oder complaints started the day these facilities started operations, make no mistake! Chemistry was the high-tech of eighty years ago.. no way that these mysterious chemical reactions are "new" to this skeptics eye
there are large new sources of money coming into play and yes, play is the operative word
The Los Angeles area waste management practices have been outrageous since the earliest days ! Military plus Movie biz -- multiple scandals and huge, unkept areas.. many links available on request. Lastly, isn't this phys.org, the ad-ridden re-hash site of press releases? seasons greetings
The Chiquita Valley site has open working portions and closed areas, most recently re-licensed in 2004 for 15 years. There have been oder complaints for years, but increasing in the last three years; notable that there was a drought followed by quite a lot of rain. There is a land developer that wants to build 200 homes nearby, and the County seems to be in favor of it mostly. An October 2023 County review of the site and enforcement actions, did not mention any active heat or fire, just problems with oder generally. The US EPA is taking over the response now. Contradictory signals are coming from different local government agencies, and the list of involved agencies is lengthy.
This is why we need a more focused and funded EPA.
Neighborhoods are built on highly contaminated areas hoping nobody will notice. There are so many disasters just waiting to happening or happening silently.
We need ways for citizens to own and access tools for analysis. So they can get more focused analysis by certified organizations.
It’s sad that we (barely) care more about recycling soda cans than we do batteries. If throwing batteries in the regular trash is such a costly thing why on Earth don’t we collect a deposit and offer deposit return to anyone who turns them in?
Given how ubiquitous and common battery usage is, why on earth is it SO DIFFICULT TO RECYCLE THEM?
My garbage is collected once a week, green waste too, recycling every other week, but regular use stuff like batteries is NEVER picked up I have to take it somewhere.
I'm sorry but if we actually cared about preventing these things from making it into landfills, we'd make it as easy as possible for people to recycle them.
I can't see battery pickup working except as a once per year kind of thing. And around me, there is a once per year electronics recycling pickup in my neighborhood.
Also, "take it somewhere" isn't that bad when "somewhere" is home depot, which has a battery disposal bin.
I would toss it in the trash. I don't want to go to Home Depot. Lol
There are only two ways to prevent this:
1. The waste management system should put everything on a big conveyor belt and filter out toxic/dangerous waste so that the consumer doesn't have to care about special handling.
2. Those materials should be outlawed from being used in consumer tech.
If we're serious about this, mandatory bi-yearly pickup of hazardous material (batteries, paint, solvents, etc), with awareness campaigns seems reasonable.
Push it down as a requirement on garbage companies and then monitor it through them.
In most places you pay for your weekly pickup one way or another. There’s no way people are going to vote for or approve an additional weekly pickup charge for something they dispose of very infrequently.
There are many stores with battery drop offs. If you really want to make a dent, put the battery recycling drop offs in grocery stores and put signage around it.
Routine pickup would be more hassle: You’d need to figure out the bins, the pickup method, the scheduling, etc. It’s really terrible for anything that isn’t both large and steady, like your waste bin.
Many places already have weekly/biweekly pickup for single-stream glass/plastic/paper/aluminum recycling - is there any fundamental reason that batteries couldn't be added to the stream?
We're talking about curbside pickup. There's men who lift the buckets and put them in trucks. Then humans help sort them at facilities. The worst thing about recycling now is mostly leftover organics and sharp lids.
How many batteries do you dispose of in a week? In a month? In a year?
I have a lot of battery powered devices, but it would take me a year to fill even a grocery bag with discarded batteries (with the exception of the occasional car or UPS battery swap every couple of years). But I generally use rechargeable batteries.
In Germany regular grocery stores are in walking distance (if your living rural, you might strongly prefer a bicycle, though), and last I looked, the mandatory post-checkout secondary-packaging-disposal/-recycling station includes a battery bin. Though it might only be required if they also sell batteries, which they (so far) still do.
Where I am in Europe, a lot of supermarkets have a bin that can take light bulbs, batteries and small electronics (no bigger than a toaster). I believe this is based on an EU regulation that the seller has to accept electronic goods for recycling at end of life.
The waste/recycling service where I live advises that we can put old batteries in a ziploc baggie on top of our recycling bin, which is picked up weekly. The three bins we have (landfill, organics/compost, and recycling) are picked up via a truck with a grabber arm, so that the driver never has to leave the driver's seat.
