The Hidden Engineering of Landfills

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There's a lot that goes into them!
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Of course, we have a lot of room for improvement in how we think about and manage solid waste in this world. Landfills seem like an environmental blight, but really, properly designed ones play a huge role in making sure waste products don’t end up in our soil or air or water.
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Опубликовано:

15 сен 2024

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Комментарии : 5 тыс.

@PracticalEngineeringChannel 12 дней назад

⚡I have more than 20 videos about soil! ru-vid.com/group/PLTZM4MrZKfW-A419dqGZVtw6CAANqKR1f 🌌Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: go.nebula.tv/Practical-Engineering

@Alex-vr8gw 12 дней назад

Is this on nebula?

@rasmis 12 дней назад

As a Dane, I know exactly where my waste goes. I was born in 1984, and has only known a world where everything is sorted and recycled. There are no landfills. The only thing that isn't reused is concrete, but we're working on it. A lot of unsorted waste is incinerated, which isn't perfect, but the heat is used for district heating and generation of electricity. The smoke is “washed”, in an attempt to remove heavy metals.

@SeanBZA 12 дней назад

By me I know all 3 landfills, Bisasar Road, now close to full, and Marianhill, also close to full, with the new Buffelsdraai landfill, set to be usable for a century or so, seeing as it is basically a massive valley between 4 hills.

@Bobsledboy 12 дней назад

@@Alex-vr8gw I can't see it on nebula either. The link in the description is broken.

@KarmCraft 12 дней назад

Loved seeing Brady doing the Obama sip.

@MadNitr0 12 дней назад

im a heavy equipment mechanic at a local landfill and this is the most comprehensive explanation of the inner workings of a land fill I've ever seen *standing ovation*

@bernarrcoletta7419 12 дней назад

Thank you. Waste management is far more important than the average citizen thinks.

@Theoryofcatsndogs 12 дней назад

Thank you for your services!

@squidcaps4308 12 дней назад

I hope most of you are without that job in a decade. Not because i you aren't doing important job but because landfill usage needs to go down globally. Here in Finland we went from 200kg per person per year to close to zero when it comes to household waste going to landfills. Extensive recycling system that takes away all the recyclables and harmful waste, and the rest is burned in power plants that produce electricity or heat for district heating, and output CO2 and H2O to the air. Landfills are now used mostly for things that fit the name better: construction waste, concrete and dirt, for ex the gravel that is spread on the roads and streets to increase grip in the winter is put in landfills. So, i hope you are out of a job soon because you are needed elsewhere and the landfill is closed.

@MadNitr0 12 дней назад

@@squidcaps4308 strange request but i get it

@specialt3701 12 дней назад

Fellow heavy equipment mechanic here from road construction industry. I love this guys videos. He answers a lot of questions the site managers and foreman don't even know.

@Joeyzoom 10 дней назад

All those times as a kid that my parents said my room "looked like a dump" were secretly compliments for my curiosity of engineering. Fascinating 💪

@aye3678 8 дней назад

lmao

@rasisdegreat7747 7 дней назад

parents always see the best in us!

@SaintSaint 6 дней назад

I'm proud of you son!

@vidaaquatic2131 5 дней назад

'Okay I'm going to stop you right there" 😀 if you think that liner is impermeable you're delusional 😀 the owners _want_ to get rid of as much leachate as possible so that they don't have to mediate it. Profit is a very warm bedfellow. They don't want to "accidentally" leak too much. And the owners want to be able to say that the amount that is leaking was whoops just an accident 😀. But those liners leak significant amounts of toxic metals and everything else into our drinking water. Only to be "discovered" in our drinking water decades later. 😮

@evgeniptolemy5570 3 дня назад

Dammit, I'm the 999th like. Somebody, anybody, like this comment! Help get this comment to 1K!

@CB-sr8ee 12 дней назад

My dad passed away almost 15 years ago. He owned a hazardous waste company and one day when we went to the dump he gave me this very interesting in depth overview of how it all worked. The first few times you said “garbage juice” I was like “but there’s a name for that…what is it?” Thanks for sneaking “leachate” in there. What a funny topic to make me think of my dad and our nerdy conversations today. Thank you for this. ❤

@W-a-n-d 7 дней назад

I'm guessing you didn't take over your father's company what did you end up doing and why?

@aaron4340 7 дней назад

Is your name Meadow by any chance?

@cfujii1251 7 дней назад

@@aaron4340i think it’s AJ, meadow went away to college so she wouldn’t be a criminal…

@busterbeagle2167 6 дней назад

May your father rest in peace

@mikeg2491 6 дней назад

@@aaron4340there is no garbage industry!

@wahkaman9242 6 дней назад

My 6 year old son sat down to watch this video with me and was mesmerized. He has now been requesting your channel daily. Thank you for presenting these concepts so well. Couldn't be happier to turn this on for him.

@sebcalabro6252 День назад

Introduce him to scishow and the green brothers if he's interested! Another amazing resource for learning at any age

@kalesmythe 13 часов назад

I loved landfills when I was kid too. It's still pretty interesting

@danielcpeters 12 дней назад

"I have a scale model of a landfill in my garage" Me: Me, too! ...Oh... that's what he meant.

@q-tuber7034 11 дней назад

😂😂 @danielcpeters wins the Internet

@valence7 10 дней назад

Can relate lol

@EweChewBrrr01 10 дней назад

Hahaha Good one!

@ScrappyPower 10 дней назад

Such an underrated comment 😄

@sjakubos 10 дней назад

If only I could attach a picture, I would win "Best landfill in garage" award!

@tomatoanus 11 дней назад

I used to be a GCCS engineer (gas collection and control systems). I designed the “pipe system” inside landfills that led to and from the wells. They’re only briefly mentioned in this video but they’re critical to a landfill’s maintenance through their whole life! Some interesting things is that as a landfill is filled, naturally the weight pressing down on piping increases. We want to avoid a pinch in lines running to wells since that would lead to a pressure buildup and no suction at the well. Because of this, the pipe systems were cut and abandoned in place every >20’ of fill on top. We would often have to extend wells as well to reach the surface when there was fill on them. The pipes also need to run at a minimum grade (angle) to ensure any condensation flows downhill to a sump! If there are valleys, the condensation will pool and create another blockage. Super interesting stuff!

@stfuyfc69420 11 дней назад

No way, tomatoanus was an engineer

@davidrodriguez5804 10 дней назад

@@stfuyfc69420 lol

@kindlin 10 дней назад

@@stfuyfc69420 I think you meant the opposite of what your comma makes your sentence mean. With the comma, you're making a strong argument that TomatoAnus was clearly an engineer. Without the comma, you are surprised that TomatoAnus could possibly be an engineer. EDIT: I've been convinced that the comma may actually be intentional. Not 100% sure, but I do see both sides clearly.

@busterbackster1 10 дней назад

Wait your the speed run guy

@PBeringer 10 дней назад

@@kindlin That confuse the hell out of me. It reminded me of the famous example of a similar comma usage; "let's eat, grandpa" and "let's eat grandpa".

@tfrowlett8752 12 дней назад

I live near a landfill, most of the time you don’t notice much, but when it rains you can smell an acrid aroma depending on which way the wind blows. I’ve often salvaged a lot of interesting things, mostly tools or machine parts. The landfill collects the methane produced by the waste and uses it to generate electricity for the site. The sad thing is the road leading to the landfill (which is a major highway) is constantly littered with trash, mainly from trucks but also from illegal dumping.

@jameswilliams1398 12 дней назад

I’ve noticed a strong methane odour near a local landfill, I’ve never thought about them collecting it and using it that way. Very insightful and interesting! Funnily enough it’s right above a major aquifer in Perth ( Western Australia) and has a water treatment plant that collects from there and cleans its collected water from the landfill.

@tommy2u 12 дней назад

at least you'll never go hungry. :D

@Sometimes7453 12 дней назад

I call bs.... I drive 2 miles away from a landfill everyday and it's the most disgusting smell ever!

@BunjiKugashira42 12 дней назад

@@Sometimes7453 Some landfills aren't ventilated and those start stinking really fast. Some are ventilated improperly because of damaged gas wells, pumps, etc. Properly ventilated landfills don't smell because almost all of the gas is collected and burnt. Kudos to those that burn the gas for energy generation.

@ElectroTree01 12 дней назад

@@jameswilliams1398you may be smelling the hydrogen sulfide. Methane is odorless.

@craigpeterman27 7 дней назад

Wish we had this presentation back in the 1990s. I am a California Professional Civil Engineer that worked Air Force Base closing. All the closed bases had landfills. Some were abandoned before the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976 gave States control over the management. Been nice to show this at meetings.

