Landfills, like this one at Hunter’s Point, produce methane, which can be used for electricity and fuel. Photo: kqedquest.

Trash that ends up at a landfill is the ugly stepsister of hipper, cooler compostable kitchen scraps and recyclable bottles and cans. But landfill trash has more of a future than you might think. As garbage decomposes, it gives off methane. Methane, when floating around in the atmosphere, is a harmful greenhouse gas; it traps 20 times more heat than CO2. But methane’s other moniker is natural gas, and is an important energy source. Methane from landfills can be captured and used to generate power and fuel vehicles—often the very same garbage trucks that brought the trash to the landfill in the first place.

Landfills are not just giant heaps of rotting trash. At the base and sides of a landfill, the trash is separated from the natural world by thick plastic liner, which prevents the effluvia from decomposing garbage from entering the environment and contaminating the groundwater. The trash itself is strategically stacked in layers of cells—landfills can be hundreds of feet deep. Within the landfill, different microbes break down the trash via anaerobic digestion. The microbes produce methane gas as a waste product. There are other gases produced too; this mix of gases produced by anaerobic microbes is called biogas.

Old landfills are punctuated by pipes that collect the biogas, which is then burned to prevent the gas from entering the atmosphere (and prevent the neighbors from smelling the stink). Open flares are just what they sound like—little burning flames of methane. Closed flares filter out the contaminants before the smoke is released. Flaring the biogas at the landfill is probably the most common way of dealing with it. But it is an unfortunate waste of a potentially valuable fuel source.

Newer landfills are built with methane collection in mind from the early stages of construction. Pipes can be buried in the landfill as it is filled with trash. Pipes can also be placed in wells drilled through the trash after the landfill has begun to be filled. A vacuum system collects the gas as the microbes produce it. The amount of gas a landfill produces depends on the volume of trash and the age of the landfill; eventually, the gas production will peak and then begin to taper off. Today’s big landfills, however, can produce biogas for decades.

The methane collected from landfills can generate electricity via a turbine or internal combustion engine. Often some of the electricity is used at the landfill to run equipment, and the rest is sold to the local utility.

Methane from biogas can be converted to compressed natural gas, which can be used as fuel for vehicles. In some areas, regulations stipulate that large fleets of vehicles (with more than about 50 trucks) are required to run on clean fuel. When biogas is converted to compressed natural gas, the vehicles can refuel at the landfill. Building a system that converts biogas into compressed natural gas is a big investment, but the fleet saves on fuel costs for decades. These kinds of biogas systems can be installed at anaerobic waste digesters at places like wastewater treatment plants, not just landfills.

Altamont Landfill has taken things a step further, converting landfill biogas into liquefied natural gas. First, impurities are removed, and then the gas is cooled down to a liquid state. This liquefied natural gas is used to fuel Waste Management’s garbage trucks. Altamont Landfill’s liquid natural gas system is the largest in the world.

Obviously, we should buy only what we need, recycle what we can, and be careful to compost everything that’s compostable. But it’s nice to know that something useful can come from plain old trash.

The particulate from diesel trucks, which contains a number of carcinogenic compounds, can also cause lung cancer.

Wondering how much soot is in your city's air right now? Find out through the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

As I write this, it's rainy outside, which is a good thing from an air quality perspective. Rain keeps the dust, or particulate matter (that's "PM" in air quality jargon), glued to streets and cars, and out of the air. Here in San Francisco, our PM 2.5 value is seven — seven micrograms of soot for each cubic meter of air. That's pretty clean, so breathe deep.

Using the calendar on the left side of the page, check out the levels from January 8th — a day where the average PM 2.5 level was 52 — and you can see why the Bay Area Air Quality Management District declared January 8 a Spare the Air Day.

So what do these numbers mean?

PM 2.5 refers to the smallest soot particles that air officials measure – each particle is about 1/70th the width of a human hair. These particles are so small, they're invisible to the naked eye. They're small enough to travel deep into the delicate alveoli, or air sacs, in our lungs, where they can cause or exacerbate asthma and other breathing problems. From there, they can make their way into our bloodstream, leading to heart attacks and strokes. The particulate from diesel trucks, which contains a number of carcinogenic compounds, can also cause lung cancer. (Check out this excellent Q&A on the hazards of diesel soot.)

The black numbers describe the current level. Blue and red figures describe the change from that same hour, the day before.

