Tag: landfill mining

Wasting Away Waste And Landfill

Wasting Away Waste And Landfill

Landfills are the old form of waste treatment and are still commonly used in most places around the world. Since the advent of agriculture, humans have had to deal with garbage disposal. Yesterday’s dump was a pit or hill on the outskirts of town that played host to disease-carrying rodents, insects, and dangerous objects.

Today, the number of “open landfills” in the world directly effect half of the world’s population, 3.5 billion people. 1

My study of waste and garbage has given me an insight into how civilizations handled waste through history.

A Brief History of the Beginning

The first recorded find of a “landfill” was in North America.

Archaeological studies shows a clan of Native Americans in what is now Colorado produced an average of 5.3 pounds of waste a day. That was in 6500BC. Americans today produce about 5.4 pounds of waste per day. 2

Then in 500 BC, Athens Greece organized the first municipal dump in western world. Regulations required waste to be dumped at least a mile from the city limits.

The New Testament of Bible refers to waste

Jerusalem Palestine, in the Valley of Gehenna also called Sheoal in the New Testament of the Bible "Though I descent into Sheol, thou art there." Sheoal was apparently a dump outside of the city of that periodically burned. It became synonymous with "hell."

The Threat of Waste

Throughout history trash has played a continuous but invisible role. The diseases spawned during the middle ages devastated the world’s population but our history books talk about it and the rats but never do they talk about the garbage and the waste as having any responsibility for the diseases. 3

How Much Waste is too Much

Current global Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) generation levels are approximately 1.3 billion tonnes per year, and are expected to increase to approximately 2.2 billion tonnes per year by 2025. This represents a significant increase in per capita waste generation rates, from 1.2 kg (2.64 lb) to 1.42 kg (3.12 lb) per person per day in the next fifteen years. However, global averages are broad estimates only as rates vary considerably by region, country, city, and even within cities. 4

MSW generation rates are influenced by economic development, the degree of industrialization, public habits, and local climate. Generally, the higher the economic development and rate of urbanization, the greater the amount of solid waste produced.

A Population of Wasters

Trash is becoming a larger and larger problem for us and for the environment. As the global population grows and the people continue to concentrate in metropolitan areas, we continue to waste more and more, and, we use more of our natural resources. Our global resources are running short.

Green Fire Engineered Reclamation is designed and dedicated to Landfill Mining and the sciences associated with it. We can’t stop the waste or the flow of waste but we can arrest some of the environmental influences of the open landfills. Open landfills contribute about 20% to the global pollution, water, air and disease.

Join with us to effect change.

I appreciate your attention

Mike Prettyman,
Chief Information Officer at Green Fire Engineered Reclamation
For more information come to the website
Children of the Landfill Project

Green Fire Engineered Reclamation

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Citations

1. ISWA calls open dumps a ‘global health emergency’

“open dumpsites receive roughly 40 per cent of the world’s waste and serve about 3.5 to 4 billion people;”

http://resource.co/article/iswa-calls-open-dumps-%E2%80%98global-health-emergency%E2%80%99-10463

2. In the earlier report, they warned that global solid waste generation was on pace to increase 70 percent by 2025, rising from more than 3.5 million tonnes per day in 2010 to more than 6 million tonnes per day by 2025. The waste from cities alone is already enough to fill a line of trash trucks 5,000 kilometers long every day. The global cost of dealing with all that trash is rising too: from $205 billion a year in 2010 to $375 billion by 2025, with the sharpest cost increases in developing countries.

http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/10/30/global-waste-on-pace-to-triple

3. “Trash has played a tremendous role in history. The Bubonic Plague, cholera and typhoid fever, to mention a few, were diseases that altered the populations of Europe and influenced monarchies. They were perpetuated by filth that harbored rats, and contaminated water supply. It was not uncommon for Europeans to throw their garbage and even human wastes out of the window. They figured that stray dogs would eat whatever they threw out. “

Kenneth Barbalace. The History of Waste. EnvironmentalChemistry.com. Aug. 2003. Accessed on-line: 11/12/2016 http://EnvironmentalChemistry.com/yogi/environmental/wastehistory.html

4. "The planet is already straining from the impacts of today’s waste and we are on a path to more than triple quantities," the authors write. "Through a move towards stable or declining populations, denser and better-managed cities consuming fewer resources, and greater equity and use of technology, we can bring peak waste forward and down. The environmental, economic and social benefits would be enormous."

