Interactive map and downloadable KML file of closed solid waste landfills in New York State.
Data Source: https://gisservices.dec.ny.gov/arcgis/rest/services/dil_permits_and_regs/MapServer/12
For more information see the DEC Intactive Landfill July 2022 Status Update and DEC Intactive Landfill Report from May 2021.
Roger Horton returns for the first time since 2017 to explain why recycling is pointless and, even worse, is basically just one big scam.
With all this talk of plastic in the news, the other day I was thinking what a large part of my trash is plastic milk bottles, as I drink around 2 gallons of milk a week, usually purchased at my local Stewart’s. They have not had a milk bottle program for a long time, instead switching to light-weight plastic milk bottles that you buy, take home, drink the milk in and throw away.
Now, I generally either recycle or burn them when camping in the woods, so none of them ever goes directly to the landfill. But I often think what a waste. Recycling is great, but usually plastic milk bottles and other HDPE products are shipped to China, and turned into some low value use like floor tiles or plastic lumber. I guess it’s better then using virgin materials for those needed purposes, but melting down all those discarded milk bottles for low value commercial products still seems a waste.
I guess I could get milk delivered in glass bottles. Meadow Brook Farms still does milk deliveries locally. That would be a more sustainable option, with less trash to dispose of. But milk in plastic from Stewart’s is more affordable, which is a big thing when you like drinking milk as much as I do. Plus, plastic milk bottles are convenient — you just throw them in the recycling trash can or I can burn them up at camp. You don’t need to return them.
But alas, I guess that is the dilemma known as modern disposable plastics. You like what comes in the package, then you throw it away. Although I do think I could put it to better use when I own my own land.
I can envision find more uses for all the milk bottles I’d otherwise be throwing away in the commercial recycling stream. HDPE is a really good plastic for molding, it can be carefully heated and remolded for various projects around the house. HDPE is a relatively non toxic plastic to burn, if the fire is hot, maybe I could use it heat water, although I wouldn’t want to do that inside where it could cause a chimney fire. Or storage of water or ice, although lately I’ve discovered plastic coffee cans are better for that purpose. Feed scoops and planters are other possible uses, although sometimes heavier plastic like what windshield washer fluid comes it would better.
I just hate seeing all those bottles in the trash and having to take them to the transfer station for recycling.
In Cornucopia City, as I understand it, all the buildings will be made of a special papier-mâché. These houses can be torn down and rebuilt every spring and fall at housecleaning time. The motorcars of Cornucopia will be made of a lightweight plastic that develops fatigue and begins to melt if driven more than four thousand miles. Owners who turn in their old motorcars at the regular turn-in dates—New Year’s, Easter, Independence Day, and Labor Day—will be rewarded with a one-hundred-dollar United States Prosperity-Through-Growth Bond for each motorcar turned in. And a special additional bond will be awarded to those families able to turn in four or more motorcars at each disposal date.
One fourth of the factories of Cornucopia City will be located on the edge of a cliff, and the ends of their assembly lines can be swung to the front or rear doors depending upon the public demand for the product being produced.When demand is slack, the end of the assembly line will be swung to the rear door and the output of refrigerators or other products will drop out of sight and go directly to their graveyard without first overwhelming the consumer market.
Every Monday, the people of Cornucopia City will stage a gala launching of a rocket into outer space at the local Air Force base. This is another of their contributions to national prosperity. Components for the rockets will have been made by eighteen subcontractors and prime contractors in the area. One officially stated objective of the space probing will be to report to the earth people what the back side of Neptune’s moon looks like.
Wednesday will be Navy Day. The Navy will send a surplus warship to the city dock. It will be filled with surplus play-suits, cake mix, vacuum cleaners, and trampolines that have been stockpiled at the local United States Department of Commerce complex of warehouses for surplus products. The ship will go thirty miles out to sea, where the crew will sink it from a safe distance. As we peek in on this Cornucopia City of the future, we learn that the big, heartening news of the week is that the Guild of Appliance Repair Artists has passed a resolution declaring it unpatriotic for any member even to look inside an ailing appliance that is more than two years old.
The heart of Cornucopia City will be occupied by a titanic pushbutton super mart built to simulate a fairyland. This is where all the people spend many happy hours a week strolling and buying to their heart’s content. In this paradise of high-velocity selling, there are no jangling cash registers to disrupt the holiday mood. Instead, the shopping couples—with their five children trailing behind, each pushing his own shopping cart—gaily wave their lifetime electronic credit cards in front of a recording eye. Each child has his own card, which was issued to him at birth.
Conveniently located throughout the mart are receptacles where the people can dispose of the old-fashioned products they bought on a previous shopping trip. In the jewelry section, for example, a playfully designed sign by a receptacle reads: “Throw your old watches here!” Cornucopia City’s marvelous mart is open around the clock, Sundays included. For the Sunday shoppers who had developed a churchgoing habit in earlier years, there is a little chapel available for meditation in one of the side alcoves.
Is Cornucopia City to become not a feverish dream, but, instead, an extreme prototype for the City of Tomorrow?
Plastics have been in the news a lot lately, with the relatively low oil prices and the boom in plastics manufacturing brought on fracking. 🛢️ A lot of the articles lately note that not only is plastic a non-renewable material, coming from the co-products of oil and gas production, it’s long chains of carbon atoms are often difficult to break down by bacteria and sunlight. Plastic is only easily broken down by heat and combustion, when the carbon molecules bond to oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and other byproducts.
In many ways, I would argue that plastic is environmentally superior to metals and glass for packaging. 🥫 Metal and glass does not break down in fire, there is no “natural” process to break it down in the environment, it must either be landfilled, buried, or brought back to industrial recycling. In many remote areas, metals and glass become litter that never leaves the land. Glass in particular is notorious, as it can break, leaving dangerous materials that can cut people’s feet, damage tires and produce a long-term nuisance. Metal — especially cans made out of iron rust — but it often lasts a long time in the woods.
The toxicity of some plastics is a concern, more then plastic becoming litter in the environment. Chances are in the back country, on the farm dump, in the woods, plastic is not piling up. It’s getting burnt.🔥 It may not biodegrade by bacteria, but there is a natural process that breaks it down, namely fire, which leaves waste metals and glass untouched. Glass is just so much nastier in the sense it breaks, and doesn’t ever leave the woods unless somebody hauls it away to the landfill.
More needs to be done to reduce the toxicity of common wastes. Replacing PVC with HDPE is a big step forward. ♻I am glad to see things like soap bottles and charcoal lighter packing is no longer coming in vinyl, but instead safer plastics that produce fewer noxious chemicals when leached out to environment or burned. In urban areas, more needs to be done to recycle plastic — something that will get a boost when oil prices inevitably go back up.
Come 50 years from now, I doubt your going to find much in the way of plastics dumped in the woods. You might find metal (although less with the high value of scrap metal), glass, and certainly other things like discarded masonry and plumbing, but not plastic. ⛰ Plastic is lightweight packaging, and while it doesn’t biodegrade, it does combust and is unlikely to have the long-term pollution problems that alternative packaging is likely to have.
