Landfill Preparation and Methane Gas Plants

Landfill Preparation

Landfills must be prepared to accept the trash. A landfill that is being prepared to collect trash is called a Cell. First, using a bulldozers and other large machines, they excavated a huge pit. A cell takes five years to prepare a landfill but only 2 to 3 years to fill it up with garbage. A landfill  can collect around 10,000 tons of trash a day, this is why recycling is so important.

Methane Gas Plants

The methane gas is produced from buried trash.  This gas is then converted to usable natural gas that helps to heat over 20,000 home. A company  process 9 million cubic

feet of gas daily. Four and a half million cubic feet of gas is used as natural gas.

The gas recovery process involves four steps:

• The gas is compressed and dried
• Pre-treatment stage: Volatile organic compounds are removed
• Pressure swing absorption:Carbon dioxide is removed
• product compression: The treated gas is compressed before entering the power plant’s substation
• The well field collection system are designed to operate the gas plants to full capacity.

       Well field collection systems

     - Wells are drilled 150 to 200 feet apart and 100 feet deep, and they are linked to the         

        plant’s header collection system

• The width of the boreholes allows methane gas to build up before entering the pipes
• Perforated holes covering 50 percent of each pipe allow gas to enter
• Stone located around and above the perforated areas acts as a gas migration point 

           filtering dirt and trash

• Two gel seals and dirt lie above the rock to prevent gas from migrating up through 

          borehole

• A wellhead system containing an orifice plate and valve measures gas flow in an out 

         the well

Reference

Rumpke Recycling- Landfill Gas Recycling At Rumpke

Sanitary Landfill Near Cincinnati

A Landfill Tour

RUMPKE RECYCLING

A 45 minutes educational tour of a landfill 10 people. The landfill make people take a different look or appreciate at their garbage man. Prior to hearing about recycling most people could care less about a garbage man’s job which was simply a waste of time. Its wasn’t important enough to be considered a real job.

The group learned that one residential garbage collector may have 500 houses on their route in one day. They also showed us their truck washing station and their wheel wash. I never realized a garbage truck had to be wash or kept clean, but not we all understand why. 

Landfill maintenance is a daily responsibility. They also use large yellow water tanks to spray water throughout the landfill. Water is sprayed to keep the dust,  produced at a minimum. Its  really hard for them keeping the dust, odors and debris at a minimum. The odors can be extremely unpleasant. 

Trash sometime escapes the landfill, to keep this at a minimum landfill operators would use large screen. They even have workers that would collect the escaping plastic bags and other trash that’s caught in the wind.

At the end of the tour we all made a promise to use recycle shopping bags and return any plastic grocery bags back to the grocery store recycling bin. 

Reference

Family Friendly Cincinnati (http://familyfriendlycincinnati.com/category/family-friendly-fyi/)

Green Cars

The high cost of gas persuaded me to so some research on ecocars. There are a number of green cars available today: Hybrid, Electric, Hydrogen, Solar cars. Many auto manufacturers are producing more green cars, making for a better future outlook. Typically, green cars do at least one of two things: produce a smaller than average quantity of harmful emissions or use less petrochemicals to get the job done, says Ron Cogan, editor and publisher of the Green Car Journal. And some models -- like the advanced technology hybrids -- do both."From our perspective, a green car is a vehicle that has improved smog-forming emissions and reduced emissions of heat-trapping gases that cause global warming,"he says. "And a big part of that is also choosing a car with good fuel economy."

Green cars are becoming more popular as we realize the need for greener cars. When looking for an eco friendly car you should look at the CO2 emissions to check how green the car actually is. Any car with less than 100 g/km CO2 emissions is a pretty good car. Another way to tell if a car is eco friendly is by looking at the tax band; the lower the band the better. There are now a lot of cars in the market now that cost nothing to tax because of their low CO2 emission.www.petrolprices.com/green-guide.html

ELECTRIC CAR

The TWIKE’s operation may seem unusual at first but it is easy to learn. If you have no prior experience we suggest you practice on side streets or parking lots or in low traffic conditions. Thus you can concentrate on your steering and control skills without the distraction of other vehicles--and then gradually venture out onto “real” roads.

Responsibility for safe, sensible operation and handling of this vehicle is with the driver. We recommend a restrained style of driving in order to minimize the risk of accidents. On streets with pedestrian traffic take care to drive slowly (less than 30km/h) because the TWIKE is barely audible to others--in contrast to internal combustion vehicles. The operating voltage of the battery module is  336 V DC.  High voltage!  Thus, the battery enclosure should only be serviced by specially trained Twike personnel. There are no battery related user-serviceable components.The vehicle charges from a 230 V AC service outlet.  Outlets and connectors should not be exposed to dampness and should be GFCI protected.

