Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Landfills Work

Episode Date: July 11, 2020

Well-planned landfills have only recently come into widespread use. Recently, waste managers have found that they work a little too well and now the landfill is being reinvented. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, everybody. Chuck here with your Saturday Selects Pick, How Landfills Work. June 23rd, 2015. This is a good one, everyone.

This is part of our, I guess, a 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 re-listen,

even, how landfills work right now. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry 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. See, but... Yeah, you went, it's awesome.

I was like, stop, it's gold. So now I'm going to say it, it's awesome. It is. And landfills, the concept of a landfill, even though it ain't perfect, it's 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, 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 Pact. And then between the 1930s and the 1970s, they had what they called dumps, which is a big hole in the ground, covered in rats and birds, and you would just dump garbage.

Yeah. To leech into everything around it. Yes, which is messed up. 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. Okay, 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 wasn't 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 dumped their trash in a pit, which people have been doing for millennia, at least. They were burning their trash also. 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, you wore your t-shirt. So you reused it, right? No.

But no, you would have maybe like, do you remember when Sam, the butcher, brought Alice the meat, BC boys reference? I was just about to say. Fred Flintstone driving around with two feet. I think it's bald feet, yeah. Which is, I guess, a really weird way of putting it as barefoot.

Well, it didn't rhyme. Bald feet. Anyway, he would bring it to her wrapped in like white butcher's paper. Yeah. He would throw it away and it would really not take up much space of the dump. It would decompose.

It wasn't like styrofoam, which lasts for 50,000 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 gonna be plastic and styrofoam. Right. So between 1960 and 1990, our packaging waste increased by 80%. 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 had 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.

Now we need to adjust it, massage it a little bit. Refine it. And we're coming up with a new generation of landfills. That's right. So if you're talking about a landfill, the goal of a landfill is not to compost trash, and a lot of people probably don't 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. And 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. They isolate the trash from the environment. They don't just dump it on the dirt and let things leach in. And this thus begins the landfill podcast. Because there are a lot of components to that. But that's the long and short of it.

It's true. And what that's called in 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. It was created in reaction to trash just being allowed to seep into the groundwater.

Sure. Methane to just leak out into 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 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 were all idiots with trash like up until the 60s, 70s, 80s. And even still, we have a big problem with trash but nothing like it was before as far as taking care of it.

We're starting to really get a handle on it. Americans produce 4.6 pounds of trash per day per person. Yeah, and you know what's crazy is you'd think, well, America's probably like as bad as it gets. No, the UK is. America's like in the middle. Oh, really? Roughly for trash generation and recovery.

Oh, I thought we were the worst. No, the UK's the worst. Oh, what are they? How much trash? They 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 some sort of national initiative. Because it says here that it went up from 31% recovery rate, which is like recycling and that kind of stuff, basically diverting it from the landfill to 50%. So it's actually better than America as far as the resource recovery rate goes. Canada's the worst, I'm sorry, Canada's 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 at almost 80%.

80% of their trash gets diverted from the landfill. That's amazing, actually. That's efficient. What's the American number on that diversion? It hovers about a third. 30%. For at least a couple of decades now, maybe three decades, you could say Americans diverted about,

they diverted about a third of their trash from the landfill. You'd like to see that number get better in three decades. For sure. And it always hovers around 33, 34%. And it should be a lot better than that. You know what that sounds like to me? Whoever's 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 to landfill in your municipality, you're going to have to start with a proposal by saying. You can't just go start one. Yeah, you got to look around and say,

we need a landfill, everybody. So let's do an environmental impact study. And 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 how stuff works started?

230 acres of land, about 70 acres of which is the actual landfill. So you're going to need a lot of land. You're going to have to do an environmental impact study to determine a lot of things. How much land do you have 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 perfectly right exactly? And then 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 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 high line, 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? I think they're avoiding that. I don't remember what it's called.

I read a really interesting New York magazine article about it. It's really well-written and clever, where it's basically like, that's awesome. That's awesome. This guy's got this great vision. But it's a landfill. Right.

Sure, at the end of the day, it's still buried garbage. Exactly. 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 leakage and seepage. That was the big thing.

When the EPA came along and started saying, you can't just bury your trash anywhere. There's groundwater. Yeah, dummies. And as trash decomposes, it's not just 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, it's called leachate is the liquid. Or garbage juice is another word. Yeah, that's a better way to say it because that defines it all in one go. Right, and the whole point of the dry tomb landfill

was to do everything you could to prevent this garbage that you're burying from reaching the water table. Right, so you study 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 the bedrock needs to allow for that as well. That's right. You're really looking for a specific area. 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. Fresh kills. Fresh kills is an old marsh land that they just filled the marshes and lakes in with garbage. Did they name it that? Is that the area? Kills is a Dutch word for stream. OK, because I was about to say, that's the worst name

for anything. Totally. Unless it was a butcher. But it really means fresh stream. Fresh kills, charcuterie. Fresh stream, garbage dump. Yeah, that makes sense now. What does kill mean?