The article, Waste Production Must Peak This Century, is the cover story in the Oct. 31, 2013, issue of Nature.

 

David

Why is Green Fire Engineered Reclamation

Here is the problem we are addressing.

Open Dumpsites

Open Dumpsites are a global problem. There are approximately 350 recognized open dump sites globally. They receive roughly 40% of the world’s waste and they serve about 3.5 – 4 billion people. That's half of the world's population.

The 50 biggest dumpsites directly affect the daily lives of 64 million people, a population the size of France, and indirectly affect half the worlds population

There have been and still are international calls for solutions to solve this escalating global health emergency. Green Fire has the solution.

While the risk of disease and illness to millions of people living in the immediate vicinity of open dumpsites is cause for concern in its own right, the impact of the gases and toxins being released into the atmosphere by burning the waste has global consequences.

Our intent is to achieve a coordinated response to the issue through a global alliance of organizations capable of delivering real change. Unless we do, the problem will exponentially accelerate as the global population increases

We are Green Fire

Green Fire is a passionate multi-disciplinary organization specializing in carefully engineered waste Remediation and Reclamation.

A number of years ago our group came together with a focus on developing ways of economically resolving the global epidemic of health risks facing society from waste. The result is Green fire Engineered Reclamation.

Green Fire Engineered Reclamation is an engineering company, made up of entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists and academic experts focused on the world's waste problem initially the open landfills.

We pride ourselves on our ability as a collective group to integrate all appropriate technologies, Green Fire's as well as third party technologies. We integrate technologies to build the best possible solution for the landfill and the local community.

We are focused on landfill mining.. With our technologies we are able to reclaim and re-purpose landfill real-estate by first removing the raw and useful materials from what has been rejected and secondly generating power from the remainder leaving only inert material to be used for manufacturing.

What we do is process the waste through the “application of heat.”

Green Fire has a patented technology several years in development and with several million dollars invested.. It is now ready to be taken into useful production.

The Green Fire Technology is an efficient electrochemical system powered by electricity that produces an intense field of radiant energy, a plasma, that causes the breaking apart of the molecular bonds of solid, liquid and gaseous compounds of materials both hazardous and nonhazardous.

With the Green Fire system, waste materials are prepared and fed into a first phase gasification chamber that operates at temperatures of approximately 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

The heat of the first stage plasma gasifier transforms the organic (carbon-based) materials into an ultra-clean, synthetic gas, called syngas. The clean syngas is then converted into transportation fuels such as ethanol and diesel, or industrial products like hydrogen and methanol. The syngas is used as a substitute for natural gas for heating and is used for electricity generation.

After the first phase, the waste materials flow into a second closed chamber where they are superheated to temperatures between 10,000 and 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit using an electricity – conducting gas called plasma.

In this secondary stage of the Green Fire process, inorganic (non-carbon-based) materials are transformed into environmentally inert raw materials.

That brings us to the recovered materials

These inert recovered materials will be re-purposed to enhance the local communities with appropriate technologies that include 3D Printing for site specific manufacturing and fabrication. The ultimate focus is creating a local manufacturing business for the betterment of community commerce.

Green Fire will provide the education and training, to local qualified individuals and professionals. All education provided will be supported by a mentoring program until a comfort level for independent operations has been reached at which point support and oversight will be minimizes to an as needed basis.

We build small low cost villages with our processes and materials. We provide designs to manufacture low cost housing for the local village.

We estimate that in most cases that 3D printing will best serve this process but it will be site specific based on the resources available.

Our villages are designed for a population range from of 50 to 150 individuals, although some are smaller, and larger villages of up to 2,000 individuals can exist as networks of smaller sub-communities.

These villages are provided electricity, fuels and clean water utilities as well as training and communication systems from Green Fire operations.

Green Fire Villages

Green Fire Villages are intentional villages whose goal is to become completely autonomous and more socially, economically and environmentally safe.

Who populates these initial villages?

Green Fire staff and employees, but most importantly the Landfill Pickers, and additional community support personnel such as medical, and emergency staff.

It is the people of the village that provide the labor for Green Fire operations.

There are approximately 15 million people who directly survive on and make the landfill an integral part of their lifestyle. These people have formed and are a part of a global organization. The Landfill Pickers are the initial target of Green Fire.

It is our intent to enhance the living standard of these people and the surrounding communities.

 

David