@binky_bun 12 дней назад

My dad worked in landfill until he retired a few years ago. He started out as a landfill gas engineer and ended up as site manager. They fed the gas into huge generators to burn it off and produce electricity. If the generators failed the gas had to be flared off and as a kid he let me light the flare. The gas had a very distinct odour to it and I vividly remember the wash of heat over me from the flare igniting on a cold day. In later years I worked on the landfill myself as a weigh bridge operator when I was between jobs. I was also in a band with one of the machine drivers. Landfill is an often under appreciated aspect of our modern lives and whilst a lot of people wouldn't want it in their back yard they'd be the first to complain if their trash wasn't collected. I've always found it fascinating.

@jamesvanantwerp1516 8 дней назад

My hometown (in Kent County, MI), had only 2 years of life left on its landfill. So they built a comprehensive waste sorting facility, where municipal waste could be sorted into combustible and recyclable waste. By burning much of the waste before it was landfilled, the county is able to generate power and increased the lifespan of the landfill to 20 years, since now it just takes in ash.

@Axle-F 4 дня назад

I wonder how the carbon emissions compare with burning to landfilling.

@lagsalot7626 4 дня назад

As someone who grew up in grandville I never knew this! Do you know when this all happened?

@sinn6719 4 дня назад

@@Axle-FIn switzerland we dont have landfills, just burning facilities. we use high performance carbon filters, recycle a lot and generate energy with it.

@abhinrsv 3 дня назад

@@sinn6719 What happens to the ash in Switzerland?

@barrywever9984 3 дня назад

@@abhinrsvIt goes into asphalt mixes and concrete

@pilotpear098 9 дней назад

One of the most fascinating things about landfills, that was briefly touched in here but goes much deeper, is that the internal chemistry has an entire lifecycle that has been very thoroughly studied and modeled. You can actually predict the volume and composition of leachate and gas discharge to astonishing accuracy based on just the size and what phase of "life" the landfill is in. It even informs things like what can be placed together and what has to be segregated into seperate cells, for example construction/demolition waste and food waste have to be kept as far apart as possible because the gypsum in building waste acts as a rich sulphur source that the microbes in food waste will convert to hydrogen sulphide, at certain life phases of the landfill, which is an odour hazard but more importantly is extremely toxic when concentrations get higher, like in the case of combined food-building waste!. I can honestly say, after studying landfill chemistry, I see them as essentially giant bioreactors for processing waste, rather than a static graveyard of trash.

@ppltlkng 9 дней назад

Years ago I did some work at a landfill that primarily accepted C&D. It's the only landfill I've been at that had a flare specifically for sulfide. It is insane just how much stink gas that dry wall / wall board can lead to! If you're not already familiar with them, you may be interested to learn about anaerobic digestors. They're a new waste disposal alternative that basically makes an accelerated version of a waste processing bioreactor. Rather than taking years to reduce the carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, etc., it's done on the scale of weeks.

@ekginseng 8 дней назад

@@ppltlkngand anaerobic digestors can produce methane for a cogeneration engine and produce electricity with methane thats been processed. a handful of wastewater treatment plants have this setup

@damndirtyape6971 7 дней назад

Amazing!

@daydodog 6 дней назад

I would love to read more about this, do you have any recommendations for further reading?

@benmorris118 6 дней назад

@daydodog you can probably get access to good case studies from professional bodies like ciwem/icheme. Water companies themselves might have some eg thames water in the uk probably have a reasonable amount of info on Beckton, a nearly 4 million population equivalent super STW that is song the biggest in the world There's a lot of useful info available if you just type into Google "anaerobic digestion case study"

@lebowski6061 6 дней назад

I’m a landfill design / CQA Engineer, and this guy has bloody nailed it! Appreciate the content mate 👍

@ocko8011 12 дней назад

Thank you for covering landfills and solid waste management! Some other current issues facing landfills include (that could be followed up in another video): PFOS, hydrogen sulfide, "black goo" (largely from diapers), lithium batteries, deep-well leachate injections, siting of new landfills vs. changing consumer disposal habits. Also there has been more investigation of resource reclamation of buried waste. Think mining of landfills. Lastly, having been a geotechnical engineer in the solid waste industry, this video just scratches the surface of the mountain of engineering that goes into landifll permitting, design, construction and operation.

@hoolz750 12 дней назад

Any good reading about these things? Hopefully non scholarly or jargon based books. Thought this was fascinating and totally changed my views on landfills.

@dembro27 12 дней назад

And the mountain is made of trash! Fascinating.

@kneau 12 дней назад

@@hoolz750 I live walking distance from a Permanent Household Hazardous Waste Facility. It is something else entirely and happens to hold a lot of stuff mentioned in the comment. Oh my gosh... I'm realizing realtime that things might be different here because the immediate area is saturated with Biotech labs.

@everythingisscience658 12 дней назад

This channel and these comments always give me the feeling that any little thing I can point at in the built environment has millions of hours of study, brilliant engineering as well as blood sweat and tears put in it. My god, the engineering considerations just go on and on and on and on.

@Kalvinjj 12 дней назад

_"Lastly, having been a geotechnical engineer in the solid waste industry [...]"_ This is what I love about being an engineer myself as well: I'm way more of a general guy, I work in product R&D and knowledge far out of my studies has been useful like, daily. But then, there's some people like you who have far more specialized knowledge that is absolutely fascinating and unquestionably important to do what most people see as the most basic tasks, on the scale that we actually need with as many people as we have living on Earth. Like, an engineer can say basically "I work with trash" in the most impressive way possible.

@tacticalguy127 12 дней назад

I'm a Regional Manager for a company that designs and operates Renewable Gas plants. We specialize in landfill to natural gas and landfill to energy facilities. The amount of engineers and thought that goes into a trash mountain is crazy. This is a great video that goes over the inner workings of a landfill. I'd love the chance to run you through the system of scrubbing the raw gas from the landfill to heat homes and such. At a plant in NC, we also use a "virtual pipeline". AKA we truck the processed gas to a utility pipeline.

@ocko8011 12 дней назад

Those trucking costs must be high but I'm guessing less than getting a permit and construction for a new pipe line? Does the condensate from "cleaning" process get placed back into the landfills or processed separately?

@tacticalguy127 12 дней назад

@@ocko8011 the trucking cost and complexity was an underestimated factor in the project. Pipeline isn’t cheap, and in this specific instance, just the right of way would have been an astronomical undertaking. A big deal in this industry currently is a new set of government guidelines that came out a few months ago that basically go over how we have to prove that the gas these plants are producing is what we say it is. The trucking makes that process a pain. The condensate usually gets pumped right into the leachate tanks at the landfill. Most projects then take that liquid to a water treatment plant.

@TheGoalieMan100 10 дней назад

The environmental division of the company I work for has a deal where the collection of gasses from our landfill in Niagara Falls is captured and pipelined directly to the local General Motors plant. I haven’t been well versed with the whole process through the landfills but it is another way that they are trying to sustainably support other local industries where we operate.

@marissagalvan876 10 дней назад

Can I sell for your company at my local landfill? I mean Y'all teach me the processes (I read p&id) and I’ll just keep selling and help build the project.

@MikeJones-rk1un 10 дней назад

So trash becomes fuel? Like a power plant? 😊

@westerngothia59 10 дней назад

Greetings from Sweden, only 1% of Sweden's trash is sent to landfills. By burning trash, another 52% is converted into energy and the remaining 47% gets recycled. According to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, more than 2.5 million tons of waste is imported to Sweden each year, mostly from Norway and the UK. In the past six years, some 50% of all household waste has been treated through energy recovery.

@operatoralex5926 8 дней назад

Also don’t forget that the food goes in a seperate bin that is turned into biogas for busses! At least that is how it is in Skåne where I live.

@skonstas4683 8 дней назад

@@operatoralex5926 Burning bio-fuels add other "trash", in a gas form, in the atmosphere.

@operatoralex5926 8 дней назад

@@skonstas4683 In the video it is said that burning methane turns it into less potent greenhouse gasses, or whatever the word he used for it. And at least we get some use for a biproduct

@jasoneganis 8 дней назад

This is the way!

@ШамильЭркенов-т6л 8 дней назад

Exactly, why other countries can’t just use your country’s model 🙉🙉

@nebulous9280 5 дней назад

I remember going to a landfill on a field trip in my gifted class. The teacher was CONVINCED that the entire thing was a horrid blight on the landscape, and used it to really drill us into the Reduce Reuse Recycle business. While, of course, it would be ideal if we didn't need Landfills, learning about their implementation, and the steps we've taken to make them as good as POSSIBLE is an eye opener. Something my teacher never actually TAUGHT us.

