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A gas flare produced by a landfill in Lake County, Ohio. Landfill gas is a mix of different gases created by the action of microorganisms within a landfill as they decompose organic waste, including for example, food waste and paper waste. Landfill gas is approximately forty to sixty percent methane, with the remainder being mostly carbon dioxide.
Landfills take up a lot of land and pose environmental risks. Some landfill sites are used for waste management purposes, such as temporary storage, consolidation and transfer, or for various stages of processing waste material, such as sorting, treatment, or recycling.
Zero waste, or waste minimization, is a set of principles focused on waste prevention that encourages redesigning resource life cycles so that all products are repurposed (i.e. "up-cycled") and/or reused. The goal of the movement is to avoid sending trash to landfills, incinerators, oceans, or any other part of the environment.
Class Two landfills can accept waste that tests at less than 10 times the maximum contaminant levels. Any waste that can decay must be removed from Class Two landfills within 72 hours.
Decomposing waste in these landfills produces landfill gas, which is a mixture of about half methane and half carbon dioxide. Landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions in the United States, with municipal solid waste landfills representing 95 percent of this fraction. [15] [16]
At the point of collection such waste is often referred to as green waste. [6] Removing such waste from the rest of the waste stream substantially reduces waste volumes for disposal and also allows biodegradable waste to be composted. Biodegradable waste can be used for composting or a resource for heat, electricity and fuel by means of ...
Landfills are the primary method of waste disposal in many parts of the world, including United States and Canada.Bioreactor landfills are expected to reduce the amount of and costs associated with management of leachate, to increase the rate of production of methane (natural gas) for commercial purposes and reduce the amount of land required for land-fills.
Leachate from a landfill varies widely in composition depending on the age of the landfill and the type of waste that it contains. [1] [2] It usually contains both dissolved and suspended material. The generation of leachate is caused principally by precipitation percolating through waste deposited in a