landfills

Landfills are causing major environment problems. Landfills are starting to run short in world. With in next ten years there will be shortage. There is no true way of waste disposal method, other then recycling waste so it does not take up most space in landfill. Local landfill problems can be poor regulation, due to vermin. Main landfill environmental problems are emissions to atmosphere and to water. Some of the emissions are noise, dust, and odor. The residual problems are people complain about smell and gas every day and the dirty water from landfill. Even know landfill bad for environment it also has many goods to them. It can fill in deep dangerous quarries. It could be used as sledding hills for community. But over all we can not stop this landfill problem. So far we have not been able to construct a landfill that can decompose it self over time. Are best luck would be to hope technology will allow future generations to solve this problem.

http://www.landfill-site.com/html/landfills__environmental_probl.php

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EPA Proposes to Add Dewey Loeffel Landfill to Federal Superfund List; Major PCB Problem Continues to Affect Rensselaer County Communities
Release date: 03/02/2010
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced that it is proposing to add the Dewey Loeffel Landfill in Rensselaer County, NY, to its Superfund National Priorities List of the country’s most hazardous waste sites. The landfill is contaminated with hazardous substances, including potentially cancer-causing PCBs. Building on the cleanup work that has already been done by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC), EPA will conduct an evaluation of the contamination and develop a plan to clean it up. The Dewey Loeffel Landfill site, located in southern Rensselaer County approximately four miles northeast of the Village of Nassau, consists of an area where hazardous waste was dumped in the past and nearby water bodies that have also become contaminated by pollutants that have migrated from the site. EPA is inviting the public to comment on the proposed addition of the landfill to the Superfund list. “EPA will do everything we can to make sure that the Dewey Loeffel Landfill gets cleaned up and that the companies that created this looming problem pay for the cleanup,” said Regional Administrator Judith Enck. “The main contaminants of concern that have been found at the site include solvents, waste oils, potentially cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), scrap materials, sludge, and solids. Some hazardous substances, in particular PCBs, have migrated from the site to underlying aquifers, streams, and waterbodies. Several species of fish have become contaminated with PCBs. The state has been maintaining the landfill and disposing of landfill leachate at an off-site permitted facility. Starting in 1992, Remedial Investigations and Feasibility Studies were conducted by GE under NYSDEC oversight. Records of Decision selecting cleanup options for the ground water and surface water drainage pathways were completed by NYSDEC in 2001 and 2002. The New York State Department of Health currently has a Health Advisory in place for Nassau Lake which advises people not to eat fish from Nassau Lake because of PCB contamination.With the proposal of this site to the Superfund list, a 60-day comment period will begin during which EPA is soliciting public input regarding this action.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/51414EE0F16FEE09852576DA0079B194

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By Chi-Chi Zhang, The Associated Press / January 21, 2010
ZHANGLIDONG, China
Visitors can smell this village long before they see it.More than 100 dump trucks piled high with garbage line the narrow road leading to Zhanglidong, waiting to empty their loads in a landfill as big as 20 football fields.In less than five years, the Zhengzhou Comprehensive Waste Treatment Landfill has overwhelmed this otherwise pristine village of about 1,000 people. Peaches and cherries rot on trees, infested with insect life drawn by the smell. Fields lie unharvested, contaminated by toxic muck. Every day, another 100 or so tons of garbage arrive from nearby Zhengzhou, a provincial capital of 8 million.“Life here went from heaven to hell in an instant,” says lifelong resident Wang Xiuhua, swatting away clouds of mosquitoes and flies. The 78-year-old woman suddenly coughs uncontrollably and says the landfill gases inflame her bronchitis.As more Chinese ride the nation’s economic boom, a torrent of garbage is one result. Cities are bursting at the seams, and their officials struggle to cope.The amount of paper, plastic and other garbage has more than tripled in two decades to about 300 million tons a year, according to Nie Yongfeng, a waste management expert at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.Americans are still way ahead of China in garbage; a population less than a quarter the size of China’s 1.3 billion generated 254 million tons of garbage in 2007, a third of which is recycled or composted, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.But for China, the problem represents a rapid turnabout from a generation ago, when families, then largely rural and poor, used and reused everything.“Trash was never complicated before, because we didn’t have supermarkets, we didn’t have fancy packaging and endless things to buy,” says Mr. Nie. “Now suddenly, the government is panicking about the mountains of garbage piling up with no place to put it all.”In Zhanglidong, villagers engage in shouting matches with drivers and sometimes try to bodily block their garbage trucks coming from Zhengzhou, 20 miles away.“Zhengzhou is spotless because their trash is dumped into our village,” says Li Qiaohong, who blames it for her 5-year-old son’s eczema.Ms. Li’s family is one of a few who live within 100 meters (300 feet) of the landfill, separated from it by a fence. These families get 100 yuan ($15) a month in government compensation.The dump has poisoned not just the air and ground, but relationships. Villagers say they were never consulted, and suspect their Communist Party officials were paid to accept the landfill.In China, especially in rural regions, there is often no recourse once local officials make a decision. The villagers say not only were their petitions ignored, but they were warned by the Zhengzhou police to stop protesting or face punishment.“We villagers were too naive … we didn’t know what a landfill was,” says Li. In July, officials scrapped the incinerator plan and closed the landfill four years early.In eastern Beijing, local officials invested millions of dollars to make the Gao An Tun landfill and incinerator one of a handful in China to meet global health standards. That was after 200,000 residents petitioned for a year about the smell.“Our standard of living is improving, so it’s natural that more and more of us begin to fight for a better quality of life,” says Zhang Jianhua, 67, one of the petitioners.“Widespread media coverage embarrassed the local government, so they finally decided to take action,” she says.After millennia as a farming society, China expects to be majority urban in five years.Busy families are shifting from fresh to packaged foods, consumption of which rose 10.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2008, well above the 4.2 percent average in Asia, according to the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. By 2013, the packaged-food market is expected to reach $195 billion, up 74 percent from last year.At least 85 percent of China’s seven billion tons of trash is in landfills, much of it in unlicensed dumps in the countryside. Most have only thin linings of plastic or fiberglass. Rain drips heavy metals, ammonia, and bacteria into the groundwater and soil, and the decomposing stew sends out methane and carbon dioxide.Regulations allow incinerators to emit 10 times the level of dioxins permitted in the U.S., and these release cancer-causing dioxins and other poisons, according to a Chinese government study.“If the government doesn’t step up efforts to solve our garbage woes, China will likely face an impending health crisis in the coming decade,” warns Liu Yangsheng, The government knows its garbage disposal will always draw complaints, says Liu. “What they need to do is invest more money into building and maintaining better plants.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0121/China-facing-a-mounting-trash-problem