Landfills Can Harm Your Health
Each person in the America creates almost 5 pounds of trash per day! That adds up to one ton of trash for every person per year. Most of the trash we generate gets dumped in a local landfill.
Landfills are monitored for safety by the government. They can not be built on a piece of land that is unstable or is near a fault line. They have to be far enough away from any water supply so there is no danger of the water being polluted. They also have to be far enough from homes to not be an eyesore or nose sore. Despite all these rules, landfills are still dangerous to us and the environment.
Landfill Gas and Your Health
Generally, any waste that might create gas pollution is not allowed to be dumped in a landfill. However, some of this dangerous waste gets in due to negligence and this can be very bad for the health of people who live and work near the landfill. Landfills produce odorous pollution even if no gas producing waste gets in.
The large amount of paper goods and food people throw away that end up in a landfill is hazardous. These things will break down as time goes on but in the process they can create a dangerous gas called methane. This gas is more hazardous than even carbon dioxide. The problem with having methane gas at the landfills is it can easily catch fire, react with other gases and suck the oxygen out of the air.
Chemicals Leaking and Landfills
There are several millions of pounds of hazardous chemicals dumped into landfills around the country each year. Currently, landfills must store the chemicals in leak proof containers but some landfills have these chemicals stored improperly before this regulation went into effect. Even the properly stored chemicals may leak after a certain period of time.
Some of the chemicals commonly located in landfills are vinyl chloride and tolulene, known to be linked to cancer. The problem is that these chemicals interact with other landfill chemicals and create leachate. Leachate is a strong chemical mixture that often finds its way into the ground and possibly into water supplies and poses a danger to food supplies, as well as humans and pets. A little bit of this dangerous mixture of chemicals can do a lot of damage.
What Should We Do?
When landfills were first developed, not enough thought was given to the potential for the landfills to hurt the health of both humans and animals nearby. Most of the trash we as a country produce goes into landfills. There are other choices.
If people were willing to recycle, they would put a lot less trash into the landfills. The majority of our trash is indeed recyclable and a lot of it is biodegradable. We could lower the amount of trash put in landfills by around 70% if people recycled and composted biodegradable trash. If trash was dealt with in this manner, the toxins in the trash would not get into the landfill and into the environment.
Some success has been had with community based composting but it is not easy to get people to cooperate. People are generally happy to recycle as long as they have the option but as of now, it is a choice, not the law. Time will tell when the rest of the country will start to compost and recycle, but meanwhile we all need to take responsibility and do what we can to handle our trash responsibly.
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