Stream, old Dutch word. Because you've heard of like fish. Bowery means farm. Oh, really? Yes, that would be fish stream. That makes a lot more sense now. Yeah, fresh kills. I wondered about that for years.

Now you know. Star. All right, so local wildlife, they're going to really study that to see what kind of, it can't be in the area of a migratory route for birds. Or like a nesting area, aka 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 archeological 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 a landfill. Yeah. Wow. So archeological site, wetland, and very close to the groundwater. It's seeping right into it. Unbelievable.

And I believe, though, is a large bunny rabbit population that they just dumped it right on top of. So once you figured out that this is not fresh kills, this is 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. Seems cheap. That seems a little cheap.

But I don't think that one's brand new. Yeah, that's probably from the 90s. Yeah. And then you probably have a public vote, because they'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. Yep, 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. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back

to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio

App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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 McLean. Right, the tree hugger.

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 does that sound? It sounds like a bulleted list. You've got the bottom liner system. You've got the cells. You've got the storm water drainage.

And you've got the leachate collection system. AKA 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 covering system. You don't want a kaboom.

So start with the bottom liner, man. 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 tomb landfill, the main part is the bottom liner. So they use a very thick, sometimes 100 millimeter thick, very sturdy 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% certain, they'll often use some sort of fabric mat that they'll lay down first and then put the liner on. And then put another mat on top of that to help prevent it from being punctured by rocks or garbage

below or garbage above. Everything's starting to puncture this mat. Yeah, it's a moisture barrier. Right, but that liner is the main component, the initial component of the landfill. That's right. Next, we have our cell. And a cell is basically the days garbage.

Yeah, it's the days garbage that you dump in there. You compact it. Airspace is key. That's where the more airspace you have, the more trash you can bury. So they want to keep it as compact as possible. And they do this by rolling over it with bulldozers and flatteners and rollers and graters.

And they smush it down. And a cell is a hole in the ground. Apparently in the North Carolina landfill that house stuff works went to back in the day. A cell is 50 feet long, 50 feet wide, 14 feet deep. 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 to you about Puente 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% 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% of rats. Oh, that's where the other half goes. And that makes that type of landfill what's called a sanitary landfill. Which means 100% 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 by covering over this stuff every day, you protect it from being blown away by the wind, by being carried away by the rain. You protect it from being dug up by coyotes.

Yeah, or trash scavengers. Right. And so that's what makes it a sanitary, dry tomb 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 brown stained, like looks like the map of Asia from the 1600s. Right, because you raised that one lady from Hellraiser from the dead. Yeah. So again, take out all that stuff and make it all the yardway. So make it as compactable as possible.

And then that is compacted at a rate, depending on where you are, about 1,500 pounds per cubic yard. Yes. So boom. Flat dirt is over it now. And now we need to worry about drainage. Yeah, basically, once you've 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, here's Tuesday's whole 365 days a year. Yeah. Well, the Pointes 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, they would fill up their day's cell by 1 PM and closed. Now they stay up until 5, and it's not even necessarily full. So they noticed a huge downturn in building materials and consumer waste a year or two before the actual crisis happened, before they collapse. Well, you know what they old saying.

If you want to know the state of the country's economics, go to a landfill. That's a good thing. That's what I think Jimmy Carter first 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. And the other way that they want to keep liquids out, and again, what they're doing is trying to prevent garbage juice from forming, is to have stormwater runoff drainage going on. So all of the, first of all, you never want a flat landfill ever.

Oh, really? Are they out in a little slant? You want to mound it at least slightly. You never want a plateau. That makes sense, yeah. And so you want the water to runoff. And then when it runs off, you want to collect it in the pipes. You want to basically create an eaves system,

like you have on the roof of your house, and then shoot it all down to some concrete gulches. Yeah, or if you have French drains at your house. Arroyoves. Cheperelles. Gutters. Yeah, habidasher. 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. And then they will test the water for 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 just the stormwater shows some leachate, they'll send it to a leachate collection pond. If it turns out to just be normal stormwater, then they'll let it flow out of there. That's right. And into like whatever river or whatever.

Yeah, and sometimes it's gravity. Sometimes they use a pump. Right. Depends on the way of the land. But if it's leachate, they have a separate collection system for leachate. Yes. Which is basically perforated pipes

that are running through the cells. Yeah, and the leachate's 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 juice. Exactly. So they collect that garbage juice 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 pond, 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 on-site water remediation

system, like a wastewater plant. Yeah. Or else they send it to like the local city or county wastewater plant for treatment. Yeah, boy, we got to do one on wastewater treatment at some point. You got it. Talk about fascinating.