When you look at the chart, check out the PM numbers for West Oakland, right next to the Port of Oakland. These are what air officials point to when asked to justify the new rules for Port truckers, which this story, and this one, describe. A few years ago, the BAAQMD conducted a detailed health assessment of West Oakland residents, finding cancer rates three times the Bay Area average. In this week's radio story, we also cite a 2008 Harvard study on lung cancer rates in truckers. Here's a story about the study, and the study itself.

Poke around the QUEST website a bit and you'll find an abundance of media on this subject. Start with Gabriela Quiros's terrific TV story, "Perilous Diesel." Gabi's also taken a closer look at some of the mysteries surrounding childhood asthma in another TV piece, "Asthma: What Brought on the Epidemic?"

Last but not least, here's a slide show of scenes from this week's radio QUEST story, featuring characters and scenes from several sides of the campaign to reduce diesel soot.

Listen to Truckers Clean Up Their Act radio report online.

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Hundreds of plastic fragments taken from the Eastern Garbage Patch fill a Petri dish that is also crammed with insect-like water striders and blue copepods.

Be sure to check out Lindsey’s photos of the patch on the slideshow below.

Reporter Lindsey Hoshaw recently returned from a trip to the Pacific Garbage Patch.  She was the only journalist on a scientific expedition led by Charles Moore, who discovered the patch 12 years ago. QUEST reporter Amy Standen talked to Lindsey about her trip to the patch and what she found there.

Tell me a little bit about your trip to the Pacific Gyre. How long did it take, and what was life like onboard?

It took about a week to reach the patch after we set sail from Honolulu, Hawaii. There were four other crew members besides myself: first mate Jeffery Ernst, Algalita director of research Gwen  Lattin, University of North Carolina at Wilmington graduate student Bonnie Monteleone, scientist and director of UC Irvine’s Urban Water Resource Center Bill Cooper, and, of course, Captain Charles Moore, who discovered the patch.

The living conditions were tight. We each had our own bunk and there was one common living area where we’d eat meals, work on our laptops, read, and generally unwind at the end of the day. The meals that Captain Moore cooked were definitely the highlight. We ate fresh Mahi Mahi and had fresh fruit and vegetables throughout most of the trip until we started running low at the end.

Can you describe what the plastic patch looks like, as you approach it in the boat?  Is it something you can see from a distance?

The patch is very difficult to describe because it’s not all stuck together. Imagine if you dumped a small wastebasket full of trash in an Olympic-size swimming pool. It wouldn’t all stay in one place and it might not all float. Most of the patch is made up of tiny plastic particles that are the size of grains of rice. It’s not something that you’d “see as you approach.” In a way, there’s no single feature to approach; the boundary of the garbage patch is hard to define because there is plastic throughout the Pacific. When you’re out on the bow sometimes you won’t see anything and other days you’ll see a rapid-fire succession of empty barrels, rope, buoys, plastic water bottles, and lots of unidentifiable plastic fragments. I’ve often been asked why you can’t see the patch from Google Earth and this is precisely why: The pieces are so tiny, water isn’t a fixed feature, and many of the fragments float beneath the surface.

Describe the moment you reached the gyre. What were your first impressions?

Actually reaching the gyre was a little anti-climactic because we collected trash throughout the journey — not just when were in the highest accumulation zone. It’s not like driving from one state to another where you’d see the road signs and vegetation change. My impression overall was surprisingly tempered. It was strange to see toothbrushes and water bottles and a toilet seat floating in the middle of the ocean. But if you think about how much plastic we produce each year, it completely makes sense. If the average American produces over four pounds of trash a day, how can we be surprised that it’s ending up in the ocean?

Is there any single type of plastic that seems most prominent? (E.g. plastic bags, or fishing nets?) How much of the plastic is still recognizable as a specific product?

The four most common items we saw were ropes, buoys, water bottles, and 55-gallon plastic barrels. Things like umbrella handles, toilet seats, toothbrushes, and light bulbs were much less common. There seem to be more identifiable objects if you’re measuring by weight but if you’re counting the number of plastic pieces then there are many more fragments than specific products.

How does it get there?