@Jewlawphin 5 дней назад

"In my gifted class" really needed to add that on. Didnt ya 😂

@misterkid 4 дня назад

Many teachers are self-righteous morons.

@triciac1019 День назад

You saw that by visiting the dump. We should all Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. What a great teacher you had to teach and encourage you.

@TTVToxic-yu5ov 12 дней назад

I'm a truck driver and can't say enough how much I love this channel!! Driving through, over, under, and around infrastructure every day and because of this channel I understand more and more. I love it

@BloodyMobile 12 дней назад

"and I have scale model in my garage" - always the most exciting part in every video

@CjqNslXUcM 12 дней назад

Who doesn't have a scale model of a landfill somewhere?

@anathardayaldar 12 дней назад

Jon: You tried to escape! Excavator: Of couas. I am an excavator.

@FlorenceSlugcat 12 дней назад

Every teenager has a scale model in their bedroom

@tomschmidt381 12 дней назад

And now his kids are old enough the participate. In a couple of decades it will be interesting to see what they remember since it will probably be different from their parents, of course in their case there is video.

@WooShell 12 дней назад

That's why it's called excavator and not escapator.. ;-)

@chrisgotski9837 6 дней назад

I've been a Garbageman for 22 years, and I personally pick up 30 tons of trash a day. People would be surprised how much waste we as Americans throw out daily. I think it's gotten worse with the poor quality of things we buy. Things just don't last as long these days. I always pay more for Quality so I don't have to add to this problem.

@lafidala.1726 День назад

It's also such a shame that waste isn't separaed properly in the USA. And yes, it's so true that the average person doesn't care one bit about the incredible amount of waste their lifestyle leaves... people just don't care, it's crazy.

@randyj4452 12 дней назад

I worked on an archeological site in eastern Arizona late 80s early 90s. The pueblo had many rooms, but one room we excavated had nothing but 'trash' in it. Turkey and deer bones, scraps of leather, busted pottery, etc. It was one of the most interesting rooms on the site!

@TheCornucopiaProject-bd5jk 9 дней назад

Are you saying aliens won’t judge us by our advancements in technology, but by the contents of our landfills?

@Iamkcs2c 8 дней назад

@@TheCornucopiaProject-bd5jkArchaeologists and their middens ... laid down in convenient daily/weekly layers and with included dated material.

@TheCornucopiaProject-bd5jk 7 дней назад

@@Madhattersinjeans that depends on perspective. Knowing about the average Joe will fill in some gaps but how do we even describe a “society”? Usually we describe it in forms of hierarchy, celebrations, their religion, stand of technology, food and wealth, wars. All those things give us plenty of information to paint a picture for average Joe. As archeologists, we take every bit of evidence to connect puzzle pieces. A landfill can be such a piece. In particular for aliens.

@jerryh5654 12 дней назад

Here in Virginia Beach we have "Mount Trashmore", the nation's first landfill park. The only two indicators that it used to be a landfill are the name, and a vent atop the hill, presumably to release decomposition gases. Mount Trashmore is a fun destination among locals and visitors alike to play and relax.

@chrism9502 12 дней назад

It's also a nice concert venue.

@mrlifguard 12 дней назад

I came to make a similar comment. I was hoping he would have mentioned it since it is an operating park that was a landfill.

@remjoleea5560 12 дней назад

Some good memories there :)

@thewatersavior 12 дней назад

How's that air quality?

@1114006578 12 дней назад

@@thewatersaviorno issues I don’t live to far from it and you wouldn’t know what it was if it wasn’t named what it is

@AMH-v5e 11 дней назад

I'm Portuguese, and in Lisbon, one of the most touristic places and high standard living in Lisbon now was a lanfill 30 ago that's was turned into a big riverside park with lot of attractions, and that decision completely changed the near neighborhood from being some poor houses and old warehouses to being one of the most high rated places in Lisbon. "Parque das nações"

@duudsuufd 9 дней назад

I looked it up on G Earth. I would not call it a park. It is a big stadium and many paved walkways with some tree lines between.

@jeffclark5268 9 дней назад

@@duudsuufdAnd used to be where the poor people had to live until it was gentrified and pricing drove out the poor people to be marginalized somewhere else. So nice!

@TheCornucopiaProject-bd5jk 9 дней назад

@@jeffclark5268someone has to be marginalized. Might as well be poor people, they already know how to deal with it.

@PaullyP-un2vw 9 дней назад

Yeah. We had a guy do that here in America. His name was Walt Disney. Your story is nothing special.

@cotochris 8 дней назад

That was an impressive transformation for that area, that included run down dockyards and brown fields. I believe one of the most sucessful legacies for any Expo's.

@cristianbocanegra497 4 дня назад

I worked as a CQA for several landfill projects along the east coast of the U.S. The explanation here is spot on while keeping it light and relatable. I love this channel so much. THANK YOU!!

@ogfoxhound 12 дней назад

Trash removal and Water Treatment are probably the 2 most important and undervalued jobs on the planet. I cannot fathom how fast everything plummets if those 2 groups cease for whatever reason.

@laurynasjagelo5075 12 дней назад

considering how the world's going, we'll be seeing more and more trash soon

@jjlpinct 12 дней назад

Poop removal is more important than either of those

@littleredpony6868 12 дней назад

⁠@@jjlpinctpoop removal is covered by both trash removal and water treatment

@jjlpinct 12 дней назад

@@ogfoxhound neither of those "two jobs" include sanitary drainage.

@lebojay 12 дней назад

I live in a big city. When I was a kid, our city trash collectors went on strike for a month. Is there such a thing as olfactory PTSD? If there is, I have it. The city did its best, designating local dump sites for everyone and telling people what to do. People complied. Everyone had a little garbage dump in their neighborhood community center parking lot for a month. It was awful. I don’t know what my local garbage collectors get paid, but I’m sure it’s not excessive considering their importance. I always treat them with respect.

@williamhumphrey9766 12 дней назад

Although recently retired, I worked for a regional municipality as a Waste Technical Officer as part of a team constructing, operating, environmental monitoring of two large landfills for many years. Your description of landfill operations is spot on. One thing you missed was the management of LFG (landfill gas) via flares begins from day one of the operation and in one of the landfills we collected LFG for power generation into the local grid well before the facility's end of life. Also one of the main management problems in landfills is the three types of water. Clean, dirty and the one you mentioned leachate. All three types must be managed separately. So the management of surface water and 'dirty' water via HES or High efficiency sediment basins to flock (clean) water off the construction areas before disposal to creeks and rivers is essential. Residents have always complained about the charges and the cost of disposing of waste and although we spend lots of time and money to educate, unlike those of us in the industry, most people are uninterested and generally don't appreciate the engineering, science and costs that go into landfills. Thanks for your well researched video of this fascinating, essential and environmentally sound industry.

@desmond-hawkins 12 дней назад

I was happily eating breakfast while watching this video about trash, but the quick shot of Grady drinking his leachate cocktail at 7:18 really took me out and made me wonder what I was currently eating. Beautiful.

@jaymzx0 12 дней назад

Well technically speaking, with few exceptions, all water is recycled water. 🤔

@chrisjones8741 12 дней назад

Mmmm, garbage juice

@RedRavenNine 12 дней назад

There is no doubt we stick a lot of garbage in our mouths, particularly at breakfast if it include cereal.

@howarddavies136 12 дней назад

It madd me think of Obama drinking Flint water 😂

@grumpybastard5744 12 дней назад

He had me at 'Garbage Juice'. @@howarddavies136

@victorrisk6098 7 дней назад

I’m 65 years old but just found out about what happens after the landfills receive our trash! Your explanation was very clear and concise which was a great way to find out! Thanks

@markcrites7060 12 дней назад

I spent an entire career mostly dealing with landfills. It's nice to see a good description of the systems involved from layman's perspective. One of the things I want to emphasize is the fact as you mentioned that virtually every possible college degree is involved in one way or another in the process. I personally worked directly with engineers of all types, biologists, geologists, chemists, toxicologists, ecologists, lawyers, public relations, community relations, lobbyists, lawmakers, architects, and many more professions.

@mariaanissimowa4626 12 дней назад

thanks for the first hand insight

@wrightmf 12 дней назад

I bet you have lots of stories of all sorts of people and attitudes.

@ocko8011 12 дней назад

Having a simular career, it's always amazed me how many highly educated people are needed to build a mountain (of waste).