Yes. You poop in the water, and eventually you drink that water. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable what we've learned to do, you know? Yep. So the other big thing that we mentioned earlier was methane. And that is a byproduct. That's a gaseous byproduct of anaerobic decomposition.

And about 50% of your gases coming out of this thing are going to be methane, about 50% carbon dioxide. And they say a little bit of nitrogen, a little bit of oxygen. I guess not enough to be a percentage point. Almost negligible. So methane 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, too, especially if you go to the trouble of building an on-site power plant 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 create electricity, right? You can power a turbine and boom, there's electricity being produced. And actually, at Fresh Kills, New York City gets $10 million a year from a company that has exclusive rights to extract the methane from this place.

That's pretty great. $10 million, that's not. Nothing to see is that. And Lincoln, Nebraska did a pilot study in 2010 and found that they could make about $300,000 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 worst days LFG, actually, when I have landfill gas. It's the worst. My worst days. So then you've got your covering or your cap is the final piece of the puzzle here. 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 rats and stuff out, the ones that aren't killed, and getting back into the trash. But like we said earlier, airspace is key. So that's 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 all of a sudden you have five and three quarters extra inches for trash. Extra inches for more trash. That's a lot, man.

Yeah, sure it is. It adds up. When you're speaking about this, which we are right now. Absolutely. And then eventually, though, it will have a permanent cap, some sort of polyethylene cap on top. And so even after it's closed, that Pointes Hills landfill outside of LA, that was the focus of the Atlantic article,

or Fresh Kills out in New York. When it's closed, you don't just walk away from a landfill. No, 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 will still hold the dirt in place

to prevent it from eroding. So like grass, kudzu. Kudzu's great. Not trees. Don't want to plant trees. But you also have to stick around and leave some people behind to monitor the groundwater for temperature changes.

The change in temperature suggests that 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 you need to address an issue. It looks like the Beverly Hillbillies thing, where Jed shot and missed that rabbit.

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 low end. So we'll talk a little more about operating a landfill and how to, well, I guess alternative to the landfill is the way to put it. Yeah, right after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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 got the municipal bonds. Old man, what was it? McTavish, McBain. Something like that. McLean. McLean. He's been shouted down. You got 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. 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. So let's say I'm doing work on my house, which I've done. And I end up with a bunch of junk. And the back of my pickup truck. I think it's called construction waste. Yes, construction debris, which I try and reuse as much as I can, but you still end up with construction debris. Didn't we do like a green renovation episode once?

Yeah, I think so. And I will drive my truck out there to the landfill in DeKalb County. And I will drive up onto a platform. It's the very first thing you do with a little, it's a waste station. Does it make you go up on two wheels and then you drive through the landfill just on two wheels?

It's just showing off. It's a stuck car scene. And you drive up on the way station and they weigh 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 a, here's where yard waste goes. Kissing booth. There's a kissing booth. There's a dunk tank. You know, the traditional landfill items. Catholic school carnival. The one in DeKalb County, there's actually free mulch and compost if you want to pick up stuff,

which is kind of neat. But then eventually you will be directed to, here is your dump. And I pull up my truck, I dump it in a big dumpster. And that dumpster is 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 Bugs Bunny conveyor belt song? Yeah, someone wrote in and had a bunch of people there.

A bunch of people there. Powerhouse. Yes. If you look up Powerhouse. Was that the one that you were thinking? Yes, totally. Okay. I can't remember the composer's name,

but it was a 20th century composer who- I think it was old man McClain. Something Quintet. Yeah. I can't remember the guy's name. But anyway, look up the Something Something Quintet Powerhouse. Yeah.

And then I think it starts about almost a minute and a half in, you'll be like, yep, that's it. Yep, that's totally it. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, I'm talking about that. Oh yeah, absolutely. It was unmistakably Looney Tunes. Yep.

So I dump all my garbage and then I drive back out onto another platform and then they re-way 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'll have a truck full of junk, go dump it, and then it's like 10 or 12 bucks. Gotcha. And of course it depends on how heavy the junk is. Right. In my case, it was always, you know, light wood and stuff like that that I couldn't reuse. Yeah.

Nails. So that's basically everything we just described as a dry tomb landfill, right? That's right. But 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 wanna kind of moist a little wet tomb, 35% moisture. Yeah, I was really surprised that this isn't how it's done by now. Cause you can, they said, you know, what could take decades in a dry tomb to break down. Right.