The last time I left some out, I could swear I saw the driver just pick up the recycle bin with the baggie of batteries on top and dump it in with all the rest of the recycling (so why put the baggie on top?). For the 2-3 times a year I do this, it would only take about 30 seconds to hop out and grab the baggie by hand to store it separately. Maybe they sort it out at the recycling facility, but I've also been told that almost all our recycling ends up in the landfill anyway.
In some areas a non negligible part of recycling goes to incineration because incinerators can't work without enough fuel and cardboard, paper and plastics are necessary.
And in some other places any contaminated recycling (oil, food residues etc) is redirected to landfill/incinerators.
It's difficult to recycle batteries because it's difficult to recycle them. They're complicated chemical containers that can be volatile/contain a lot of energy. Some things are easier to recycle and some are harder. Batteries are pretty close to the bottom of the list.
(This is also why "electricity is more environmentally friendly than burning fuel" is not necessarily true).
It really makes me think about the increase in use of disposable vapes, the younger demographic that uses them, and how they are even labelled as “disposable” in the first place. I know people who go through one a day and once they are done, they just dispose of them in their garbage can as they think they can simply be disposed of. I think a reward system would be the only way to incentivize proper recycling of these sadly.
> why on Earth don’t we collect a deposit and offer deposit return to anyone who turns them in?
that's exactly how it works in Germany. By law batteries must not go into household trash and retailers are required to take back used ones free of charge.
Almost any larger battery has a resale value and you could reuse instead of recycle.
Around my area in Metro Detroit there are battery stores all over that will buy used batteries. It might be only a dollar for some random laptop battery while car batteries etc are basically the core price of $50-$60 per.
At the very least, there is value in the raw metals as scrap.
> It’s sad that we (barely) care more about recycling soda cans than we do batteries
Why is that sad? It takes more energy to extract aluminum from bauxite with electrolysis than it does to recycle used aluminum. Same with steel. Depending on the source, 30-50% of aluminum and steel made in the US is from recycled stock.
Is there any evidence this was battery-caused? Over 35 acres..?
Seems like their explanation (high heats melting plastic pipes and degrading the landfills' ability to pump out gases, leading to runaway anaerobic decomposition) is sufficient to explain what happened here?
My bet - "No Evidence Whatever". But most people don't know what happens if you build a big pile of oily rags. Let alone about the fire hazard created if you pile up green hay.
True, but landfill operators do. I think the unspoken subtext in the article is that this was an abnormally hot period (possibly climate driven) that the old landfills just weren't designed for.
Kinda like the Fukushima sea walls (which were there, just not high enough).
> Hundreds of feet underground, in a long-dormant portion of Chiquita Canyon landfill, tons of garbage have been smoldering for months due to an enigmatic chemical reaction.
It doesn't sound enigmatic. It sounds like anaerobic respiration:
> ... In aerobic organisms undergoing respiration, electrons are shuttled to an electron transport chain, and the final electron acceptor is oxygen. Molecular oxygen is an excellent electron acceptor. Anaerobes instead use less-oxidizing substances such as nitrate (NO3), fumarate (C4H2O24), sulfate (SO24), or elemental sulfur (S). These terminal electron acceptors have smaller reduction potentials than O2. Less energy per oxidized molecule is released. Therefore, anaerobic respiration is less efficient than aerobic.
In short, heavy rainfall in the last year combined with decades of organic waste disposal in the landfills (think yard trimmings, discarded food, and other organic matter) have resulted in an enormous, uncontrolled underground anaerobic respiration problem in Southern California.
Here in PA we have dozens of coal seams and clum heaps and slag mountains on fire - and have for like decades. There's a special PA EPA fund for dealing with it.
The temperatures are approaching boiling and are melting the PVC embedded in the landfill for gas removal. Unless it’s some really crazy new extremophile we’ve never seen before (which is definitely possible), it’s unlikely to be biological. CalRecycle said they’ve been seeing elevated oxygen in gas wells in the area for years and now are seeing elevated carbon monoxide levels that implies something is burning.
The other dump with the water intrusion has that biological problem, but the one that’s almost burning probably isn’t.
>> The scorching temperatures within Chiquita Canyon Landfill have caused pressure to build inside the 639-acre facility and forced contaminated water to burst onto the surface.