                                                                HYDROGEN CAR

What makes a hydrogen car possible is a device called a fuel cell, which converts hydrogen to electricity, giving off only heat and water as byproducts. Because it's non-polluting, hydrogen seems like the ideal fuel for the 21st century. A lot of people in the government and the auto industry are excited about its potential. Hydrogen cars have the potential to be fuel-efficient and offer the hope of eco-friendly, green driving. But there are still a lot of problems that need to be overcome and questions that need to be answered before hydrogen becomes the fuel of choice for enough people to make much difference in our current use of fossil fuels. For instance, where will we get the hydrogen? How expensive will these fuel-efficient cars be to purchase? Will you be able to find a hydrogen fuelling station to refill your tank? And, perhaps most importantly, as a fuel, is hydrogen really as non-polluting as it seems?

                                                                    HYBRID CAR

One of the most recognized Hybrids on the road, the Toyota Prius is designed for fuel efficiency and ultra low emissions. What goes on under the hood to give you 20 or 30 more miles per gallon than the standard automobile? And does it pollute less just because it gets better gas mileage? In this article, we'll help you understand how this technology works, and we'll even give you some tips on how to drive a hybrid car for maximum efficiency.Most hybrid cars on the road right now are gasoline-electric hybrids, although French car maker PSA Peugeot Citroen has two diesel-electric hybrid cars in the works. Since gasoline hybrids are the kind you'll find at your local car dealership, we'll focus on those in this article.

SOLAR- POWERED CAR

GM's Cadillac Provoq concept features a rooftop solar panel that provides power for the vehicle's accessories.© GM Corp.

Pros and Cons of Solar-powered Cars

While they are still a possibility, solar-powered cars are a long way off. There are a number of practical problems with solar-powered cars. Most importantly, it's difficult for the car's solar array to gather enough power to move the car. That's why most solar race cars only carry one person -- the extra weight of a passenger would tax the car's power.The way solar cars gather and store power is also a big issue. Solar power makes sense for buildings, the space station and even satellites because those structures are regularly exposed to the sun. These applications also have the ability to use batteries to store the energy the sun generates. A large battery pack -- with enough storage to power the car from sunset to sunrise -- would make an electric car far too heavy, so a solar-powered car must be in the sun at nearly all times to be effective. That means solar-powered cars aren't very practical if you're in a tunnel, a covered parking garage or even if it's cloudy. Building rooftops, the space station and satellites also have the space for much bigger, more powerful solar arrays that allow them to gather more energy. For a car to harness the equivalent amount of energy, the vehicle proportions would have to be huge.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com

www.bankrate.com/brm/news/auto/car-guide-2004/green-cars1.asp

www.petrolprices.com/green-guide.html

GOING GREEN POEM

Oh you trucks and cars
With your polluting ways
Change to hybrid
It’s better to save
And all you people
Littering the ground
Killing our whales
Their death rates are going down
None of you care
How you’re damaging our world
Looking at the trash
Makes me wanna hurl
Some of you want to save our place
But others oh you others
Polluting with your waste
So help save our world
The place where we live
And go green with your items
Because you get what you give!

This poem was written/submitted by Kendal Ihejirika

www.sweetrhymes.com/nature-poems/going-green/

CONVERTING TRASH INTO ELECTRICITY

According to The New York Times, new energy plants across Denmark and other European countries are converting trash into heat and electricity. Dozen of filters catch pollutants, from mercury to dioxin, that would have emerged from its smokestack only a decade ago. such plants have become both the mainstay of garbage disposal and a crucial fuel source across Denmark. Their use has not only reduced the country’s energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Denmark now regards garbage as a clean alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem.

The author writes, by contrast, no new waste-to-energy plants are being planned or built in the United States, the Environmental protection Agency says- even though the federal government and 24 states now classify waste that is burned this way for energy as a renewable fuel, in many cases eligible for subsidies. There are only 87 trash-burning power plants in the United States, a country of more than 300 million people, and almost all were built at least 15 years ago. 

“Europe has gotten out ahead with this newest technology,” said Ian A. Bowles, a former clinton administration official.





Kevin Hand writes, How does it works: Startech's trash converter uses superheated plasma-an electrically conductive mass of charged particles (ions and electrons) generated from ordinary air-to reduce garbage to its molecular components.  First the trash is fed into an auger that shreds it into small pieces. Then the mulch is delivered into the plasma chamber, where the superheated plasma converts it into two by-products.  One is syngas composed mostly of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which is fed into the adjacent Starcell system to be converted into fuel.  The other is molten glass that can be sold for use in household tiles or road asphalt.


Reference:

www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/science/earth/13trash.html?pagewanted=all

http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/behar/

Fresh Kills, Staten Island Landfill

Jack with his fellow classmates are on a trip at the Fresh Kills landfill. The science teacher, Mr. Palmer wanted them to understand the affect a landfill has on the earth. Mr. Palmer escorted the students to the west side of the landfill, so they could get a better visual perspective of this enormous mountain of accumulated waste. Some of the smart students pulled their camera out to take pictures. Then Mr. Palmer said, "according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States has 3,091 active landfills and over 10,000 old municipal landfills."


References:

www.hazardous.zerowasteamerica.org/Landfills.htm

Youtube.com Fresh Kills, Staten and fill

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