How Landfills Work

say it. It's awesome. And landfills, the concept of a landfill, even though it ain't perfect, it's pretty neat. Yeah. And even though we need to reduce the amount of trash, especially Americans produce. Yeah, um, there is still going to be trash in the world and it needs to be dealt with. And this is way better than the old days. Uh, when in like pre nineteen thirty New York City they would dump their garbage in the ocean. And then between

nineteen thirty and we still do that. You realize New York City doesn't dump it right in the Atlantic Ocean, No, but a lot of garbage is dumped in the ocean. Yeah. Well, we talked about the Great Pacific garbage back um. And then between the nineteen thirties and the nineteen seventies they had what they called dumps, which is a big hole in the ground covered in rats and birds, and then you would just dump garbage to leach into everything. Yes,

which is messed up. And the e p A comes along and I think the sixties, definitely the seventies, and was like, uh, we need to do something better about this. But so the the idea of the landfill was born in about the sixties, I believe. Well, well, the first modern sanitary landfill was ninety seven and Fries. Now, okay, that's right, and it's like a national his or place or something, because it kind of kicked off the whole thing.

But it wasn't until the sixties and seventies that they started passing law saying that, like every state really needs to start doing the same thing. Right, And like you said before that they just dumped their trash in a pit, which people have been doing for millennia at least. Um. They were burning their trash also, and it sounds mind bogglingly awful and it is, especially from environmental standpoint, but they didn't have the trash problem that we have now

in the sixties. Since the nineties sixties are trash generation, municipal solid waste generation has um doubled, tripled, tripled, And I was like, why is that? What's going on? Apparently it's the advent of cheap packaging, Before styrofoam packaging, before plastic,

before aluminum cans, that everybody just threw away. Everything was wrapped in a T shirt that you could wear exactly, And like when you weren't carrying around a slab of meat in the T shirt from the butcher to your house, you wore your T shirt so you reused it, right, No, but no, you would you would have maybe like, um, do you remember when Sam the butcher brought Alice the meat BC Boys reference about um Stone driving around with two which is I guess a really weird way of

putting in his barefoot well that didn't rhyme bald feet anyway. He would bring it to her wrapped in like white butcher's paper, and she would throw it away and it would really not take up much space to the dump. It would decompose. It wasn't like styrofoam, which lasts for fifty thou years, right, And so starting about packaging, especially

very non biodegradable packaging, took off like a rocket. Yeah you could still go to the butcher though now you can and you get it in paper, but you go to that big chain grocery store and it's going to be plastic and starmer foam. So between nineteen are packaging waste increased. That meant that we had to do something. We had a lot more trash and we had to take care of this trash and ways that we had before. And so the modern landfill based on that Fresno model

uh boomed And fortunately that's right. But even now they're finding we went too far in one direction. Now we need to adjust it, massage it a little bit, refine it. And we were we were coming up with a new generation of landfills. That's right. So, uh, if you're talking about a landfill, the goal of a landfill is not to compost trash. And a lot of people probably don't know this. It's not to compost trash such that it breaks down super quickly uh and biodegrades. It is the

opposite of that. It is to keep it as dry as possible in an air tight and and just bury it lock it away from the surrounding world. That's right. And so that's what a landfill is, a sanitary landfill, municipal solid waste or MSW landfill. Um, they isolate the trash from the environment. They don't just dump it on the dirt and let things leach in. And this thus begins the landfill podcasts. There are a lot of components to that, but that's along and short of it. It's true.

And um what what that's called. The whole idea behind that landfill that was in reaction to that's one dry tomb is the industry lingo for it. It's and it it was created in reaction to trash just being allowed to seep into the ground water and methane to just leak out into the air blow up. Apparently houses that have utility pipes that pass by old landfills, methane will get into those utility pipes and like get in mixed in with the electricity and when you go to plug

in your toaster and it sparks kaboom. Really, yes, it's a problem with old landfills because they were all idiots with trash like up until the sixties, seventies, eighties, UM and even still we have a big problem with trash, but nothing like it was before. As far as taking care of it, is starting to really get a handle on it. Americans produce four point six pounds of trash per day per person. Yeah, and you know what's crazy is you think, well, America's probably like as bad as

it gets. Know, the UK is America is like in the middle roughly for trash generation, and the UK is the worst. They produced per capita, they produced the most, and um, they also throw away the most. They have the lowest recovery rate. Um, although it's gone up. I believe I think they had like some sort of national initiative because it says here that it won up from thirty one percent recovery rate, which is like recycling and that kind of stuff, um, basically diverting it from the landfill.