@AffordBindEquipment 11 дней назад

forgot politician which is different than a lawmaker. lawmakers are supposed to be in it for the people. Politicians are in it for themselves, passing laws that curry favor with certain lobbyists so they can get votes to be reelected.

@pendlera2959 11 дней назад

@@AffordBindEquipment That's not true. Politician is a job, and trying to make lawmaker seem like a purer, more trustworthy version of the job is as silly as saying a police officer is different from a cop. It's better to call them corrupt politicians than try to change the meaning of existing words, since it will just turn into a new way to insult whichever politician someone dislikes regardless of what their actions or motives are. Besides, "lawmaker" sounds like a puppet, so shouldn't that be the bad version? Politicians are sup[posed to do a lot more than make laws, and anyone who limits themselves to just making laws is probably corrupt in the way you describe.

@CrinosAD 12 дней назад

I live in Norway, and here we do a mix of deponing and incendiary. The garbage is collected to depos, then properly sorted and then handed over to incinerators. These again filter out heavy gasses etc, and since the waste was properly sorted beforehand, it's easier to control what kind of gasses that will be produced. 1Kg of waste, equals 2.5kW of energy. Deponing became illegal here in 2009. With the exception of hazardous waste, this is still being locked into big depones.

@SecureLemons 12 дней назад

entire video about landfills, yet not a second about decomposition. goes to show what americans are smoking

@ConfidentialMeerkat 12 дней назад

Literally just commented about the energy recovery you folks and Japan have there, were on the same page dude.

@Baxtexx 12 дней назад

Samme i sweden. I belive we actually started to import thrash because we want to burn it for electricity and heating in the winter.

@damnkris 12 дней назад

Yeah, it's an EU wide thing, building new landfills for incinerateable thrash is banned.

@ahoannon5711 12 дней назад

@@damnkris I didn't know that it was EU wide. But dumping treatable (doesn't have to be incineration, but that's the most common) trash has been banned in Germany for decades.

@driggs8600 12 дней назад

I've been practicing in the Solid Waste industry for almost 20 years. Grady, as always, this was an excellent introduction to the engineering in landfills, especially the part where you said almost every college degree can factor into landfill construction and operation. In most cases, the difficulty is not the engineering, but the permitting. Succesfully permitting large expansions or new sites (greenfields) requires City/Township, County, and State approval to allow operation. Some landfill sites I manage only take in a couple thousand tons a year and don't have much money for elaborate systems, while others have massive sites and want to be at the forefront of technology, especially for leachate reduction. As with most other Civil disiplines, there is never a one-size-fits-all approach. Understanding the geologic setting and designing a landfill well-suited for it's environment is just step 1 (although definitely the most enjoyable part).

@nunbub1 4 дня назад

I'm a civil engineer that has worked with dozens of landfills. This is a fantastic explanation of landfill construction, operations, and maintenance. Well done and you earned a subscription from me!

@fredtaylor9792 10 дней назад

My mother is dying in front of my eyes here at the hospital. She's hanging on but she won't make it. Thank you for such a calming, and positive RU-vid channel to take my mind off things. RU-vid is so full of hate but it feels more hateful when you feel so vulnerable. Yours is a diamond on this platform. Love yall.

@veefd5558 10 дней назад

so sorry to hear this, man. may she go gently. look after yourself

@fredtaylor9792 10 дней назад

@@billwall267 What do I get for a top RU-vid comment? Nothing. Just want to share my appreciation for the content and how much it means to me.

@AllHijinksNoHighDinks 9 дней назад

@@billwall267 jesus is a femboy.

@nmda9578 День назад

It’s so hard. Sending you calm and peace during this time.

@fredtaylor9792 День назад

@nmda9578 She passed the day after my comment. It's still hard. She lived with us. My wife took care of her and my kids played with her every day. We'll be okay but thank you for the kind words. I mean it, this channel seems to draw kind people to it. I haven't always been a kind person myself but I think everyone can change. Love yall.

@brent4adv 12 дней назад

I've worked in a few landfills as an electrical contractor. We actually built a pump/flare system at a landfill. The landfill sells the landfill gas to a brick plant for their ovens. The gas is flared off when the brick plant doesn't need it. We have to monitor the vacuum on the wells to keep it below certain thresholds. The same landfill also has pumps in each sump that pump the leachate back to a main holding tank. The leachate is put into water trucks and dumped back on the landfill. I was surprised how much goes into running a landfill once we became involved with a few of them.

@CrankyPantss 11 дней назад

@brent4adv Thanks for your additional information. It appears to be far more complicated and interesting than I’ll bet most of us ever expected.

@rite2bcreative 4 дня назад

Hey cool! I was an electrical contractor for a landfill gas plant that generated power and used flares for the remaining. It really is an interesting process!

@GFlCh 12 дней назад

14:48 "I'm thankful for the sanitary engineers and the other professions involved in safely and economically dealing with our trash so we don’t have to." That's for sure!

@CenturyHomeProject 2 дня назад

One of the landfills here in Albany, Georgia is very high. It’s extremely flat here. So anything above 6 feet is a hill to us. At one of our landfills, it goes above the tree lines of our pine trees. It gives you a really interesting view of the surrounding landscape. one of the things they are doing at this landfill is putting pipelines throughout the landfill and off the methane gas. It is piped across the road to the marine logistics space and used to power turbines for electricity. It’s saving the base a ton of money and creating a lot of revenue for the city.

@triciac1019 День назад

That is so cool!

@evan 12 дней назад

7:20 drinking the forbidden kool-aid

@timowagner1329 12 дней назад

Did not expect that from Grady 😂

@okymek 12 дней назад

Tasty glass of Lich-monate.

@Sonny_McMacsson 12 дней назад

Blue Bull Synergy Drink

@jonadabtheunsightly 12 дней назад

It had to be done.

@LuisSierra42 12 дней назад

He will now get super powers and turn into Garbage man!

@Psikeomega 12 дней назад

"garbage juice" is now a go-to engineering term. 😂

@andrewharrison8436 12 дней назад

Waiting for the next version of the text books. Although it will probably appear in journals first.

@jamesengland7461 12 дней назад

Yes, and now we've peer-reviewed it and approved it for ... general consumption 😂

@Psikeomega 12 дней назад

And in the comments section we can assume it's an interdisciplinary review as well.

@groundedgaming 12 дней назад

😂never thought the term Garbage Juice would be used by others as well It has to be made into a proper term!!

@OutbackCatgirl 12 дней назад

bin juice, and of course bin chickens to drink it

@braphomet5470 12 дней назад

12:13 I'm one of the many engineers who work on those waste-to-energy systems. I'd love to see you cover them in more detail sometime, maybe even including the other sources besides landfills. There's a ton of challenges that make it a rarer solution than you'd think but the industry is really growing these days.

@derrickconnolly9164 4 дня назад

I'm a oilfield worker. Drilling rig both land and offshore. Started in 1978. A young man. At that time I seen things that were questionable. But what did I really know. Short after I heard for the first time the word. Environment. Environmental. It all made made sense. So we accepted this new way of recycling. Again first time I heard recycling. I just threw everything away. But we started doing our part. And we never got credit for for all the hard work we put into protecting the environment. Very early we went all in. I also learned that oil in its natural state is organic waste. Perfectly harmless to the environment. Much like compost. It's when this oil is refined into fuel and chemicals that produce many of our daily products. Plastic comes to mind. But oil in its natural state is harmless. And that's what's pumped through pipelines. Oil all natural and harmless. But we don't see the end product. That travels daily on our transportation pathway. Ship truck train. All above ground man made a highly dangerous to us all. Just a little info

@TimLPINE 8 дней назад

I was a test specialist that traveled to landfills to perform sampling and analysis of both air emissions and leachate treatment systems. Fascinating places these landfills are. True fact- when you first arrive the smell can be overwhelmingly nauseating but your brain begins to ignore the bad odors through a process called olfactory fatigue. Depending on the person, within a couple of hours you don't notice the bad smells anymore. But that's not always be a good thing; your sense of smell is important in detecting toxic gases (like hydrogen sulfide) so carrying a gas meter that could sound an alarm was required for some test situations. Great video as always!

@TheJacklikesvideos 5 дней назад

a generalized form of the concept of olfactory fatigue is the fact that all of our sensory input detects derivatives, changes, differences- not constants or absolute values. a weight is heaviest when loaded or unloaded, not carried. a constant droning noise is loudest when starting or stopping. something hot is warmer than the environment, yourself, or its recent past self. you cannot see clearly in darkness or bright light when changing from one to the other. stinky work clothes will probably smell as bad coming out of the wash as they did coming off you at the end of the shift, just like how a smoker's clothes will smell to a non-smoker more than they do to the owner, etc.