I found that visual both gross and hilarious - in a tragic kind of way. It highlights how dumb some parts our modern world are. To think we can dump 7000 tons a day into a hole and figure that'll be just fine! And that's just one landfill... I don't have any solutions to offer, but just wow ;-)
In 100 years the thousands of plastic diapers that I used as a baby will still be carefully preserving my crap such that archaeologists a thousand years hence will be able to accurately assess the contents of baby food in the late 20th century. And that applies to basically everything wrapped in plastic, such as most every garbage bag.
What other grand predictions do you have for us about the future of microbe evolution?
Also, we’re talking about a tiny quantity. A single square mile filled to one meter = 1600x1600 = 2.5 million tons assuming density of 1. That’s an entire year of 7000 tons a day.
EDIT: that was snarkier than intended, my apologies.
> What other grand predictions do you have for us about the future of microbe evolution?
It took about 3 billion years for microbes to learn how to consume lignin. They'll learn to process plastic eventually, but without human intervention it won't be within the span of human civilization.
there is no shortage of landfill space. some how corporate america (waste management) got you to shill for them. this is why I don't recycle, if they want the stuff they can dig it out. brainwashing kids to recycle only bolsters their own profits, while taking away a revenue stream that poor/homeless used to enjoy.
I am totally on board with the idea of recycling. But the reality is murky. Where does the stuff go, and does it get recycled?
A couple of years ago, it was common practice to simply ship garbage to a third-world country (!) and have them deal with it - I'm totally 100% sure they scrupulously recycled every ounce.
why do they need a second truck that guzzles about the same amount of diesel to transport them? I thought recycling was "good" for the env? at least the homeless people who collected them used public transport/green energy to transport them back to the recycler.
Efficiency? The garbage truck and the recycling truck both get full on their routes and probably have different destinations. They’re both going to cover some middle ground to reach their service areas, which could overlap but don’t have to be the same.
In my neighborhood we have three different trucks. Garbage, recycling, and compost. The garbage and compost come weekly but recycling is every other week.
I wonder - when the Sun goes supernova, will the man-made exotic nuclear elements on Earth change it’s spectrum in a detectable way?
Someone on here once suggested shooting nuclear waste into the sun, but apparently aliens would immediately be able to tell we did that from the absorbtion lines, in addition to the impractical delta-V involved.
I lived in a rural town of 10k that informed us where everything went. Mattresses were bought by a mattress company, bottles went to coors, plastics went to Salt Lake City for detergent bottles. They did not accept plastics over #2 as a buyer couldn’t be sourced. I felt pretty confident that anything i put in my bin that followed their guidelines would get recycled, and I was more diligent in recycling when I lived there. Of course this was a municipal service in a town with a focus on environmentalism. Who knows where less scrupulous providers send their lower value recycles.
It sounds like microbial anaerobic respiration heated things up and then conditions were right for a smoldering burn to propagate. It's a shame all that detailed historical cultural information will be lost to future landfill researchers. On the upside, the high temperatures and anaerobic conditions might reduce metals to their base forms as sperules which would make future mining for material re-use a lot easier.
I still don't understand that the US doesn't use plasma burners to get rid of waste.
The waste is hauled in, and they are getting paid for this.
If the waste management companies would acquire plasma burners they could charge for the service of picking up garbage AND sell the electricity because of the sheer amount of energy recuperated from the incinerating of the waste.
> The conversion efficiency from MSW to Electricity can be as high as 40%, with the remaining energy being recovered in the form of heat and exported as steam (~50% and the inherent heat losses. Of the electrical energy produced by the reactor, 1/3 is being used by the plant for internal consumption and 2/3 exported to the power grid. Table 2 shows some examples of the form of energy output and quantities that can be exported from a WPC gasification plant processing MSW.
So why aren't we doing it? The landfill is there. And even if you need a new one, there is plenty of space.
EPA should require all hazardous things to have RFID chips. That way, these can be detected very early in the garbage pickup process and appropriate actions can be taken.
"When there are high temperatures in the landfill gas, that can melt or deform some of the landfill gas collection system components,"
PVC which was used for the gas collection system systems at ~200F, hardly a high temperature. Melting occurs at about 350F. However, garbage fires are a fairly common occurrence, which begs the question why PVC, which itself produces very toxic pyrolysis and combustion products, was used in the first place.
