How Do We Solve Our Trash Problem?

By Author: John
Total Articles: 18
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Plastic bags are good at holding groceries but how are they empower us most of us don't think so much about trash especially if we live in an industrialized country where we get a curbside pickup but here are some important statistics 32% of municipal waste is recycled another 13% is incinerated and that leaves the rest which is over 50% or a thousand pounds per year per American citizen to sit in the landfill to decompose or not decompose. You see most metals and plastics can take thousands of years to break down in landfills and because we have future generations on the way and they're going to be generating their own waste this is something we have to think about. Well, how does the stuff get to the landfill in the first place there are some places I've gotten a little creative with this like Helsinki Finland they're building out a system of pneumatic tubes so what you do is you sort your waste and you put it in various bins or chutes and then it flies through these tubes to screw tanks there are other places like Roosevelt Island New York that are doing the same thing but the one ...
... in Finland has some special features, for example, those tanks have sensors on them so they can alert you to when those tanks are full and a crew can come out and empty it out.
They also can track where the trash comes from that's important it means that they know who is generating the most garbage like a manufacturing plant and those people get charged more for collection services but that still leaves us with the problem of what to do with all these landfills and liftoff no we're not going to shoot it out into space that doesn't make economic sense the environmental impact would be terrible.
I mean you might as well pay people a million dollars to pour a gallon of oil in the nearest river but an idea that is getting some traction is plasma gasification in this process extremely high voltage electrical current is passed between two electrodes generating a temperature near 25,000 degrees Fahrenheit that's hotter than the surface of the Sun because this process takes place in a no oxygen environment.
There's no actual burning going on here instead that energy is breaking down the molecular bonds of the trash itself freeing the component atoms they become either a synthetic gas or molten slag and here's the really awesome part that synthetic gas can actually be turned into fuel that will run the plasma waste converter itself and if you generate enough synthetic gas you can actually generate enough electricity to feedback into the power grid and what about the landfill that's not in a landfill there are islands of plastic floating in the ocean like one in the Pacific that's about the size of Texas what do we do about those bacteria are really good at getting rid of stuff could we use that a student in Canada back in 2008 tried to do just that and isolated the bacteria and found that it could break down plastic in about three to four months.
But whether you could make that a large-scale operation is another question maybe the solution is a new design biopolymers plastic not made of corn but from bacteria, with a half-life of eighteen months we're talking plastics that actually biodegrade at the sea now the Nano optimists out there say that nanotechnology will save us will create these little nanobots that will break the garbage down into its component at and as for me personally I think the best kind of trash is no trash at all we've got a question for you how would you solve the trash problem.