@barnaclebob123 12 дней назад

I love just how genuinely excited Grady is in every video to share what he's learned/setup. It gets me excited to learn it.

@Kato414 9 дней назад

Landfills are an easy thing to be cynical about. It’s one of the many cheap ways to appear sophisticated. But here’s Grady again showing us how they’re feats of human ingenuity 😂

@shamanschlong 6 дней назад

his optimism for trash parks has me skeptical sounds like he's paid off by big trash

@MasterChaoko 12 дней назад

7:11 We should just pay Grady for his leachate disposal services 😂

@kstarler 12 дней назад

I certainly hope that leachate tasted more like leachaide, but I'd be willing to bet it tastes like garbage.

@Regimeshifts 12 дней назад

you mean garbage juice?

@Billionth_Kevin 12 дней назад

Reminds me of my wish for a solar punk factory game where all the 'machines' are living things. Over here is my community of leachate drinking Gradys. They balance well with the aerial Billys who need plenty of diseased air to stay healthy

@dhillaz 12 дней назад

NileRed moment

@Garbagejuicewaterfall 10 дней назад

Or not….

@TheCurious36 7 дней назад

Went into this video super judgemental of endorsing landfills at all, and this video completely blew me away, thank you. Subscribed.

@ZoonCrypticon 12 дней назад

Could you please make a video about different recycling methods, incineration, carbonization and thermocracking in vacuum? Thank you!

@rpm6085 12 дней назад

Here in Sydney we fill in old brick pits. The hole was dug decades ago, now we fill it again. There’s one near where I live that now has a golf driving range on it.

@ogfoxhound 12 дней назад

The only suitable place for golfers

@ilikesnow7074 12 дней назад

Where I live, we fill gravel pits, sand pits, and other already dug holes like that.

@delciemcwhoopie 12 дней назад

there are so many empty open-pit mines in the US that i'm surprised we don't do that more often. some might be just too far out of the way.

@lars3509 12 дней назад

Where I live, municipal waste is either burned, recycled or goes to a biogas plant. Only 1 % of municipal lands in a landfill. In the video, there is so much plastic ending up in this landfill, I can't believe that it is cheaper to dump it somewhere, then burn it and generate electricity and heat.

@nickjonathan4043 12 дней назад

@@ogfoxhoundinfected with anti-golfer brainrot

@wiki2014 12 дней назад

1:31 and I have a full-sized model of a landfill in my room every day

@HupfderFloh 12 дней назад

Honey, it's spring again. Would you clean up the garage a little? No, I have a 1:31

@maxque2841 6 дней назад

I’ve been working as an engineer on a project recently, Chiquita LF outside Santa Monica. It’s one of five ETLFs (elevated temperature landfill) in the US. Super interesting project! Love to see this video. People have a real misunderstanding of how much engineering goes into modern landfills

@52Ricoman 6 дней назад

Chiquita LF is outside of Santa Clarita. Did you make an error.

@nottherealrashnar 4 дня назад

@@52Ricoman depending on his definition of outside, Chiquita is outside San Diego too 🤣 I lived in Canyon country and Castaic for over 20 years, and only recently moved out of state. Boy did I sell my Castaic house at the right time!

@maxque2841 2 дня назад

@@52Ricoman You are correct. I worked there nonetheless

@brianho6625 12 дней назад

I used to work in a landfill site in my civil engineering training many year ago. Waste management is a multi-engineering operation business, It includes site formation works, earth moving, rock blasting, slope stabilzation wall, sewwall, pier construction, biological treatment plants, gas collection system, leatchage pipe laying, liner laying and etc. Planning, construction, operation, decomission, restallation of a landfill site may lasting more than 50 years....Because the site is so huge, design phase, construction phase, operational phase, decomissioning phase and restoration phase are all happening in different portion of the site. There are lots of things to learn in solid waste management business.

@dennismccall9237 12 дней назад

About 70 years ago before regulations my father's friends wanted him to invest in a new land fill he thought it was a bad idea and didn't invest . They bought low value Canyon land and terraced the sides to cover the trash. When it was full they built a golf course on top of the fill and built up scale houses overlooking the golf course . The investors became very rich. I know of 2 housing tracts built in this area on top of land fills and law suits started when tires and gas leaks appeared .

@sandrinakeffufal6008 12 дней назад

That's good! Wait that's bad! Wait that's good! Wait that's bad! Wait that's good! Wait that's bad! Wow what a roller coaster ride :O

@dcamron46 11 дней назад

When you said apartments built on top I’m like ugh not a good idea to live on a land fill . I know the engineers do great work but it’s not an easy problem and u don’t wanna find out and get cancer or sick 10 years later

@Beryllahawk 11 дней назад

Oh, dear. Those investors never heard of Love Canal, huh? What an unfortunate set of decisions.

@kindlin 10 дней назад

@@Beryllahawk They probably got rich enough to afford some good lawyers. Too bad for the home owners, tho....

@UnshavenStatue 4 дня назад

You briefly touch on it but I think it's worth emphasizing that having trash in landfills is wayyyyyy tf better than having it end up anywhere else (e.g. plastic in the ocean, in the water table, in our food fields etc). Really, we should be *trying* to put trash in landfills, way better than actually polluting

@QuantumRift 9 дней назад

Oh man, you're cracking me up! I'm 67 years old and I've been using the term "garbage juice" since I was a kid! Really, the first time I saw a trash truck going down the road and liquid was dripping out of it, I called it "Garbage Juice", and you see the same "juice" leaking out of dumpsters. I changed the phrase a bit years ago when my first child was born, and I started calling it "gobbage jooze" and we'd always have fun, if we smelled something funky, it was always attributed to 'gobbage jooze'. Great video! When we go by the local "Mt. Trashmore" I always tell the kids (look! There's where your poopy diapers go!" (we have twin 6 yr old granddaughters). Now when they see the landfill or a trash truch, they should 'GOBBAGE JUICE'!!!

@Zehn-X 6 дней назад

Were you around when the local radio station said Trashmore was about to explode (on April Fools Day)?

@damagecontrol7 5 дней назад

they shout*

@JoeStuffzAlt 12 дней назад

I lived somewhere that had houses built on top of a landfill. Not recommended. The settling can make the house start sagging, and it doesn't sag uniformly. So, part of the house can droop down, causing issues. It affects the roads and the liquid sometimes leeches out during the rain.

@fkUTube449 11 дней назад

That sounds like it was a terrible idea from the start

@felixonrails 12 дней назад

In Switzerland, Landfills are almost non-existent. All waste that can be burned gets incinerated and provides local heating. Landfills are only for materials that can't be incinerated, such as ashes, concrete, etc. Many incineration plants are connected to the railways with sidings so that the trash can be collected outside in the train stations and then transported into the incineration plant by train, reducing the amount of truck journeys considerably.

@BnFGProductions 12 дней назад

A lot of ash is produced when rubbish is incinerated. I imagine that landfills are more common than you think.

@frilansspion 11 дней назад

same here...seems so crazy that people still just bury trash and pretend its not there...or even make artificial islands of it as in Japan. No wonder theres microplastics everywhere

@callmeishmael7452 11 дней назад

When I was in Switzerland there were truckloads of trash constantly trucked to Italy.

@benfarrell3347 11 дней назад

Trading land pollution for air pollution. Not as good a brag as you intended. Even with pollution capture… still not the perfect solution.

@Isarddubois 11 дней назад

Same in The Netherlands. No space to create landfills.

@Feathertusk 4 дня назад

As someone who works in compliance this is a very positive perfect world take on the system. Many older landfills do not have proper barriers, and the gas and leachate have tendencies to leak out. It is important to keep in mind who does the dumping too, and there are landfills that contain toxins such as vinyl chloride and benzene. Landfills in remission with poor barriers need to have constant gas pull and constant leachate pull to stop off gasing and leaching. They also have to have the surface monitored for the same type of toxins coming through the top cover. Some cities have even allowed building of houses and apartments next to these kind of landfills. After what I've seen I would neither want to live near a landfill, nor go to a park at one. Landfills are toxic and are not safe even in remission, they are an unfortunate burden of the society we have built.

@ozarkcraftsman2784 9 дней назад

As a solid waste engineer designer/consultant in western NC, I really appreciated this video! Well done and enjoyed the summary of solid waste management and landfill design. Will be sharing with new engineers in the office that aren't familiar with the intricacies of landfill design!