So it's actually better than America as far as the resource recovery rate goes. Canada is the worst. I'm sorry, Canada is the worst. Yeah, that's hard to believe. I would think so too, but it's true. The standout is Germany. Germany produces way more trash per person than any other country per capita, but they also have the highest recovery rate at like almost of their trash gets diverted from the landfill. That's amazing, Actually that's efficient. What what's the

American number on that diversion? It hovers about a third for at least a couple of decades, now, maybe three decades, you could say Americans diverted about they diverted about a third of their trash from the landfill. You'd like to see that number get better in three decades for sure, and it's always hovers around thirty three, and uh, it should be a lot better than that. You know. That sounds like to me, whoever is in charge of doing that study is just like, let's just use last numbers.

We can all live with that, right, all right. So if you want to landfill in your municipality, um, you're going to have to start with a proposal by saying. You can't just go start Yeah, you gotta look around and say we need to landfill everybody. So let's uh do an environmental impact study and let's let's find an area.

Let's find a lot of acreage. Um. Because I think they use the North Wake County Landfill in Raleigh, North Carolina as a their go to example, in this article, so our how stuff work started two and thirty acres of land, about seventy acres of which is the actual landfill. So you're gonna need a lot of land, and you're gonna have to do an environmental impact study to determine a lot of things. How much land do you have, Yeah, if there's enough of it, sure? Um. What type of

soil you have and what bedrock is underneath it? Very important? Um. How water flows over the surface of the site. Yeah, does it flow right down into the river? Does it perfully right right exactly? Um? And then the uh, the impact it's going to have on local wildlife. Sure. And if it's an historic site, like an archaeological site, yeah,

you don't want to landfill on an archaeological site. What's funny is if you, um, if you go back and look at the Fresh Kills landfill, which is one of the biggest in the world New York, right, Yeah, and it wasn't even the only one for New York. Yes, And the guy who created the high line, James Corner, is um creating a park there out of it, like a massive, massive park. Interesting. I think like three times the size of Central Park are they calling it cancer Park.

I think they're avoiding that. Okay, I don't remember what it's called. I wrote a really interesting New York Magazine article about it, though. It really well written and clever um where it's basically like, that's awesome, that's awesome, this guy's got this great vision. And then but it's a landfill. You know, I'm sure at the end of the day,

it's still buried garbage exactly. Um. Alright, So when we talked about the bedrock, that's really important because if you have, what would you really want to try and prevent when you're building a landfill or operating landfill is um leakage and seepage. That was like the that was the big thing when the e PA came along and started saying like, you can't just bare your trash anywhere there's groundwater, dummies, and like, as trash decomposes, it's not just like old

coca cola and banana peals. When those things break down instead of mixing together, some really horrific stuff like ammonia gets produced and that gets into the groundwater, and all of a sudden, you're drinking ammonia. That's bad for you. Yeah, that's called the it's called leech eight is the liquid

um or garbage juice is another words that. That's a better way to say it, because that defines it all in one go, right and um, the whole point of the of the dry tomb in fill was to do everything you could to prevent this garbage that you're burying from reaching the the water table. Right, So you study that bedrock. If it's too fractured, it's not gonna work because it's going to seep into that junk. No mines, no quarries, because they probably already have broken through the

water table before they were abandoned. That's right. But at the same time, you also need to be able to sink wells in various points, so you can't the bedrock needs to allow for that as well. That's right. Like you're really looking for a specific area when we talked about the water flow, of course, you don't want it flowing near wetlands or any kind of rivers or streams. That's a no brainer. Fresh Kills is an old marsh land that they just filled the marshes and lakes in

with garbage. What what did they name it? That is that the area or like that kills is a Dutch word for stream, Okay, because I was about to say that's like the worst name for anything unless it was a butcher. But it really means fresh stream, fresh kills, charcooterie, fresh stream garbage, don't Yeah, that makes sense. Now what does kill mean stream of old Dutch word because you've heard of like bowery means yes, that would be fish stream. That makes a lot more sense. Now fresh kills. I

