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Waste Landfills facts

While investigating facts about Waste Landfills Near Me and Waste Landfills Company Limited, I found out little known, but curios details like:

Switzerland has no landfills. 50% of the municipal waste is recycled, 50% is incinerated to produce electricity

how much waste ends up in landfills?

Sierra Nevada Brewing won the 2010 U.S. EPA “Green Business of the Year” award. The brewery is run by solar energy, processes used cooking oil for biodiesel in delivery trucks, is the largest buyer of organic hops in the U.S., and over 99% of the plant’s solid waste is diverted from landfill.

What happens to food waste in landfills?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what happens to waste in landfills. Here are 40 of the best facts about Waste Landfills Company Limited Ghana and Waste Landfills And An Environmental Ethic Of Vulnerability I managed to collect.

what is one of the negative consequences of dumping waste in landfills?

  1. Plastic was invented in 1907. Since 1950, humanity has produced 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste; 9% of it is recycled, 12% is incinerated, 79% ends up in a landfill or in the environment. Majority of the world's plastic waste from the developed world is exported to Southeast Asia.

  2. Plastic waste can be converted into fuel - gasoline, diesel or kerosine - needing only 1 kw of electricity make 1 liter of oil. This means all the plastic choking sea life, polluting the ocean, and filling landfills could have been used to power cars and machinery.

  3. In the early '90s numerous U.S. companies, such as Alcoa and Cenex, sold farmers toxic byproducts marketed as 'recycled fertilizer' to avoid paying to have the waste sent to landfills. It polluted fields with hazardous heavy metals and it was all done legally

  4. It is estimated that of all the trash sent to landfills roughly 30% is paper (recyclable), 18% is food waste (recyclable), and 16% is plastic. Most of this is recyclable and should not be ending up in landfills.

  5. In the late 80s, hypodermic needles and other medical waste from the Fresh Kills Landfill washed up onto the shores of New York and New Jersey. Known as Syringe Tides, incidents like these closed more than 70 miles of beaches and are cited in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire."

  6. Glass Beach in California, which was used as a sort of landfill in the early 20th century, and over time waste glass (bottles, etc.) ended up completely covering the beach in gem-like polished glass "pebbles".

  7. The city of Eskilstuna in Sweden recycles half of all its waste, with no domestic waste going to landfill.

  8. Reducing the amount of waste sent to landfills is important as they are running out of space around the world.

  9. At a US nuclear test site in middle of the Pacific, radioactive waste was buried and covered with a concrete dome. Cleanup was so poor that the dome fails American standards for landfills for household trash and radiation inside the dome is dwarfed by the radiation in the sediments outside it.

  10. Although the number of landfills in the United States has decreased, the remaining ones are much larger. The amount of waste being sent to landfills in the United States has tripled since the 1960s.

waste landfills facts
What are the advantages of using landfills to handle local waste?

Why no yard waste in landfills?

You can easily fact check why are landfills not the best means of waste disposal by examining the linked well-known sources.

In 1942, a company in St Louis, MO began processing radioactive material for use in the Manhattan Project. The waste was illegally dumped in a landfill in a residential area in St. Louis, and a SubSurface Smoldering Event (the landfill is on fire) is encroaching on the nuclear waste.

John Sylvan, the inventor of K-Cup, regretted his invention after seeing how K-Cups are adding so much waste to landfills. - source

Cigarettes can be recycled through a free program by Terracycle, plus the packaging of Energy Bars, Chips, Toothpaste, Pens, Music Strings that usually end up in the landfill. Simply collect the waste, get a FREE shipping label from Terracycle and mail it in to be turned into something new. - source

You are supposed to scrape off the 'solids' from a used baby nappy (diaper) into the toilet before you throw the nappy away, to avoid contaminating the garbage system and landfill with human waste.

In a country where only 4% of waste goes to landfills, Sweden has been importing trash from Norway so they can keep making heat and electricity. - source

What happens when waste is dumped in nullas?