@BensEcoAdvntr 12 дней назад

I’ve worked with landfills that accepted a bunch of old wallboard from demolished houses along with municipal waste. There were a lot more issues with hydrogen sulfide generation compared to other sites, requiring a special treatment system to capture the sulfur. Flaring it off creates huge amounts of SO2, which is an air quality issue. Another great episode!

@tizilogic 12 дней назад

Would be interesting to hear a comparison to countries that incinerate the trash. I remember when I was little and a waste disposal official from the region where I live came to our school and explained what happens with our trash and showed us what remained after the burning process. I assume that would still end up in some landfill afterwards (don't remember what they mentioned, given it was well over 30 years in the past).. I also recall them talking about filters on the smokestacks that extract toxins from the burning process.. So a comparison of the various approaches would be really interesting to learn about

@damnkris 12 дней назад

Landfills for incineratable thrash has been banned in Norway since 2009 (and loads of other European countries, but as I'm Norwegian that's what I know most about). The only things that are still landfilled are certain toxic substances, incineration ash and things like building materials that can't be incinerated (cement/rocks etc). Modern incineration plants filter out the almost all toxins, the only things released to the air in any significant way is CO2 (but CCS is being developed to capture that too). Based on a quick calculation I made, a modern incineration plant, like Klemetsrud in Oslo, per ton of incinerated waste, releases about 1 ton of CO2, 750 grams NOx, 250g SO2, 50g PM, and 0.5g Mercury.

@juz4kix 12 дней назад

I worked in a waste to energy plant. The ash went to constructing road beds.

@arglefargle123 12 дней назад

" that extract toxins from the burning process"... interesting. and then the toxins just magically disappear. don't have to put *them* anywhere.

@monad_tcp 12 дней назад

@@damnkris mercury is a problem. CO2 isn't a pollutant

@callmeishmael7452 11 дней назад

Toxins simply transform to gaseous state from solid. One is fooling oneself by thinking this is any kind of solution.

@migratingeagle5497 7 дней назад

First year after graduating with civil/environmental. These videos help me so much understand what my boss is talking about. Think one of the landfills final cover is literally just a thin layer of turf. Basically allows zero water in.

@ElectroTree01 12 дней назад

The first step to waste avoiding a landfill is to make it worth it and possible to reuse and, if that is not an option, recycle things. Even incinerating waste will allow us to be able to recover a lot of energy that would otherwise be unrecoverable, plus it allows metal to be easily separated out of our waste. Other inert debris(bricks, rocks, etc) may be too contaminated for it to be worth separating though.

@EthanPerkins-qq9qh 12 дней назад

I live near a trash incinerator and I know a few things: it reduces the garbage to 10% of the original volume. So it takes in about 100 truckloads a day, but still generates 10 truckloads a day of ash, that is brought to a landfill.

@themenacingpenguin.7152 9 дней назад

@@EthanPerkins-qq9qh I wonder if the ash can be used to lower costs in certain concrete constructions, I don't know the math or anything behind this but maybe if I figure this out I can find out how many Fallout 76 disks I can put in a concrete highway barrier.

@ElectroTree01 6 дней назад

@@EthanPerkins-qq9qh Interesting to know the size reduction. The trash is toxic anyways so I am thinking why not extract the energy and metals contained within it. The only reasons I can think of why more people don't do this is because of people who don't want to give a permit to an incineration facility and/or that a landfill is cheaper. But in the end, reduction is the best, reuse is the second best and the most practical, and recycling is the easiest but generates a lot more waste and loses the value of the original object(which is likely a lot higher than the produced one)

@EthanPerkins-qq9qh 6 дней назад

@ElectroTree01 Yes, it's absolutely true that reduce and reuse are the best options. We as consumers should buy high quality, long lasting, repairable things. We should also take the time to learn how to do simple repairs on the things we own. As far as the recycling goes, glass,metal, and cardboard are presently highly recycled. The big problem is plastics. We barely recycle any plastic. It is best to avoid plastic packaging if you can.

@EthanPerkins-qq9qh 6 дней назад

@ElectroTree01 To address your comment on incinerators, both of your thoughts are true: there was a lot of community pushback and anger when the incinerator was put in, and it costs far more to dump a truckload at the burner than the landfill. A truckload at the burner costs close to a thousand dollars, that same load costs about 400 dollars to dump at the landfill. (I work for a garbage company)

@misteral9045 12 дней назад

Wastewater treatment operator here. I used to work at a ~3 million gallons/day plant that was primarily landfill leachate. Interesting comparisons: -the collection system was not a main with branches but a grid of 138 vaults (50,000gal each) that were selectively opened as they filled up >treatment plants are designed to remove certain pollutants, usually it's 1-2 pages long, this one was a full 7 pages >we had to test solid waste from the treatment process (basically dead bacteria, spongy dirt) for radioactivity just in case >we had a contract with the local municipal/residental waste plant to buy their wastewater (the pipes were in place for them to send us water) in order for us to dilute the landfill leachate >we had a very long treatment process because each step was basically done twice (two aerobic tanks, two anoxic, two filters, etc) in order to meet pollutant removal requirements >the plant would frequently flood and lose power when it rained really hard because the sewer main was used as a backup to the storm drain and the local power plant was poorly made, a common problem in the east coast

@ocko8011 12 дней назад

WW treatment plants never seem to be sized with enough reserve capacity to handle anything more than 25 year storms. In the Midwest many WW plants have outright refused to take landfill leachate due to PFOS/PHAS. Trash and liquids should be kept as separate as possible.

@misteral9045 12 дней назад

@@ocko8011 You have zero idea what you're talking about. Treatment plants are never designed with reserves (fermenting waste = bio and explosive hazards), the state will either force private companies to take it or build public plants (to comply with federal or self regulation), and PFOS/PFAS have been banned for 60 years, not to mention being relatively simple to treat.

@rhuttrho88 12 дней назад

I worked on a garbage truck for a temp service. We went to the landfill multiple times. On one route we went back to the same streets to get recyclables. I actually got a little happy, because I thought I would see the recycling center. We went right back to the landfill!🤦🏿‍♂️ why even have people separate their trash if you are going to dump it all in the exact same spot?🤷🏿‍♂️

@woody442 12 дней назад

Because people buy it. "We have it under control" is what you're ought to believe. The existence of landfills on their own prove we have no clue how to properly handle our waste. And by burying our trash we have lost the connection to the problem and are teaching the population to just go on. Stupidity is bliss.

@lukasnopi6359 12 дней назад

To build a habit when one is built

@SecureLemons 12 дней назад

because "climate change" in 2020 is like "pollution" in 2010. thats to say that people genuinely thought recycling would "save the planet"

@xungnham1388 12 дней назад

Did you pay attention to any conversation between the driver and dump workers? or notice if you dumped the recyclables to the same spot as the trash? Many municipalities have recycling sorted at the dump. It makes sense to do so because some of those recyclables are not actually recyclable and sorted into trash. There's a whole continuum of how much processing gets done at the municipal level. Depending on the grade they are able to achieve, It gets sold and moved around to other processors or it gets trashed if there are no buyers.

@kaboom4679 12 дней назад

It's the grift that keeps on grifting .

@wa495 7 дней назад

Mt. Trashmore in Virginia Beach is an old landfill that was turned into a city park decades ago. I remember when they did a core sample of the hill to test the degradation of the waste. I was in high school at the time and we went to see it done. We were expecting recognizable trash from the 50s or something like that. It looked like just dirt with rust in it.

@ReddFoxx1562 19 часов назад

I'm really surprised Trashmore wasn't mentioned!

@andrewv5104 12 дней назад

I designed and was the resident project representative for a landfill project. At the beginning of the project the Contractor sup was saying "we're building a landfill not a piano". To mean how hard can this be it's a hole in the ground. By the end of the project i head him say "Man i wish we were building a piano".

@Oddman1980 12 дней назад

When I was a kid growing up in Virginia, there was a landfill that had been turned into a park. "Mt. Trashmore" is what they called it. There's a funny story about it - in 1990 or thereabouts, on April 1st, two radio announcers made a joke that Mt. Trashmore was going to explode due to a "buildup of methane". Residents were told to look out for low-flying dirt clods. The station was fined $10,000 for this "joke", and before you place all of the blame on the radio station, it's worth noting that this was a funny morning radio show. It would be like Roy D. Mercer making such a claim. Anyone with half a brain in the area knew this, and that "Tommy and the Bull" weren't AP News. But the Virginia Beach police got so many calls from people worried about Mt Trashmore that the city felt "something" needed to be done.

