Rubbish ! The Archaeology Of Garbage Summary

RUBBISH! The Archaeology of GarbageBook Review
The book titled Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage by WilliamRathje and Cullen Murphy was a very interesting read. Created in1973, the archeology of garbage was a program primarily created as an exercise in archeology for students at the University of Arizona-Tucson. The most fascinating aspect of the book is the discoveries of what our garbage tells about us as a society. It was interesting the amount of detailed behavior that can be discovered by going through trash. For example, in times of product scarcity, our garbage shows that we waste more of the scarce product.Another major fact Dr. Rathje’s team discovered is that our landfills are not filling up from disposable diapers which is taking
He points out that composting is expensive and the issues is that most compost becomes tainted with hazardous elements, such as the heavy metals used in inks and pigments as well as yard waste containing traces of pesticides and herbicides. Another issue with composting biodegradable plastics is that the corn used in fermenting the lactic acid is Genetically Modified corn, because of this, if PLA plastics are composed that compost cannot be labeled “organic”.For many composting facilities, this would severely impact the marketability of the compost material.What Dr. William Rathje and those using the book to bash biodegradable plastics neglect to mention is that over the last few years we have made significant improvements to the way we handle our trash. One of these improvements is called landfill bioreactors, which is not discussed at all in the book. These types of landfills are designed in the beginning to better control the anaerobic biodegradation process by circulating the leachate back through the garbage. This not only helps to accelerate anaerobic biodegradation by adding moisture but it has also been discovered to improve the quality of the leachate. These bioreactors are built with collection systems for
Bioreactors with their advanced LFGcollection systems are able to collect more than 90% of the methane gasses.Another benefit of bioreactor landfills is that the life of the landfill is extended by as much as 25years. This means that the same physical space of land that would traditionally have been filled and capped can now be used for another 25 years longer before needing additional bioreactor landfill cells. There is some discussion that a bioreactor landfill could, later on, be dug up to use the soil for fertilizer and then reuse the landfill space again, but this is yet to be a reality.The key to utilizing anaerobic biodegradation with organic garbage is that it creates a greater value proposition over composting. With composting, the organic material is artificially processed to accelerate aerobic biodegradation resulting in compost material which makes a great rich soil. What is off-gassed is CO2 which is released into the atmosphere as a GHG.Some would argue that this would be a zero sum game but it really depends on the organic material and the life cycle of that material.Markets for compost material are very specific to the