Scientists believe most of the plastic in the gyre is from the Pacific Rim, off the coasts of North America and Asia. Some is obviously from commercial fishing vessels; the rope, nets and buoys likely drifted away from fishing operations or may have been intentionally dumped. The question about plastic’s journey from a consumer to the patch is an interesting one. I would love to see a model of how this occurs or a report that charts the path of one piece of plastic from producer to consumer to the patch. Thus far I haven’t seen this and we can’t pick up a piece of plastic from the patch and say, “here’s how this got here.” That said, here’s a likely scenario: Someone on-the-go buys a water bottle and tosses it in the trash. The trashcan happens to be full and the water bottle falls onto the sidewalk. That night it rains and the water bottle goes into a storm drain that empties into the bay. From there it is slowly sucked out to sea and ends up in the North Pacific Gyre, which keeps everything swirling together in a giant whirlpool.

Are there any known human health effects from eating large ocean fish with high concentrations of plastic-derived toxins? And what kinds of toxins are we talking about?

Obviously there’s a precedent for this: We’ve been warned about the inherent dangers in eating tuna that contains mercury. If we are eating large ocean fish with high concentrations of plastic-derived toxins, they may be leaking into our tissues but most table fish (the fish we eat) don’t come from the garbage patch. More research needs to be done on this subject. The types of toxins we’re talking about are DDT and PCBs, among other things.

Having seen the patch in person, does it seem feasible that the Pacific gyre (or any of the others) could ever be cleaned up? Any idea what the leading strategies might be?

I am an eternal optimist, so while it would be extremely difficult to clean up, I still believe some sort of removal program may be possible. What may happen in 100 to 200 years is that we start to see this plastic as valuable once petroleum is no longer available. If rescuing the plastic becomes profitable then I could see people investing in large commercial vessels to try and clean it up. But right now I haven’t seem any clean-up endeavors that have convinced me they can remove an ocean’s worth of trash.

… Or, does the focus seem to be more on understanding the patches so that we don’t keep adding to them?

Of the four groups I know of who are studying the patch — the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Project Kaisei and the GP2 Project — the first two are devoted to research and the latter are l ways to clean up the mess. There’s so much that needs to be understood in this arena, I think research is the way to go at this point.

For everyday citizens, our best bet is to do away with single-use disposable items like water bottles and take-out containers and plastic bags and coffee cups. I’ve started carrying around a mason jar, à la No Impact Man (http://noimpactman.typepad.com/), for coffee and restaurant leftovers. It’s just a matter of convincing ourselves that one hour of enjoyment with a disposable coffee cup is not worth a lifetime of plastic pollution.

Tune in April 20, 2010 for a new QUEST TV story, Sea of Plastic. You can also listen now QUEST Radio's story on the Pacific Garbage Patch online.

Funds for Lindsey's trip to the garbage patch were paid in part by Spot.us.

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And how this metamorphosis saves Monkeys!

Colombia: a beautiful country, with incredible forests and diverse wildlife, but like many other countries, a trash problem. With no formal trash collection system, the forests and villages suffer from scattered plastic bags, endangering wildlife and creating a mess on village streets. One such village was Los Limites, until they came up with a most transformative solution: Eco-Mochilas!

The Eco-Mochila project was invented by the organization Proyecto Titi (Project Tamarin), a dynamic conservation program that combines field research, education, and community programs in an effort to protect the endangered Cotton Top Tamarin.

An Eco-Mochila is a bag made from crocheting 100 plastic bags into a colorful beach bag or purse. The innovative woman who create the bags are called the Asoartesanas. They encourage villagers and school children to collect plastic bags and as they go door to door to collect, they educate the people about their local wildlife. Then, they cut the bags into strips and begin their craft.

Eco-Mochilas are sold throughout the world at various venues and bring in a suitable salary for an artist. Of course, the collecting of thousands of plastic bags has other benefits: a more beautiful village, and a forest clear of trash, which makes a certain one-pound monkey very happy.

The endangered Cotton Top Tamarin is found only in the forests of Colombia. Deforestation and capture for the pet trade are the species' greatest threats. The Eco-Mochila project creates sustenance for villagers, an alternative to using the forest for such, and of course, offers a cleaner forest for all wildlife.

The program has been so successful that the Asoartesanas have trained people from other countries to begin similar project in their communities…

And in case this is important to their case, eco-mochilas are cute, come in different sizes, can be personalized, make great presents and are water resistant. I have three!

Click here to purchase an Eco-Mochila and help Cotton-Top Tamarins; and come visit the Tamarins at the Oakland Zoo anytime.

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