wondered about that for years. Now, you know, all right, so, uh, local wildlife they're going to really study that to see what kind of um You know, it can't be in the area of a migrate my migratory route for birds or like a nesting area a k marsh like Fresh Kills landfill. That's right. And then once you figured all this out and they say, oh wait, wait, you skipped over the historical or archaeological site. Well you already mentioned that like Fresh Kills landfill. Okay, Apparently I think it

was stated at all wrong. Huh. Henry David Thoreau said that um arrowheads were the surest crop to dig from the ground at Fresh Kills before it was a landfill. Yeah, so our theological site wet land and very close to UM. The ground water it's seeping right into it. Unbelievable. UM. And I believe there was a large bunny rabbit population that they just dumped it right on top of UM. So, once you figured it out, this is not fresh skills, is actually a great spot. You're gonna get your permits,

you're gonna raise your money. Um. This one in North Carolina costs about nineteen million to build cheap. That seems a little cheap, but I don't think that one's brand new. Yeah, that's probably from the nineties. And then you probably have a public vote because they're probably gonna be using public dollars and no one will know that vote takes place, and you're gonna get a landfill built. Yeah, they just

build it in the night. All right. So let's take a little break here and we will talk about building that landfill right for this all right, So you've got your permits, you've got your money raised, it's time to build a landfill. Yeah, you've shouted down the old guy at the Board of Commissioners meeting, who objects, old man? McLean the tree hugger. Let's recycle all our garbage, crack pot. So we will list the basic parts of the landfill and then go over them in detail. Hows that sound

It sounds like a bulleted list. You've got the bottom liner system, You've got the cells, you've got the storm water drainage, you've got the leech eight collection system, ok, garbage juice methane collection system, and you've got the cap the covering boom. Actually, that's the opposite of what you want to happen with the cap covering system. You don't

want a kaboom, So start with the bottom liner. Man again, this is the original purpose of all landfills that are in use today, unless they're bioreactor, although it's it's part of it. But this dry tomb landfill, uh, it's the main part is the bottom liner. So they use a very thick like um sometimes a hundred million millimeter thick, very sturdy like polyethylene liner synthetic plastic that they line the whole place with, puncture resistant, strong, able to withstand

a lot of trash being dumped on it. And just to be a certain, they'll often use some sort of like um fabric matt that they'll lay down first and then put the the the liner on and then put another mat on top of that to help prevent it from being punctured by rocks or garbage. Rocks below or garbage above. Everything's trying to puncture of this mat. Yeah, it's a moisture barrier. Right, But that liner is the main component, the the initial component of the landfill, that's right. Uh. Next,

we have our cell, and a cell is basically the garbage. Yeah, it's the day's garbage that you dump in there. Um, you compacted airspace is is key. That's where the more airspace you have, the more trash you can bury. So they want to keep it as compact as possible. And they do this by rolling over it with bulldozers and flatteners and rollers and graters and they smush it down. And a cell is um, it's a it's a it's

a hole in the ground. Apparently in the North Carolina landfill that House Stuff Works went to back in the day. A cell is fifty ft long, fifty ft wide, fourteen ft deep yep. And all the trash is put in there. Like you said, there's heavy equipment that rolls over and compacts it. And did you read the Atlantic um article I sent to you about Pointe Hills. Yes, they said that there's an added benefit of compacting trash not just doesn't take up less space, it also kills about the

rats in there. Oh good. And then at the end of the day, when the cell is filled, they cover it over with about six inches of dirt that they then compact that kills the other of rats. That's where the other half and that makes that type of landfill what's called the sanitary landfill, which mean rat free, because they're all dead, they're squished or they're suffocated by this

process of compacting and covering over. And the by covering over this stuff every day, you protected from being blown away by the wind, by being carried away from by the rain. You protected from being dug up by coyotes or trash scavengers. Right, um, And so that's what makes it a sanitary dry tomb landfill is what we've described

so far. That's right. And to get this thing as compact as possible, they're gonna weed out things like that huge roll of carpet that you took out of your uh nineteen seventies bedroom, or that mattress that has a you know, brown stained like looks like the map of Asia from the sixteen hundreds, because you raised that one