It could take just a few years. Yeah. If you just add a little water. Just a little bit of water. Like there's already about 10 to 15% moisture in a dry tomb, no matter how much you try to keep it out. There's gonna be about 10 to 15%. They figured out that if you add another 20, 25% water,

you're going to greatly increase anaerobic decomposition. Yeah, and it can be leachated. It's not like the spring water or anything like that. Exactly. It can be that storm water 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 stuff's still gonna be left behind. But that's kind of that bury and walk away mentality

as well still. Right. But at least the density of your landfills going to increase tremendously as all that other stuff decomposes. And you're gonna 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. They have to do something collect a lot in a little bit of time.

Yeah, because they used to collect the methane in that they would harvest it and then burn it, which sounds horrible because you're just releasing all that stuff into the atmosphere. But it's better than just venting it, just venting methane. Methane's a much more potent greenhouse gas than even like CO2, like by far.

So you don't wanna just vent that stuff. So you'd burn it off, but even better is if you're gonna burn it, at least use it to power stuff. So by adding just a little bit of water, you can accelerate the anaerobic decomposition. And since 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 gonna get from it, the thing's not gonna 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. I guess it's just a matter of like building more of them.

Yes. So we got a couple of more things here before we close. For sure. This is very interesting stuff. One Nido 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've just been in the landfill. Right, yeah. Apparently some sports arenas like Camiskey in Chicago, Milehouse Stadium in Denver, Giant Stadium in New Jersey, built on landfills because they're cheap land. Yes. And some speculation that it might give athletes cancer.

Yeah, apparently there are a lot of Giants players or several that came down with cancer that one of the linebackers, Harry Carson, told the New York Times, 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 Camiskey Park

in Chicago. This is crazy. Where there was a, I think a shortstop. Yeah. They ran into a piece of metal sticking up from the diamond and like started like kicking away. I didn't realize it was getting bigger and bigger and the grounds crew came out and investigated. And it was Jimmy Hoffa.

It was a copper kettle from the landfill that had moved its way up. Isn't 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. Like sit around for an hour.

They were all so fast moving that they needed a breather. 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? Apparently you can because what they're doing now is

there are fewer landfills than ever before. They're making these huge landfills. Yeah. Super gangs. Yeah. In 1986, there were close to 7,700 dumps in the US. By 2009, there were just under 2,000, a 75% decline in less than 25 years. And so essentially what they're creating are these super landfills,

which is kind of cool. Fewer landfills, right? But what's the problem? Do you know? Stinkier landfills, what? The problem is, is you're now trucking garbage, sometimes 500 miles away to dump in the landfill. Cause your state may not even have one.

So then they're looking at, 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? And they basically say they don't really know. Which is... Just go back to burning everything. Yeah, which is more environmentally friendly.

In 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 in our state. Right. In the Rhode Island, same way. So they send it to Springfield.

They send it to Kentucky. Well, no, remember the trash commissioner episode? Yeah. He accepted other states to waste. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. Right. 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 to 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 per ton,

making about $6 billion a year. Ohio, $21 billion a year of available landfill space. It's because Ohio knows how to negotiate. That's right. The Buckeye state. That's right. Don't tread on me.

Wait, that's New Hampshire. Or is that Vermont? I thought that was the Tea Party. No, I think it's either New Hampshire or Vermont. One of those. No, New Hampshire's is live for your die. Oh, right. And they make their inmates make those license plates.

Yeah, don't tread on me wasn't a state motto on it. I think that was just the- It was a flag with the cut-up snake. Right. That the Tea Party adopted, remember? Did they adopt that? Yeah. Oh, 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. That'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.

Einran. I'm thinking of Jack Reacher. If you want to know more about landfills, you can type that word into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And I said search bar, so it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this very sad email.

Okay. But uplifting at the same time. Okay. 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. It was and is devastating.

My husband and youngest son, and I sat in a dark days for days, mixing with crying and feeling lost. I always listened to podcasts while I run though, which I do every day. And after 10 days of being there in Germany, I finally decided to queue up one of your podcasts while running.

It was blood types. I laughed for the first time in two weeks out loud, guys. It was so nice to laugh again, and it really opened the door for me. I realized that we as a family are going through is so tough, but I also started to realize that if I could laugh, then I could heal. Yesterday, my husband and I, still in Germany,

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More long walks are in his future as long as I have you guys on my phone. And Oliver also asked me along the walk, wait a minute, mom, these guys get paid to do this? And when I said yes, I saw a sparkle in his eye. Nice, I love this email. Boom, that is from Jennifer,

and Jennifer, that is awesome. I, those mean the most to us. Yeah, I mean, that is a great top-notch email. Great email, and there was more to it, even. I had to leave out some of it for Link. Jennifer, right? Jennifer and Oliver, her son, and she doesn't even- Anonymous husband.

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