Landfill Mining

Yikes!!

I have a sneaking feeling that some unsolved crimes may suddenly have new leads.

- Steve

I wonder why they don't just fish for it in the Texas sized plastic garbage patch that swirls around in the North Pacific.

I've been predicting this for years - half jokingly. The idea seems obvious enough but I think the scarcity of materials will have to increase significantly in order for prices to allow any large scale viability. The article makes some mention of hazardous waste... I think that risk would make the liability too high for current commodity prices in our litigous society. On the other hand, it is not uncommon in poor countries for some of the most desperate souls to make a living from scavenging at the dumps.

In combination with a good recyclables collection program, the city I live near has dramatically extended the life of its dump site by extracting and recycling the waste.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Should be more widespread.

I guess it's pretty profitable for landfills too. They get paid to remove the waste, and get paid again to sell the recycled materials and free electricity made from burning the organic waste. All at the same time making room to bring in more and more.

James Spisich
Design Engineer, CSWP

If we just started the sorting from home/industry landfills would have a more extended life.
In many countries recycling is a very common practice. This would make the mining non-profitable.
In the countries where this practice (recycling) does not exist, namely poorer countries, there's people that live in the landfills and does these extractions already. Back home they are called 'pepenadores'.

<<A good friend will bail you out of jail, but a true friend
will be sitting beside you saying ” Damn that was fun!” - Unknown>>

There's far more valuable stuff going into landfills in North America right now than the plastic...

Allowing salvage in municipal landfills would go a long way toward reducing the waste that's in there. Though it's commonplace in small municipalities, open salvage is not permitted in most larger ones for reasons of "safety". In reality we're trading one sort of safety for another.

I agree moltenmetal. Right now we are removing about 80,000 pounds of 14 Ga 316 stainless sheet metal from our facilities. One side of it is coated with asbestos contaminated mastic that is difficult to remove. We contemplated removing the tar and recycling the metal, but doing that does not appear to be cost effective. We will likely end up landfilling the material. This may be valuable someday.

Mining may be practical from relatively modern landfills, but what's in the older ones? Mercury, lead, asbestos, tires, etc. So if you unearth those materials in the process of recovering others, you would then be obligated to bury the toxics in a current, state-of-the-art type landfill. Doesn't sound particularly viable (yet).

I don't know if anyone else saw it, but there was a short clip on one of the cable shows that spoke to this subject. The toxic substances can be recovered in large part, particularly the metallics. They addressed the rather large tire problem with conversion to fuel stocks via cooking them at 900f and 600 psi yielding liquid fuel stocks. Looked do able to me if it could be done cost effectively. Then again, I don't know squat about the chemistry. Something for the future when oil is $200/brl.?

Rod

Just dig it up, try and separate anything immediately useful and throw the rest in one of these –

thread730-211955
thread730-204617

problem solved;-).


KENAT, probably the least qualified checker you'll ever meet...

The Fischer-Tropsch process, already mentioned in another thread re using landfill waste:


Bill

evelrod: you can shred tires and burn them in a cement kiln or coal-fired power plant and offset natural gas or coal consumption directly. You don't need to bother wasting a good part of the energy they contain by de-polymerizing or pyrolyzing them to produce liquid products before burning them. The only thing stopping it (in North America at least) is the stupidity of the general public and their NIMBYism. When they think of burning tires, they think of the black smoke you get when a tire half burns, half pyrolyzes when a car catches fire. So we pile them and let them catch fire by accident, making people far worse off.

Fischer-Tropsch will work with any gasified carbonaceous material. But there are far better, easier-to-handle carbon sources than old landfills. But it's not what you'd call an energy-efficient process, nor an inexpensive one to build in capital terms. Right now, F-T plants are being built only where there are vast fields of natural gas that are too far from market to make a pipeline or LNG plant feasible.

I like the landfill mining idea...at least as a future alternative. Technology not yet invented? The possibilities are endless if you look at it as a future resource.

An anecdote: I spent a week in Cripple Creek, Colorado with the family in 1956. We toured the gold mines and the usual tourist stuff. I was literally dumbfounded by the mountains of tailings. We were told that it was waste from the gold mining process. Fast forward to 1992...My wife and I took a little trip up to Cripple Creek on our way through Colorado. What a change...The old town is gone and was being replaced by a Las Vegas of the mountains!!! AND...The "mountains of tailings" that I had seen in 1956 were GONE! Technology and the cost of gold had seen to that!

Rod