Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Down in the dumps. A couple of thousand feet east from my house the old landfill from circa 1950-1958 is being removed for the new park. I had to go down into the massive hole to collect some junk for the future museum exhibit, which will include a section on the dump.
The giant hole.
People don't realize that when their trash goes to a landfill, it basically sits there and doesn't rot away, since it is sealed in tight and bacteria can't get water or oxygen to decompose the material.
About 120 truck loads a day are removed.
The horrible smell that pervaded my neighborhood has stopped after they started spraying some sort of deodorant on the stuff they were digging up.
Squished tires.
The giant excavator sets aside tires as they are found, they are being sent to a recycling place to be ground up for new street surfaces.
Fancy tire.
They did a program of injecting air and water into the landfills and it was mostly successful in decomposing the waste. Still, pockets of organic material, especially paper, remained intact.
A bowling pit, plastic doll, and a woman's nylon stocking.
Pieces of newspaper, receipts, raffle tickets for a Cadillac, and old magazines are visible as you wander around in the bottom of the 30-ft-deep hole.
Bread wrapper and phone book.
Down at the bottom the trash stinks really bad. I had to take a big plastic bin of junk in my car to our storage locker at work, the smell was terrible.
1957 phone book.
I'm very good at recycling and composting. My garbage can usually only has cat litter and plastic wrap in it. Except I went through my closet the other night and threw out all of my old plastic computer disks, including some 5 1/4 floppies (I took one to work and was actually able to pull files off of it from 1992!). I wonder if someone will someday find those?
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The giant hole.
People don't realize that when their trash goes to a landfill, it basically sits there and doesn't rot away, since it is sealed in tight and bacteria can't get water or oxygen to decompose the material.
About 120 truck loads a day are removed.
The horrible smell that pervaded my neighborhood has stopped after they started spraying some sort of deodorant on the stuff they were digging up.
Squished tires.
The giant excavator sets aside tires as they are found, they are being sent to a recycling place to be ground up for new street surfaces.
Fancy tire.
They did a program of injecting air and water into the landfills and it was mostly successful in decomposing the waste. Still, pockets of organic material, especially paper, remained intact.
A bowling pit, plastic doll, and a woman's nylon stocking.
Pieces of newspaper, receipts, raffle tickets for a Cadillac, and old magazines are visible as you wander around in the bottom of the 30-ft-deep hole.
Bread wrapper and phone book.
Down at the bottom the trash stinks really bad. I had to take a big plastic bin of junk in my car to our storage locker at work, the smell was terrible.
1957 phone book.
I'm very good at recycling and composting. My garbage can usually only has cat litter and plastic wrap in it. Except I went through my closet the other night and threw out all of my old plastic computer disks, including some 5 1/4 floppies (I took one to work and was actually able to pull files off of it from 1992!). I wonder if someone will someday find those?
