The "Green" and "Renewables Energy" Push

With the "green" and "renewables energy" push in full steam, the conversion of landfill gas into power now even makes its way into GQ Magazine: The bioconversion of trash into renewables such as landfill gas (LFG) is an industry which has been around since the 1970s. Much of the initial work was simply performed to collect the landfill gases (mainly methane and carbon dioxide) to control odors, and then subsequently for health and regulatory compliance reasons (methane in air at >5% is explosive). But in recent years, with the realization that landfills located in and around major metropolitan areas, are a renewable power source with as much as a 50 year gas collection lifetime, the landfill gas to power business is booming. This article in GQ, describes a trip to the Puente Hills Landfill in Los Angeles. A large fraction of LA's trash goes there every day, and the operation is immense.
Project Navigator is very familiar with Puente Hills Landfill and found the article to be interesting, informative and well written.

GQ Magazine article: May 2008:
At dawn The landfill looks nothing like what most people picture when they imagine a landfill. Nothing messy, nothing gross, nothing slimy, no trash anywhere at all. It looks, perhaps disappointingly, like an enormous, lonesome construction site, a 1,365-acre expanse of light brown dirt filling canyons reaching innocently toward the horizon—buried trash from yesterday and several thousand other yesterdays. The scale of the thing alone boggles the mind, and to stop and ponder the fact that forty years of trash forms a foundation 400 feet deep is to simply grow fretful with some unnamed woe about America’s past and the planet’s future.

The first truck to arrive is no. 4272, a seventy-three-foot-long tractor-trailer, driven by Herman Snook, 67 years old, wiry, chewing a toothpick. He is quick to point out that he, too, thinks the landfill looks nothing like a landfill, and he believes it doesn’t smell like one, either. He allows that he may have just gotten used to the odor. (He has.) When fellow truckers arrive, pulling up next to Herman, the ground—so deep with trash—is so soft it bounces.

At six o’clock, the truckers are allowed to start dumping, and so Herman pushes a red button inside a panel on his cab. The back end of the trailer rises obediently and 79,650 pounds of debris comes thundering out, most of it wood and plaster and nails and shreds of wallpaper. Beside him a truck is dumping decidedly more organic garbage, pungent indeed, and way down the row, off¬ to the side, a guy is pouring a truckful of sludge, sterilized human waste, black as ink.

The Puente Hills Landfill, about sixteen miles east of downtown Los Angeles, serves 5 million people in seventy-eight California cities, one of six landfills operated by the Sanitation Districts of L.A. County. Every day 13,200 new tons of trash are dumped here. That’s enough to fill a one-acre hole twenty feet deep.

In five years, on November 1, 2013, the landfill will be out of room, and all that trash will have to go somewhere else.

Herman gets a broom, sweeps his trailer clean, then heads back to South Gate Transfer Station, twenty miles away, for another load. He will make five trips in a day, stopping only once to eat Oodles of Noodles and cheese crackers and a cookie. On the ride home, he eats a green apple. He is careful to note that he is just about the only one of his entire eighth-grade graduating class of 1954 who has not yet retired. “Why would anyone retire from a place like this?” he asks. “I enjoy the sunrise. I enjoy being part of nature.” Having spent more than a week at the landfill, by now I am getting used to hearing workers here, from the highest to the lowest ranks, speak like this. Concerning the landfill, they are all pride and admiration and even thanks. It seemed, at first, like crazy talk.

A landfill, after all, is a disgusting place. This is a 100-million-ton solid soup of diapers, Doritos bags, phone books, shoes, carrots, watermelon rinds, boats, shredded tires, coats, stoves, couches, Biggie Fries, piled up right here o¬ the 605 freeway. It’s a place that brings to mind the hell of civilization, a heap of waste and ugliness and everything denial is designed for. We tend not to think about the fact that every time we toss out a moist towelette or an empty Splenda packet or a Little Debbie snack-cake wrapper, there are people involved, a whole chain of people charged with the preposterously complicated task of making that thing vanish—which it never really does. A landfill is not something we want to bother thinking about, and if we do, we tend to blame the landfill itself for sitting there stinking like that, for marring the landscape, for o¬ffending a sanitized aesthetic. We are human, highly evolved creatures, remarkably adept at forgetting that a landfill would be nothing, literally nothing, without us.

In America we produce more garbage per person than any other country in the world, 250 million tons a year. In urban areas, we are running out of places to put all that trash. Right now, the cost of getting rid of it is dirt cheap, maybe $15 a month on a bill most people never even see, all of it wrapped into some mysterious business about municipal tax revenue. So why think about it?

Electricity used to be cheap, too. We went for a long time not thinking about the true cost of that. Same with gas for our cars.

The problem of trash (and sewage, its even more offensive cousin) is the upside-down version of the problem of fossil fuel: too much of one thing, not enough of the other. Either way, it’s a matter of managing resources. Either way, a few centuries of gorging and not thinking ahead has the people of the twenty-first century standing here scratching our heads. Now what?

The problem of trash, fortunately, is a wondrous intellectual puzzle to scientists and engineers, some of whom lean, because of the inexorability of trash, toward the philosophical. The simple conundrum—the intrinsic disconnect between human waste and the human himself—becomes grand, even glorious, to the people at the dump.

“nobody knows we’re even even here,” Joe Haworth is saying, as we make our way around the outside of the landfill, winding up and up past scrubby California oaks, sycamore trees, and the occasional shock of pink bougainvillea vine. He is driving his old Cadillac, a 1982 Eldorado, rusty black with a kerry-edwards sticker on the bumper. He wears a Hawaiian-print shirt, a straw hat, and wire-rimmed glasses, and the way he leans way back in the driver’s seat suggests a simple, straightforward confidence. “People driving by on the highway think this is a park,” he says.

Click here for the remainder of the GQ article.