lady from Hell, raiser from the dead. Yeah, so they're gonna chake out all that stuff and make it um you know, all the yard ways to make it as compactable as possible, and then um that is compacted at a rate depending on where you are, about fift pounds per cubic yard. Yes, so boom, flat dirt is over it now and now we need to worry about drainage. Yeah. Basically, once you created that cell, you've just completed a portion of the landfill, right, Yes, for the day, um, one

day's trash. It's so weird, it's like yours Tuesday's whole five days a year. And those well, those UM the Hills people in that Atlantic article, we're saying that they in retrospect figured out that they could have predicted the economic crisis. Interesting because about a little less than a year before it happened, the UM they would fill up their days cell by like one pm and closed. Now they stay up until five and it's not even necessarily full.

So they know it's like a huge downturn in building materials and consumer waste. UM. Like a year or two before the actual crisis happened before they collapse. Well, you know what the old saying, if you want to know the state of the country's economics, go to a landfill. It's a good thing. That's what I think. Jimmy Carter first said that. So you don't want liquids in that

solid waste as much as possible. So they test the solid waste for liquids, and um, if it's not liquid, then it's fine to go in the hole, right, So they put that in there. And the other way that they want to keep liquids out. And again, what they're doing is trying to prevent garbage juice from forming. Is to have storm raw storm, water runoff, drainage going on. So all of the first of all, you never want a flat landfill. Ever, you want to mount it at

least slightly. You never want a plateau um and so you want the water to run off, and then when it runs off, you want to collect it into pipes. You want to basically create an eves system like you have on the roof of your house and then shoot it all down to some concrete gulches or French trains at your house. Roos shepperls what else uh, gutters, yeah, habit dasher right, um, and all that goes to a collection pond. That's right. Uh, this is not the kind

of thing you want to swim in. What they wait for there is for um the suspended particles to kind of settle on the bottom, and then they will test the water for those the garbage juice, and depending on how nasty it is and riddled with chemicals, they'll go from there. They may um treat like regular wastewater. Well, that depends, like if they if just the storm water shows some leech, they'll send it to a leech a

collection pond. If it's if it turns out to just be normal stormwater, then they'll let it flow out of there. That's trying to like whatever river or whatever. And sometimes it's gravity. Sometimes they use a pump, depends on the lay of the land. But if it's leach, they have a separate collect collection system for leech. A yes, which is um basically perforated pipes that are running through the

cells and the leach. It is gonna happen, like they try and prevent it as much as possible, but there is no hole in the ground where you're not gonna have any garbage juice right exactly. Um, So they collect that garbage juice as it's forming, and they run it out to a separate collection pond that's the leech a collection pond. And if you don't want to swim in the stormwater collection pond, like you don't even want to

look at the leech collection pump. So again, they let the particles settle, they test the concentration of the leech a in the pond, and then they send it either to uh an on site UH water remediation system like a wastewater plant, yeah, or else they send it to like the local city or county wastewater plant for treatment. Yeah. Boy, we gotta do one in wastewater treatment. At some point. You got to talk about fascinating. You poop in the

water and eventually you water. It's pretty remarkable of what we've learned to do. Uh, you know yep. So uh. The other big thing that we mentioned earlier was methane, and that is a byproduct that's a gaseous byproduct um of anaerobic decomposition. And about fifty of your your gases coming out of this thing, we're gonna be methane about carbon dioxide and they say a little bit of nitrone, little bit oxygen. I guess not even enough to be

a percentage point, almost negligible. So methane is um can be dangerous and hazardous, but it can also be very useful. So these days they're finding ways to harness this methane and use it as fuel, right, which is pretty great. Yeah, it is very great. And actually there's a lot of money in it they're finding too, especially if you go to the trouble of building an on site power plant where you just basically extract the methane from the landfill gas l f G is what it's called, and then

you burn the methane. You can power, you can create electricity, right, you can power a turbine and boom, there's electricity being produced. And actually at Fresh Kills, New York City gets ten million bucks a year from a company that has exclusive rights to extract the methane from this place. Ten million. That's not something it needs that UM and Lincoln, Nebraska did a pilot study in two thousand and ten and found that they could make about three hundred thousand dollars

a year from methane collection from their landfill. So if you're a city that's trying to like figure out ways to at least keep your landfill open methane collection I call my my worst days l f G. Actually when I have landfill gats the worst. Uh. So, then you've got your covering and your or your cap is the final piece of the puzzle here, and um, it depends

