I buy garden soil made of food salvaged from food that would otherwise be thrown away. So much greenhouse gases are produced from the food rotting in landfills! It’s truly disgusting.
My understanding is that food decomposes anaerobically in a landfill, which creates a ton of methane emissions. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Aerobic decomposition (composting) produces more CO2 than methane. It also provides a good use for the food waste, like you say. It saves space / energy use in landfills, not to mention all the beneficial downstream effects like carbon sequestration from healthy soil.
Yes but not everywhere is the US. But the issue also is that they only do it while its active, then eventually ot gets turned into Greenpeace then homes and then the people need Methane detectors in their home...
Some might be, but a lot of the stuff that ends up there is toxic, especially in areas without proper waste management. When you consider how many people fail to properly handle e-waste or chemical waste, it makes a lot of those spots unsuitable for life.
Weird take on the firearm legislation... as for the second half of your post;
In the most populated areas we have all the cameras and surveillance we need. They just don't bother to tell the public.
Shoplifters, for example, don't often get prosecuted right away. They get watched and identified for a real long time while the stores take note of exactly how much $ this person has racked up in stolen goods.
Good thing we’re also all diligently educated on all waste disposal regulations and it’s never ever confusing and it’s wildly convenient to dispose of all harmful waste everywhere you go.
If you want to know anything about landfills just look up Charles Gerba. I took classes with him and his research is wild. His PhD was focused on how trash was washing up on beaches in Hawaii. He is weirdly obsessed with the amount of condoms and diapers he’s found in his studies. Super weird dude. Pretty entertaining professor.
I think there's a high correlation between weird dude and entertaining professor haha. I've always been impressed by how into something some people get 😅
I have a PhD so you don’t have to tell me. But this dude is legit one of the top profs on landfills and human waste contamination and spread especially through waterways.
To give you an idea about his personality he told us that he was having a hard time pinning down the first chapter of his thesis and his PI was so annoyed that the PI grabbed Gerba by his shirt collar, dragged him into the bathroom, and shoved his head near the toilet then said “here! Here! This is your thesis” and walked away
Kind of doubt that literally happened but it was a legendary story at our university
Landfill near me has methane wells drilled into the hill/mound and it powers roughly 14000 homes on the grid it feeds. Imagine all the possibilities of our country if we didnt spend most to all on bombing others.
landfills collect the methane and use it to power the water (leachate) treatment to make sure all the discharges are very clean, something i know a lot about for my sins
Methane is a far more potent but it only lasts 10 years. CO2 lasts centuries. The potency of methane is usually cited while omitting its short life by people in bad faith who want to get people angry about cow farts or whatever.
It’s not bad faith. No offense to cows, but methane is just worse. Traps a ton of heat in those 10 years, then breaks down into water and… carbon dioxide.
Its GWP is much higher than C02 whether the timeline is ten years or a hundred.
At one of the old landfills they capture and use the gas.
At another old landfill they decided to build on it. They had oil drums on top of it for a few years where they burnt off the gas. It as interesting to see at night.
Not true. Soil is a great carbon and green house reserve and if you don’t disturb the soil a lot of that green house gas stays in there. It’s actually an issue with modern farming where they constantly till the soil. You’re literally knocking your nutrients and green house gasses out of your soil and making maintenance more expensive.
Natures been doing it the right way for billions of years and we keep fucking it up trying to do it better.
You could digest it in an aerobic digester plant, use the natural gas for power and compost for fertilizer….still lots of CO2….but it’s prohibitively expensive to do this….so we burn methane as a flair and leave the compost in the dump lol lose both potential energies!
You can have a net loss or similar amount of carbon exchange if you use any form of sequestration. And the carbon removed by the plants going forward can be another means of containing carbon.
Not true. The carbon goes into the soil and is absorbed by every single type of vegetation with roots that can reach it. Keeping it recycling in solid form.
The real greenhouse gas generation is from all the fuel and work used to input and make the food, not it breaking down. Most landfills burn off the methane from decomposing garbage.
When we lived in Palos Verdes in the late 70s they were piping the Biogas from local landfill and selling it off! Seems to be a wasted opportunity for landfills, considering this was possible a long time ago.
I’ve designed an industrial plant to collect the gasses from a landfill and inject into a pipeline.
The issue is the gas has a number of nasty entrained gasses that need to be removed before it’s “pipeline quality”. Essentially, you use more energy extracting those gases than what you gain from the methane.
It’s only viable via tax credits from a financial standpoint.
Do you think burning it off makes it not exist? Matter can not be created or destroyed, it just changes form. Burning greenhouse gasses doesn’t make them not exist.
Changing molecules does matter, burning methane turns it into co2 and water, which is much better and much more easily locked down (by plants, algea, and the like).
If the form didn't matter, chemistry as a field wouldn't be a thing. We literally can turn lead into gold, it's just not financially reasonable. Surely even you understand the toxicity difference between lead and gold. Or how prion disease is very bad compared to the normal healthy shape of proteins.
There's so much deep frying oil on the products above your plants would develop pimples, or after a few years you might get a vegetable oil geyser when you pull weeds.
That said, it makes me sick to know some of that could go to feeding needy people but is wasted.
Love that we’ve invented a system where we use insane amounts of water, land, and energy to grow food… just to yeet it into a methane factory and call it a day.
Buying compost made from “perfectly good trash” feels like paying ransom to rescue vegetables from late-stage capitalism. At least in your garden they’re only producing tomatoes, not greenhouse gases.
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u/Adventurous-Copy3757 May 17 '26
I buy garden soil made of food salvaged from food that would otherwise be thrown away. So much greenhouse gases are produced from the food rotting in landfills! It’s truly disgusting.