88 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadoder complaints started the day these facilities started operations, make no mistake! Chemistry was the high-tech of eighty years ago.. no way that these mysterious chemical reactions are "new" to this skeptics eye
there are large new sources of money coming into play and yes, play is the operative word
The Los Angeles area waste management practices have been outrageous since the earliest days ! Military plus Movie biz -- multiple scandals and huge, unkept areas.. many links available on request. Lastly, isn't this phys.org, the ad-ridden re-hash site of press releases? seasons greetings
The Chiquita Valley site has open working portions and closed areas, most recently re-licensed in 2004 for 15 years. There have been oder complaints for years, but increasing in the last three years; notable that there was a drought followed by quite a lot of rain. There is a land developer that wants to build 200 homes nearby, and the County seems to be in favor of it mostly. An October 2023 County review of the site and enforcement actions, did not mention any active heat or fire, just problems with oder generally. The US EPA is taking over the response now. Contradictory signals are coming from different local government agencies, and the list of involved agencies is lengthy.
This one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill is near radioactive material that were illegally dumped.
This is why we need a more focused and funded EPA.
Neighborhoods are built on highly contaminated areas hoping nobody will notice. There are so many disasters just waiting to happening or happening silently.
We need ways for citizens to own and access tools for analysis. So they can get more focused analysis by certified organizations.
Given how ubiquitous and common battery usage is, why on earth is it SO DIFFICULT TO RECYCLE THEM?
My garbage is collected once a week, green waste too, recycling every other week, but regular use stuff like batteries is NEVER picked up I have to take it somewhere.
I'm sorry but if we actually cared about preventing these things from making it into landfills, we'd make it as easy as possible for people to recycle them.
Also, "take it somewhere" isn't that bad when "somewhere" is home depot, which has a battery disposal bin.
There are only two ways to prevent this:
1. The waste management system should put everything on a big conveyor belt and filter out toxic/dangerous waste so that the consumer doesn't have to care about special handling.
2. Those materials should be outlawed from being used in consumer tech.
Why not?
> Also, "take it somewhere" isn't that bad when "somewhere" is home depot, which has a battery disposal bin.
I think you underestimate how lazy people are. Lets not leave the health and safety of our landfills up to something as risky as human laziness.
If we're serious about this, mandatory bi-yearly pickup of hazardous material (batteries, paint, solvents, etc), with awareness campaigns seems reasonable.
Push it down as a requirement on garbage companies and then monitor it through them.
Because weekly pickup is expensive to run.
In most places you pay for your weekly pickup one way or another. There’s no way people are going to vote for or approve an additional weekly pickup charge for something they dispose of very infrequently.
There are many stores with battery drop offs. If you really want to make a dent, put the battery recycling drop offs in grocery stores and put signage around it.
Routine pickup would be more hassle: You’d need to figure out the bins, the pickup method, the scheduling, etc. It’s really terrible for anything that isn’t both large and steady, like your waste bin.
Just have some hardware stores keep a bucket labeled “recycle your batteries here” and the recycler can make monthly visits.
I have a lot of battery powered devices, but it would take me a year to fill even a grocery bag with discarded batteries (with the exception of the occasional car or UPS battery swap every couple of years). But I generally use rechargeable batteries.
Even the municipal recycling center, where I sometimes take bags full of paper or plastic bottles, refuses to take batteries.
The local Batteries+Bulbs store is the only place left near me. For how long?
It should be FAR far easier to do.
Many retail stores accept lithium batteries for recycling. You might already be going to a store every few weeks or months that accepts them.
The last time I left some out, I could swear I saw the driver just pick up the recycle bin with the baggie of batteries on top and dump it in with all the rest of the recycling (so why put the baggie on top?). For the 2-3 times a year I do this, it would only take about 30 seconds to hop out and grab the baggie by hand to store it separately. Maybe they sort it out at the recycling facility, but I've also been told that almost all our recycling ends up in the landfill anyway.
And in some other places any contaminated recycling (oil, food residues etc) is redirected to landfill/incinerators.
(This is also why "electricity is more environmentally friendly than burning fuel" is not necessarily true).
that's exactly how it works in Germany. By law batteries must not go into household trash and retailers are required to take back used ones free of charge.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/waste-resources/pro...
Almost any larger battery has a resale value and you could reuse instead of recycle.
Around my area in Metro Detroit there are battery stores all over that will buy used batteries. It might be only a dollar for some random laptop battery while car batteries etc are basically the core price of $50-$60 per.
