can this American family save its members decide to really reduce the energy
consumption this month?
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