Some landfills are managed in such a way to confine the waste to the smallest possible area, to compact waste which will reduce volume, and to cover the waste with soil to help promote decomposition.

How to reduce waste in landfills?

Pringles cans are not conventionally recyclable, contributing to landfill waste. However, Terracycle and Pringles in the UK have partnered to set up drop off points for collection and recycling.

Hawaii converts 600,000 of 1,600,000 tons of their waste from landfills a year into usable power, making up 10% of Oahu's electricity.

There is a subterranean fire in a landfill in St. Louis that is heading toward an area containing radioactive waste

A history professor helped a landfill be granted historic landmark status due to its pioneering waste disposal method. But that landfill was also a EPA Superfund site. Doubts about whether such a site should remain a historic landmark faded after 9/11 occurred.

90.5 percent of the 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste produced since mass production began about 60 years ago is now lying around our planet in landfills and oceans or has been incinerated

When organic waste is dumped into a pond?

Coal ash -- such as that in a North Carolina landfill breached by Hurricane Florence last week -- puts more radioactivity into the environment than does nuclear waste

Other cases in the United States of contamination of the environment include Valley of the Drums (a 23 acre toxic waste dump in Kentucky), Munisport Landfill (170 acre toxic chemical landfill), and the Agriculture Street Landfill in New Orleans.

A company called Hooker Chemical sold one of their landfills to a Schoolboard in Niagra Falls for $1. The land was later developed and toxic waste poisoned all the inhabitants.

79% of the world's plastic waste ends up in the environment or a landfill

A fire has been burning since 2010 under a landfill near St Louis, Missouri. It's the size of 15 football fields, contains toxic material, cannot be extinguished, and is approaching a radioactive waste pit.

How are landfills useful in waste management?

There is a large amount of radioactive waste left over from the Manhattan Project in a landfill outside of St. Louis. The landfill is currently on fire

A landfill in st louis called west lake dump has tons of radioactive waste from 1973 and another landfill has an underground fire that is close to it

The Layfayette, Indiana Subaru manufacturing plant has not generated landfill waste since May 4, 2004

Kamikatsu – Japan’s Aspiring Zero-Waste Town, with a population of 1700, were residents/businesses recycle about 80 percent of the city's trash and only 20 percent goes to landfills

An exothermic (underground) fire has been burning at the Bridgeton Landfill site near St. Louis for SEVEN years, close to a radioactive waste site.

Just like your food scrap waste becomes fertilizer in the form of compost, your fallen leaves will work hard to feed your yard and gardens—so don't bag up those valuable nutrients and abandon them at the curb for the landfill.

A there's a youth orchestra called "Landfill Harmonic" with instruments made from garbage and other waste materials.

8000 plastic bottles go to landfill every second and it takes each bottle 450 years to break down, but also about ways to reduce this waste

The Royal Statistical Society winning International Statistic of 2018 is 90.5%. That's the proportion of plastic waste that has never been recycled. Estimated at 6,300 million metric tons, it’s thought 12% of all plastic waste was incinerated, and 79% put in landfills or the environment.

China's "National Sword" policy. Before 2017, China imported almost 45% of the world's plastic to recycle, but has since banned most imported plastic waste. Lacking the domestic recycling infrastructure to handle the extra waste, other countries end up landfilling or incinerating a lot of it.

Disneyland uses bins connected to a system of tubes for waste removal. The trash travels through pneumatic tubes to a central location where it is processed and compressed for transfer to a landfill or recycling plant.

Only 1% of household waste finds it's way to landfills in Scandinavian countries.

This is our collection of basic interesting facts about Waste Landfills. The fact lists are intended for research in school, for college students or just to feed your brain with new realities. Possible use cases are in quizzes, differences, riddles, homework facts legend, cover facts, and many more. Whatever your case, learn the truth of the matter why is Waste Landfills so important!

Editor Veselin Nedev Editor