At the very least, there is value in the raw metals as scrap.
Why is that sad? It takes more energy to extract aluminum from bauxite with electrolysis than it does to recycle used aluminum. Same with steel. Depending on the source, 30-50% of aluminum and steel made in the US is from recycled stock.
Seems like their explanation (high heats melting plastic pipes and degrading the landfills' ability to pump out gases, leading to runaway anaerobic decomposition) is sufficient to explain what happened here?
My bet - "No Evidence Whatever". But most people don't know what happens if you build a big pile of oily rags. Let alone about the fire hazard created if you pile up green hay.
Kinda like the Fukushima sea walls (which were there, just not high enough).
It doesn't sound enigmatic. It sounds like anaerobic respiration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_respiration
> ... In aerobic organisms undergoing respiration, electrons are shuttled to an electron transport chain, and the final electron acceptor is oxygen. Molecular oxygen is an excellent electron acceptor. Anaerobes instead use less-oxidizing substances such as nitrate (NO3), fumarate (C4H2O24), sulfate (SO24), or elemental sulfur (S). These terminal electron acceptors have smaller reduction potentials than O2. Less energy per oxidized molecule is released. Therefore, anaerobic respiration is less efficient than aerobic.
In short, heavy rainfall in the last year combined with decades of organic waste disposal in the landfills (think yard trimmings, discarded food, and other organic matter) have resulted in an enormous, uncontrolled underground anaerobic respiration problem in Southern California.
I can just imagine my mitochondria right now pointing to the electron transport chain and saying "shit's on fire, yo"
The other dump with the water intrusion has that biological problem, but the one that’s almost burning probably isn’t.
The reaction may have started when oxygen entered the well system, which is designed to pump out landfill gases like methane.
I found that visual both gross and hilarious - in a tragic kind of way. It highlights how dumb some parts our modern world are. To think we can dump 7000 tons a day into a hole and figure that'll be just fine! And that's just one landfill... I don't have any solutions to offer, but just wow ;-)
In 100 years, almost all of it will be rotten or eaten or otherwise recycled.
It's the extremely nonreactive but probably toxic chemicals like PFAS which are terrifying.
Also, we’re talking about a tiny quantity. A single square mile filled to one meter = 1600x1600 = 2.5 million tons assuming density of 1. That’s an entire year of 7000 tons a day.
EDIT: that was snarkier than intended, my apologies.
It took about 3 billion years for microbes to learn how to consume lignin. They'll learn to process plastic eventually, but without human intervention it won't be within the span of human civilization.
I read they’ve found microbes eating plastic already. [0]
We’re also working on helping their evolution along. [1]
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/plastic-eating-microbes-fro...
[1] https://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2023/november/plasti...
A couple of years ago, it was common practice to simply ship garbage to a third-world country (!) and have them deal with it - I'm totally 100% sure they scrupulously recycled every ounce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada–Philippines_waste_dispu...
In my neighborhood we have three different trucks. Garbage, recycling, and compost. The garbage and compost come weekly but recycling is every other week.
Someone on here once suggested shooting nuclear waste into the sun, but apparently aliens would immediately be able to tell we did that from the absorbtion lines, in addition to the impractical delta-V involved.
The waste is hauled in, and they are getting paid for this.
If the waste management companies would acquire plasma burners they could charge for the service of picking up garbage AND sell the electricity because of the sheer amount of energy recuperated from the incinerating of the waste.
> The conversion efficiency from MSW to Electricity can be as high as 40%, with the remaining energy being recovered in the form of heat and exported as steam (~50% and the inherent heat losses. Of the electrical energy produced by the reactor, 1/3 is being used by the plant for internal consumption and 2/3 exported to the power grid. Table 2 shows some examples of the form of energy output and quantities that can be exported from a WPC gasification plant processing MSW.
So why aren't we doing it? The landfill is there. And even if you need a new one, there is plenty of space.
The burner has a larger startup cost.
Can this be used for something useful? Collect the heat and use it to heat nearby houses? Hot water, etc.
PVC which was used for the gas collection system systems at ~200F, hardly a high temperature. Melting occurs at about 350F. However, garbage fires are a fairly common occurrence, which begs the question why PVC, which itself produces very toxic pyrolysis and combustion products, was used in the first place.