The largest reason landfills have methane at all, is because of rotting organic materials, such as yard waste and food scraps. These materials were originally elegantly designed by nature to actually break down through the biological process and create healthy fertilizer for soil. Humans screwed this up about 70 years ago when we started putting this material into a deep pit compressing it creating a lack of oxygen that causes this dangerous anaerobic result. Organics should never go in the trash and should be composted at home or placed in a managed organics collection system.
As Ben Franklin said famously “ an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. The United States needs to lead in reducing organics and outright banning them from landfill and moving them into productive—Uses such as energy production or composting. This turns a waste nuisance product into a beneficial ingredient. Moreover, we need to stop wasting so much food and generating so much organic waste. The United States wastes almost 40% of the food that it grows and US consumers often complain about food prices, and then, at the same time are cavalier about wasting their food investment. Even our farms, wholesale, and grocery stores, and even caterers and buffets, need to start reducing how much food they waste, but they also must start donating it, too. One and six Americans are food, insecure, meaning they have a constant struggle to have enough food to feed their families. (I’m sure many on Democratic underground are in this category and would be sickened to see so much perfectly edible delicious food is going into the dumpster after all the resources used to create it. It’s amoral!) California’s new SB 1383 that not only bans organics from landfill, it also mandates certain identified business categories as having to donate edible food. This law is a monster and its a big and heavy lift to get this shift going, but overtime it will be well worth it with solutions that lift many boats.
I applaud Senator Whitehouse for caring about stuff that just doesn’t get enough attention. Methane is a greenhouse gas emission that in the short term, meaning decades, it is 84 times more potent than carbon emmissions. Unfortunately, methane has not been given the importance it was due, but now is the time. We need to definitely keep addressing carbon emission reductions. Sadly, it isn’t going down because no one wants to take the true haircut to reduce carbon emissions like they should (cars, airplanes, pollution violation clean ups, etc). Yet the biggest and quickest lift we can get in reducing greenhouse, gas emissions is getting methane out of landfills and controlling the variables through managing it in a productive way. Then the leaking technology can focus more on the legacy material that’s already in there.
But the biggest thing to suck all of our oxygen out is this constant drumbeat focus and obsession with Donald Trump. Hopefully, a rotting pile of methane that we can burn for energy soon and get back to living our lives.
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