@LanceThumping 12 дней назад

One of my favorite things is seeing value and purpose extracted from even the smallest or most worthless thing. So seeing generators running off the trash and the land reused for parks is fantastic. Though I do wish we had a better system of separation to extract even more i.e. burnables going to generation plants, organics going to digestors, metals getting pulled out. Ideally we'd have no need for landfills because that's really the roughest way to put something back in the cycle but it's good to see us managing to make them a bit better.

@seanworkman431 12 дней назад

Plastic is made from oil, may as well burn that too.

@LanceThumping 12 дней назад

@@seanworkman431 For a good portion of it, I agree. I've heard there is a lot of fake recycling and just general lack of interest because it doesn't really maintain quality. So we'd be better off burning it and switching our plastic source from oil to plant based sources. As long as the exhaust is properly treated, then I don't see it being worse than coal or gas plants.

@brianbrewster6532 День назад

Many many moons ago I was a Geology major in Bloomsburg State College. Anyhow, on a field trip from my Environmental Geology class, we explored a local landfill. We talked about many of these issues you mentioned and we all were surprised to learn just how delicate & complex the safe disposal of municipal waste was and how dire the consequences could be for local residents should things go awry. Your content and presentation was top notch so I gladly subscribed.

@ElectroTree01 12 дней назад

Interesting as always. The process that generates h2s and ch4 is anaerobic digestion of organic waste. It is more expensive to put it in a specialized digestion facility but instead of the digestate(essentially fertilizer) being contaminated and becoming leachate, it is able to remain as digestate and act as fertilizer.

@Moshca 12 дней назад

14:45 yeah, I'd love it if things lasted longer than just after the warranty period is over

@mynameisben123 10 дней назад

Are you happy to pay maybe several times the price?

@jajefan123456789 9 дней назад

@mynameisben123 Yes, because if it lasts several times longer than the cheaper version, then I’ve essentially paid the same, no?

@csibesz07 9 дней назад

If only there was law to make the product repairable by design, by third party...

@LunamrathP 9 дней назад

@@mynameisben123 I would personally love to return to more expensive but longer lasting products.

@mynameisben123 9 дней назад

@@jajefan123456789 well in many categories they exist and usually they are the least sold products. So maybe you like this (as do I) but overwhelmingly people do not, as demonstrated by their purchasing preferences.

@kartikg.kartikg 10 дней назад

I am studying Landfills management and this video is uploaded yesterday. Excellent timing !

@sethcoleman8675 2 дня назад

I bought new windshield wipers for my truck today after the old ones fell apart. The new ones came in a plastic sleeve that used more plastic than the wipers themselves. Reduce is the step we really are missing.

@Zt3v3 12 дней назад

A few miles from me a developer built a subdivision on top of a old landfill. 5 years ago was a very wet year and several of the homes slid off the hill. The homeowners had no idea that was what their homes were built on, and homeowners insurance doesn't cover soil movement.....many of the folks have big mortgages and no home.

@Rorschach1024 12 дней назад

I smell a lawsuit....

@FLF20M2 12 дней назад

Insurance companies will literally refuse to sell you the insurance you need. Live on a hill side? No landslides coverd. Live in a flood zone? No flood insurance. Live in the mountains? No avalanches for you. Live at the coast? No storm and hurricane damage.

@PatriotBelgica 12 дней назад

@@FLF20M2i think thats illegal. You have the right to be insured

@sgtjonzo 12 дней назад

@@PatriotBelgicamoney talks

@FLF20M2 12 дней назад

@@PatriotBelgica What are you gonna do, if the flood insurance is then magically a $3000 premium?

@g.e.fourie5672 12 дней назад

Please make a video on the design, construction, maintenance, and failures of tailings dams. And as always, keep up the great content!!

@TheDaniel366Cobra 12 дней назад

Red mud floods? Yes please.

@Alex_Plante 11 дней назад

Many landfills are in former sand or gravel quarries, so you do not have to dig a hole specifically for the landfill. The life cycle goes like this: Quarry -> Landfill -> Park.

@jerrykeeder2007 9 дней назад

Hey we have something like that here in Allen park near an old clay mining pit that ford used for their car models, it was Quarry -> Landfill -> Mall

@dkchef 8 дней назад

We have a now closed landfill that is an inner city recreation area with a ski hill. We call it Mount Garb-age (like mirage). If you say it with a French accent, it sounds much more attractive and inviting.

@Defender90210 8 дней назад

how is it a cycle if you dont end where you started?

@Alex_Plante 8 дней назад

@@Defender90210 Interesting point. It's more of an arc.

@TonyRule 7 дней назад

@@Defender90210 Starts and ends as publicly accessible recreational land.

@CrowScareify 4 дня назад

This was such an unbelievably cool video. As someone who has lived in places and studied places around the world that manage waste really poorly it was fascinating to learn about good ways to manage trash!

@zacpitteloud6066 12 дней назад

In Switzerland everything is incinerated, it reduces the waste volume a lot, but we have to store the ashes.

@blahsomethingclever 12 дней назад

Those ashes can be used in concrete or turned into glass as gravel for roads.

@ralfrudiger7276 12 дней назад

send it to africa

@georgeherman9953 12 дней назад

Incineration is more polluting than landfills. Incinerators do not avoid landfills. For every 100 tons of trash burned, 30 tons become toxic ash that goes to landfills.

@zephawisher 12 дней назад

@@ralfrudiger7276😂😂😂😂😂

@AliasHSW 12 дней назад

@@blahsomethingclever- I believe there a Swiss company doing that type of concrete research

@chrisceykovsky 12 дней назад

I'd like more details or a further series on this topic. It affect everyone and I think most of us are pretty ignorant to the details of landfills - even though we all probably live relatively close to one.

@humppanen9130 8 дней назад

Lookin at your landfills there, I'm glad that my country forbid any organic waste from landfills in 2016.

@mcsenn 4 дня назад

Plastic is really the big difference here. We are 3 guys sailing from Denmark to Caribien, we wash and put plastic aside so when we get to land we can throw it away in a trash bin. Metal and organic matter just get over the side into the sea, metal cans sink and goes to the sea bottom where it over time disappear, food waste or organic matter like paper get eaten or dissolve in the water. But the big difference here is the plastic, we (humans) need to rethink plastic and how to get rid of it. We know where and how far away from a cost we have to be to do this, we follow the rules to take care of the nature around us. Just like we are some of the leading in waste handling globally. Nice video, hope it makes a lot of sense to others put there. Surely the world needs to know more and be better at this 🤞🏼

@bro5846 3 дня назад

yes biodegradable plastic is a must! We will be very lucky indeed if it turns out plastic only has a small impact on our health. Over time, plastic gets smaller and smaller in size and is eventually EVERYWHERE. In your blood stream, in mother's placenta while she is pregnant! I sound like a mad man but study after study shows this to be true. not so fun fact: Microplastic impact on human health, is almost impossible to study because there are no control groups: Plastic contaminates ALL SPECIMENS so there's no possible way to compare a contaminated one to a clean one. Nobody is clean, everybody lives with microplastics. I think it's insidious and concerning yet people don't seem to be worried at all. What if they make living beings infertile? There's microplastic literally everywhere and we only continue to dump it into our environment. Eventually we will be drowning in the stuff. bio "plastic" that breaks down organically is essential. It's a shame that big changes like this don't tend to happen until the consequences are already apparent and many people have been injured. I try to avoid microplastics where I can. No more bottled water. We live in a very sick, very toxic society.

@dembro27 12 дней назад

The only landfill park I’ve been to is Mount Trashmore, and if it weren’t for the name, I would’ve never guessed it was a mountain of garbage. That’s the whole point, but it’s nice that it works.

@Alfred-Neuman 12 дней назад

I'm from Montreal and not too far from where I live they discovered that people are living over an old landfill site. The funny thing is that nobody knew about this but over times people were finding some clues, like someone digging a hole and finding old bricks and piles of coal, etc... At some point the newspapers found some old maps and they discovered that after the year 1900 a large clay mining site got used as a landfill. If you walked now in this neighbourhood you'd never notice anything about it, it's just a normal place with a park and lots of apartments. Of course you can say this was a from a long time ago but these people are still living over a huge pile of garbage.

@kindlin 10 дней назад

If you've been to many parks, you've probably been to a lot more landfill parks than you thought. To your point, if the name didn't have 'trash' in the name, you would right now confidently claim you'd been to 0 landfill parks.

@adhdengineer 12 дней назад

me a software engineer @ 4:05 "Look I know my code isnt always the best, but to call it trash..."