on what kind of a landfill it is. Generally it's going to be covered with six inches at least of compacted soil and that's to keep you know, rats and stuff out the ones that aren't killed and getting back into the trash. But um, like we said earlier, airspace is key. So like six inches, if they could find a way to make that one inch, that would be

much better. And so they've been experimenting with that too, like um, paper or submit emulsions instead that you just spray on top instead of that six inches of soil, it's like a quarter inch. Yeah, And then all of a sudden you have five and three quarters extra inches for trash, extra inches for more trash. That's a lot many which we are right now absolutely uh. And then eventually though, when you h it will have a permanent cap um some sort of poly ethylene cap on top.

And so even after it's closed, that points hills Um landfill outside of l A that was the focus of the Atlantic article or fresh kills out in New York when that when it's closed, you don't just walk away from a landfill plant stuff on it. Well, yes, you have to plant stuff on it because when you cover it over with dirt, you want to plant something with um, a low roots system that won't go into the landfill, but we'll still hold the dirt and place to prevent

it from a roading. So like grass cut zoo, not trees. I don't want to plant trees. But you also have to stick around and leave some people behind to monitor the groundwater for temperature changes. Change in temperature suggests that it's um. There's leachate that's intruded. Sometimes you can see the leech seeping up through the ground, and that means that there's you need to address an issue. It looks like the Beverly Hillbillies thing where Jed shot and missed

that rabbit and instead oil comes up. That's what leech kind of looks like, bubble up. But you have to keep an eye on this place for decades and decades and decades. Yeah, I think they sitting here like thirty years. It needs to be maintained and monitored at least at least I think that's definitely in the line. So we'll talk a little more about operating a landfill and how to well, I guess alternative slam fills is a way

to put it right after this. So, Chuck, let's say you are Tommy Landfill and you want to fulfill your birthright and open your own landfill, and you got everything all set. You've got the municipal bonds. Old man, what was it, mc tavish, mcvaine, something like that, mc lane, McClane. He he's been shouted down. You got the place open. How are you going to operate a day to day Well, what you're gonna do is it's gonna be open to a couple of different things. It's gonna be open to

the um municipality that collects the trash. Of course, it's gonna be open to demolition companies, construction companies, and many of them, including the one I go to, is open to you and me. Okay, um, So let's say I'm doing work on my house, which I've done, and I end up with a bunch of junk in the back of my pickup truck. I think it's called construction waste. Yes, construction debris, which I try and re use as much as I can, but you still end up with construction debris.

Did we do like a green renovation episode once? Yeah? I think so okay, And um, I will drive my truck out there to the landfill into Cabb County and I will drive up onto a platform. Is the first very first thing you do with a it's a way station. Does it make you go up on two wheels and then you drive through the land just wheel that's showing off the stuck car scene. Um. Then you drive up on the way station and they weigh your truck or your car or whatever with full of trash. You go

dump it. There's gonna be various stations. Um, there's like a recycling station. There's a here's where yard waste goes, a kissing booth. Uh, there's a dunk tank, you know, the traditional Catholic school carnival um at the one into Capp County. There's actually free mulch and um compost if you want to pick up stuff, which is kind of neat, but then eventually you will be directed to, uh, here is your dump and I pull up my truck, I dump it in a big dumpster, and that dumpster has

then taken to the cell. I imagine. I don't follow the route, but that's what's supposed to happen. Does it make that bugs Bunny conveyor belt song? Yeah, someone wrote in and had a song, yeah power If you look up what was that the one that you were thinking, Yes, totally. Um. I can't remember the composer's name, but it was the twentieth century composer who think it is old man. It

was something something Quintet. Yeah, I can't remember the guy's name, but anyway, look up to something something Quintet powerhouse, and then I think it starts about almost a minute and a half in. You'll be like, yeah, that's it, d dude, you know I'm talking about Yeah. Absolutely. When I heard it, it was unmistakably looney tunes. So I dump on my garbage, um, and then I drive back out onto another platform and

