Landfills

Landfills.

• Heavy equipment compresses a day's worth of trash into areas called cells, which are then covered with soil and recompacted.
• Since landfills are designed to bury trash andnot to break it down, toxic chemicals can easily leak out and contaminate the surrounding environment. Closed sites must be monitored and maintained for up to 30 years.
• When bacteria break downtrash, the result is a gas that's about 50 percent methane and 50 percent carbon dioxide.
• Compost piles are designed to break down trash and turn it into usable nutrients. Landfills, withtheir plastic liners and oxygen barriers, actually preserve trash.
• New technologies called bioreactors can facilitate the decomposition of trash, thus producing more methane for capture as energy.• Environmental impact studies determine how much land a landfill would need, the composition of the site's underlying soil and bedrock, the flow of water near the area and the impact a landfillwould have on the surrounding environment.

What it is
Landfill - carefully designed structure built into or on top of the ground in which trash is isolated from the surrounding environment(groundwater, air, rain).

Causes
• Millions of tons of industrial waste, hospital waste and debris are dumped each year in an uncontrolled manner.
• These products aren’t packagedwith reusable or recyclable materials. For example: plastic. 
Way in which affects the environment and human beings
Since landfills are designed to bury trash and not to break it down, toxic chemicals caneasily leak out and contaminate the surrounding environment. In the landfills they live rodents and these transmit infectious diseases.

Solutions
Re-use: to use objects that are considered to begarbage.
Reduce: We need to use less products.
Recycle: Return to use the packings that we reject.
• The bioreactors can facilitate the decomposition of trash, thus producing more methane for...