@BrendonGreenNZL 8 дней назад

Don't throw code away! Do you have any idea what's involved with safe disposal of a biohazardous bit-bucket?

@cersos 12 дней назад

That snapping fingers intro music is so Grady. Never change it.

@steved8610 4 дня назад

Being a dedicated waste industry worker for many years, I enjoyed watching your video on the topic of landfills. Here in Melbourne, Victoria in Australia. I used to empty around 20 tonnes of garbage almost everyday at the 'Melbourne Regional Landfill' in Ravenhall. I hated going to this place during rainy days, it would not only become slippery and dangerous on the tip face, you'd make an absolute mess of your truck daily (a clean freak's nightmare). On the tip face, you'll see rebar poking out from the waste below you, ready to puncture your tyres. Shredded and processed medical waste and who knows else. I agree with you in the sense that landfills are essential to society. But we also must bear in mind that landfills are an ancient means of disposing of waste. Dig a hole, throw all the garbage in there and forget about it. Humans been doing this for many thousands of years. I am belief that there are better ways of dealing with our waste, such as further emphasising on the 3 R's as well as Waste to Energy plants which can make better use of our waste. My country Australia is indeed technologically behind the world, especially in terms of alternative solid waste treatment/disposal. But one day we will get there😊

@doogiemcdougster6740 12 дней назад

How timely! I was driving past our county landfill just yesterday and saw they were in the middle of implementing some kind of elaborate hillside drainage (?) system with large areas of industrial black plastic sheeting like at 14:19 . I'm guessing it was their garbage juice collection system! I was going to Google 'landfill design', but now I won't have to. 🙂

@lordofbanana6869 12 дней назад

As a swiss citizen i'm shocked by the concept alone. Here we burn it, filter the smoke to such a high standard that only some white smoke appears and the air doesn't smell weird near the treatment facility and we use the heat from the burning to generate electricity.

@hinkypunk7073 12 дней назад

I had exactly the same thought! :D (I'm also a swiss citizen)

@Unmannedair 12 дней назад

Yeah this is a much better idea. Landfills are literally wasted resources. And to boot, quite literally everything that goes into a landfill is recyclable at some level. It just requires a certain degree of engineering. It can even be self-sufficient in providing the energy required to recycle the materials...

@jonatanwestholm 12 дней назад

If recycling becomes much cheaper in the future thanks to robots, then landfills might go from a liability to an asset. So it's not obviously better to burn the resources right away.

@urishima 12 дней назад

Well, you don't exactly have the luxury of space, now do you.

@MatthewBakke 12 дней назад

With enough density that becomes a more and more attractive option.

@Yojibby 12 дней назад

13:02 there’s a park in my city called “Mt. Trashmore” and it used to be a landfill

@ironbond0073 12 дней назад

Just chilling here in Cedar Rapids

@ToyInsanity 12 дней назад

I went to Mt Trashmore in VA. Apparently there is one in IL and FL also.

@matthewvonarx1181 12 дней назад

Live right near Mt. Trashmore in VA Beach, the place is great

@alexharshman7025 10 дней назад

I just live in a city…….. it’s kind of trashy.

@DanCampbellKneecaps 8 дней назад

Just went golfing on an old landfill the other day

@jdude9922 5 дней назад

Therea an old landfill near where I live. It's now covered in trees and mountain bike trails. What was once trash has tuned into a lovely place to spend a Saturday morning.

@Vastafari34 12 дней назад

I'd Love to see a video where you discuss the various types of trailers that Semi trucks can tow. You know, similar to how you did that video on train cars!

@cruisinguy6024 12 дней назад

There's so, so, so many different types of semi trailers - most of which are pretty self apparent

@Vastafari34 12 дней назад

My son and I always see these crazy looking tankers, different from your standard fuel oil tankers, and wonder what the heck they're hauling.

@cruisinguy6024 12 дней назад

@@Vastafari34 You can can get a physical copy or download a copy of the Emergency Response Guidebook....or simply use a search engine to look up any warning placard on a trailer. While it won't tell you the exact products within it'll give you an awareness of what type of product is in the trailer and what, if any, danger it poses.

@Vastafari34 12 дней назад

@@cruisinguy6024 I know the placards can tell you what in a trailer, but i'm talking more about how the trailers are designed and why they are that way for the loads they carry.

@Vastafari34 12 дней назад

I think it would be easy for Grady to come up with a list of lets say 10 or 15 trailer designs and explain how they are optimized for their intended loads, and I bet it would be really interesting.

@GuantesBlancos 11 дней назад

In my city, the most famous park is on top of a closed landfill. I've been there many times, and you can't tell what it was without anyone telling you!

@BATTLESTAR42 12 дней назад

I would have loved if he also included a real life example of a completed landfill park. Here in Virginia there is a large park literally called Mt. Trashmore that is a very nice park with a man made lake.

@djnor1979 День назад

As someone with engineering blood, i love Your videos. Most of the facts i knew already, but this is a really complete oversight of the procedure. Thanks! Keep up the good work!

@ilovetotri23 11 дней назад

I have been to a recycling center trying to find a wallet, and deposit bag worth thousands of dollars. That recycling center went out of there way to help me! I dug through the recycling and it all looked like trash. I found my wallet and the deposit bag, my life was saved...many years later I had to discard an old sofa. My only option was to buy a pass to the top of landfill. I bought my ticket, I had no idea what to do, but when I reached the top I was dumbstruck! My feet were sinking in...I have always had a strong appreciation for the environment, since that visit I have started to see so many landfills around my travels. I have wondered what truly happens in them. Thank you.

@jimmygervaisnet 11 дней назад

10:29 the forbidden ravioli ☠️

@carloseddy1005 12 дней назад

I worked in a pet crematorium that was built on an old reclaimed land (50 - 60's landfill) When they dug holes for the mass ash burial ,6 foot down they hit the old landfill rubbish , still in the same state it was in when it was buried. You could read the writing on any paper work/newspapers etc , the black plastic bags were still black plastic bags and any thing else was as it was when it was put there.

@sc1338 12 дней назад

That’s kinda cool, thinking it’s all just waiting down there lol

@sandrinakeffufal6008 12 дней назад

Wow that's amazing. A true time capsule. I suppose that it's sunlight that mostly breaks things down, or sunlight is required for the micro-organisms to live in order to break things down. Or maybe it's oxygen that's missing.

@Barkainian 11 часов назад

i really respect the amount of diligence you have in doing your homework and breaking it down so others can understand.

@daved3494 8 дней назад

I'm an engineer and I find all of your videos fascinating. I always learn something, generally a lot. Nothing much happens without engineers.

@fritslyneborg 12 дней назад

Coming from Denmark this all sounds prehistoric

@designtechdk 12 дней назад

Sandt

@rpetty 12 дней назад

You are so advanced over there. We praise you.

@maura423 12 дней назад

It is prehistoric. Humans have been doing this since humans have been.

@fritslyneborg 10 дней назад

@@maura423 No, many countries only did it for a while before moving on to recycling end to end.

@digimaks 9 дней назад

This seems strange how in US you guys just dump trash into landfill. Since Soviet Union till present- in Russia we got garbage processing facilities, which take trash from garbage trucks, sort out plastics, glass and metals from the trash, and only then send it off to landfill, and recyclable materials to recycling facilities. It helps allot in saving space in landfill. Here in States a HUGE drawback - you got allot of plastic products and plastic packaging and by-products, but you are not recycling it - it all goes into regular trash. This is nuts!

@eucalyptus_ribose 8 дней назад

i think we live in different Russias. Landfills are full of recyclable waste and it is too expensive to try to sort it (tho i was working on a "experimental" landfill where was a sorting line. Still most part of garbage was recyclable: my least favorite were tree branches)

@JasonLeCompte 8 дней назад

Plastic is not recyclable, you've been told a lie

@eucalyptus_ribose 8 дней назад

@@JasonLeCompte well, partly it is. Into much worse materials and harder then producing new products - yeah

@jamesreid7213 5 дней назад

It’s interesting to see a video about landfills that is not talking about their evils but the many ways they benefit us. Thanks, it was fascinating

@Hauntercry 12 дней назад

Here in Finland we dont have landfills anymore and we are slowly cleaning out the old ones

@IAmPGZW 12 дней назад

How are you dealing with waste?

@Hauntercry 12 дней назад

@@IAmPGZW Metal, glass, plastic packaging, organic waste, electornics, paper, cardboard etc all are separately collected and recycled. The rest that goes into bins is burned and turned into electricity or heat that is transferred to local buildings with huge waterheatpipes