then they rewagh my truck. They do the math and then when they weigh it, um, they charge you a tipping fee, yeah, which is usually a per ton amount right, Yeah, and so you know, it's not that much money. Like I'll have a truck full of junk, go dump it, and then it's like ten or twelve bucks. And of course it depends on how heavy the junk is, but in my case, it was always you know, uh, lightwood

and stuff like that that I couldn't use nails. So that's that's basically everything we just described as a dry tomb landfill. Right. But as as UM companies like waste management and local municipalies have figured out, like, hey, there's actually money in this rotting garbage, they've been looking into ways to get more methane out of it. And what they figured out is that you don't want a dry tomb. You want to kind of moist a little wet to

thirty percent moisture. Yeah. I was really surprised that this isn't how it's done by now, because you can they said, you know, what could take decades and a dry tomb to break down, you can take just a few years if you just add a little water, just a little bit of water, Like there's already about ten to fifteen percent moisture in a dry tomb, no matter how much

you try to keep it out. There's gonna be about ten to fift They figured out that if you add another water, you're going to greatly increase anaerobic um decomposition. And it can be leachated. It's not like they have have spring water exactly. It can be that stormwater you're collecting, it can be leech eate um, it can be gas condensation from the gas that's coming off and and basically what you're doing is you're speeding up that anaerobic decomposition

that's already going on. So these things are breaking down that organic stuff, the banana peels and the grass clippings and all that stuff. It's already in there. They're not breaking down the styrofoam, at least not very quickly, so that stuff is still going to be left behind. But

that's kind of that burying walk awayte mentality as well. Still, but at least the the density of your m landfill is going to increase tremendously as all that other stuff decomposes, and you're gonna have the added benefit of a lot more methane production. Yeah, and a lot more methane and

a lot shorter time spans. So what they've had to do, because this is basically accelerated production, is create collection systems that can handle They can't just throw the old methane collection system in there that's used to collecting slowly, but surely they have to do something collect a lot and

a little bit of time. Yeah, because they used to collect the methane in that they would harvest it and then burn it, which is sounds horrible because you're just releasing all that stuff into the atmosphere, but it's better than just vending it. Just vending methane. Methane is a um much more potent greenhouse gas than even like CEO two like by far, So you don't want to just vent that stuff, so you burn it off. But even better is if you're gonna burn it, at least use

it to power stuff. So by adding just a little bit of water you can create this. You can accelerate the anaerobic decomposition. And since the anaerobic decomposition is what makes the landfill like a moving, living, evolving pile, once that's done in ten years, you've got all the methane you're gonna get from it, the things not gonna settle anymore, and you can walk away without monitoring it for the next fifty years. Yeah, so the bioreactor model seems like

far and away the wave of the future. Right. Um, I guess it's just a matter of like building more of them. Yes, so we got a couple of more things here before we close. For sure. This is very interesting. One Neto thing that I didn't know. I think I knew about Giant Stadium, but I didn't know that. I just heard Jimmy hoff was buried there. Well, you might

have just been in the in the landfill. Apparently some sports arenas like Kemiskey in Chicago, Mile Haush Stadium in Denver, Giant Stadium in New Jersey built on landfills because they're cheap, cheap land, and some speculation that it might give athletes cancer. Yeah, apparently there are a lot of Giants players are several um that came down with cancer. That one of the linebackers, Harry Carson, told The New York Times, Um, it makes you wonder what's going on around here, referencing the fact

that it was built on an old land hill. Yeah, and apparently there was a game at Comiskey Park where there was a I think a short stop like ran into a piece of metal sticking up from the diamond and like started like kicking away. I didn't realized it was getting bigger and bigger, and the grounds crew came out and investigated, and it was Jimmy Hoffa. It was a copper cuddle from the landfill. They had moved its way up. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, So they had to

dig it up and then refill it. Unbelievable. I'm sure that was a lovely break for the fans. Yes, because moving that they needed. They needed a breathere. Uh. I read an article on Slate called go West Garbage can exclamation point, and the main gist of it is, when are we going to run out of space? It's a great question. You can't keep bearing trash right? Um, Apparently you can, because what they're doing now is there there

are fewer landfills than ever before. They're making these huge landfills. Yeah. In nineteen in six, there were close to seventy dumps in the US, and by two thousand nine there were just under two thousand. Decline in less than twenty five years, and so essentially what they're creating of these super landfills, um, which is kind of cool, fewer landfills, right, but what's

