Posted by Snow in 
Dumpster Deadlock
East Coast trash problems are causing plants to run into overdrive just as the need to reduce energy is paramount. The war on pollution means shutting down pollution problem incinerators. Burning versus burial for trash has been a debate that many environmental watchdogs have fallen on either side of.
Burying trash causes groundwater contamination and future inhibition of residential settlement, and the transportation cost and gas emissions can contribute to local pollution air quality problems. But burning the trash causes immediate problems of vapor and particulate ash in the air.
New York City may be the Big Apple but it carts out eight million tons of trash each year, and that’s one city. Landfills of Virginia and Pennsylvania absorb this burden. A far off landfill is always going to be a more pleasant answer than local burning, for reasons that are clear even if the resulting sky would not be.
The reason landfills became adopted so widely was that garbage incineration polluted so markedly any solution for waste removal was embraced.
The incinerators that have been conventionally used for this purpose are not the incinerators of today.
Capturing methane from landfill wastes does occur, but power captured from garbage incineration today is a new industry. Energy is always a commodity, but waste to energy technologies are now possible to be installed and utilized as a measure of sustainable living and newly green community management principles.
Hence the driving need behind more sustainable living in the consumption side of the living cycle. If the population of the United States could underproduce today’s garbage volumes by 50%, then burning and burying volumes could be accommodated in more green friendly ways. Whether or not trash incineration can be classed as a renewable source of energy in future is not clear. What is clear is the rationale behind so many tips and hints to live green and maintain a more sustainable home without excess waste.
The ideal solution for the East Coast of the United States is to reduce garbage volume, decrease trucking and transportation of trash, and find alternate ways to dispose of trash without polluting immediate or landfill environments.
Long Island and New Jersey are filled with people whose legacy of growing up in America includes a harsh environmental accent of an overly packaged, overly consumerist society too reliant on garbage trucks and faraway landfills to see the road ahead.
If the green living movement forges ahead, some day maybe citizens of New Jersey won’t shake flakes off their jackets in summer when the landfills are too far away to truck the rubbish. Maybe Long Island will be more famous for iced tea than garbage. And maybe the residential requirements of land development for tomorrow’s people won’t be hunting for a clean space in a mountain of landfill sites.
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