the problem, Um, do you know stinkier landfills? What the problem is is you're now trucking garbage sometimes five miles away to dump in the landfill because your state may not even have one. So then they're looking at you know how much c O two is used to do that? Um? Like, is it really greener to have fewer landfills and truck your garbage on a train or in a truck every day? Uh? And they basically say they don't really know. Which is

back to burning everything? Which is more environmentally friendly? Um? In different states? Apparently there's a lot of money in it. Different states have way more room than others. And then some states don't even want that stuff. Of course, in the Northeast, like Massachusetts are like, we don't want landfills in our state, the Rhode Island. Same way they send it to Springfield, they send it to Kentucky. Well, no, remember the commissioner episode he accepted other states to waste. Yeah,

that's exactly what's happening. Um. Let me see, Arkansas has enough capacity for more than six hundred years of trash without any more facilities being opened. There you go we'll just send it all to Arkansas. Whereas Rhode Island only has twelve years remaining. New York State only has twenty five years of capacity left. Send it to Arkansas. So that's what they're doing. Um, Kentucky is twenty nine dollars

per ton, making about six billion dollars a year. Ohio twenty one billion dollars a year of available land phil space because Ohio knows how to negotiate. That's right, the Buckeye State, that's right. Don't tread on me. That's New Hampshire the Tea Party. I think it's either New Hampshire, Vermont, one of those you know New Hampshires is lived for your die and make their inmates make those license plates. Yeah, no,

don't tread on me wasn't a state motto. And I think that was just flag with the cut up snake right that the Tea Party adopted. Remember did they adopt that? Yeah? So yeah, if you see a bumper sticker with one of those flags on it, they're not just like a history buff or anything. Yeah. Or if it says who was John Galt? Yeah that that that'll tell you something about the driver of that vehicle was that a Tom

Cruise movie. No John Galt was the main character, and Atlas shrugged, Oh yeah, I ran, I'm thinking of Jack Reacher. If you want to know more about landfills, you can type that word into the search part how stuff works dot com and uh, I said search bar. So it's time for a listener, ma'il. I needna call this very sad email but uplifting at the same time. Hey guys, two weeks ago, my amazing and wonderful father in law,

Walter passed away. We had to drop everything, my husband and son and I and fly from Florida to Germany, where he lived. He's been in my world for twenty four and my fifty years. And I was so sad. I felt like I was going to throw up all the time. When we arrived in Germany, walking through the front door of the family home without him there was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. That was and is devastating. My husband and youngest son and I sat in the dark days for days, mixing

the crying mixed with crying and feeling lost. I always listen to podcasts while I run, though, which I do every day, and after ten days of being there in Germany, I finally decided to cue up one of your podcasts while running. It was Blood Types. I laughed for the first time in two weeks out loud. Guys. It was so nice to laugh again, and it really opened the door for me. I realized that we as a family are going through was so tough. But I also started

to realize that if I laugh, than I could heal. Uh. Yesterday, my husband and I, still in Germany, decided to go UH to walk to the nursing home where my aunt lives, which is two and a half hours through the forest, up and down hills. I love this family. By the way, walking to the nursing home like that, we of course brought our thirteen year old son, Oliver, who was moaning. After about twenty minutes of walking, I handed into my phone and he listened to UH three Stuff you Should

Know podcasts along the way and is now hooked. He loves you, guys. My husband and I had a badly needed quiet, get in touch with nature walk as a result, and we didn't have to listen to our sun moan at all. Uh More, long walks are in his future as long as I have you guys on my phone. And Oliver also asked me along the walk, wait a minute, mom, these guys get paid to do this. When I said yes, I saw a sparkle in his eye. I love this email. Boom,

that is from Jennifer and Jennifer. That is awesome. I uh, those mean the most us. Yeah, I mean that was a great top not to email. Great email and those more to it. Even I had to leave out some of it for Lincoln Jennifer right, Jennifer and Oliver her son and she doesn't even anonymous husband anonymous husband on name notes. But yeah, thanks a lot, Jennifer. We appreciate you letting us know that that's a again great email.

And uh, if you out there want to let us know how we've helped you or hindered you or even woken you up from a deep sleep. If you're French, um, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff we Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com and has always join us at our home on the web, Stuff you should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff works, dot com