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Compost is a mixture of ingredients used as plant fertilizer and to improve soil's physical, chemical, and biological properties. It is commonly prepared by decomposing plant and food waste, recycling organic materials, and manure. The resulting mixture is rich in plant nutrients and beneficial organisms, such as bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, and fungi. Compost improves soil fertility in gardens, landscaping, horticulture, urban agriculture, and organic farming, reducing dependency on commercial chemical fertilizers. The benefits of compost include providing nutrients to crops as fertilizer, acting as a soil conditioner, increasing the humus or humic acid contents of the soil, and introducing beneficial microbes that help to suppress pathogens in the soil and reduce soil-borne diseases.
Waste management or waste disposal includes the processes and actions required to manage waste from its inception to its final disposal. This includes the collection, transport, treatment, and disposal of waste, together with monitoring and regulation of the waste management process and waste-related laws, technologies, and economic mechanisms.
A landfill site, also known as a tip, dump, rubbish dump, garbage dump, trash dump, or dumping ground, is a site for the disposal of waste materials. Landfill is the oldest and most common form of waste disposal, although the systematic burial of the waste with daily, intermediate and final covers only began in the 1940s. In the past, refuse was simply left in piles or thrown into pits; in archeology this is known as a midden.
A compactor is a machine or mechanism used to reduce the size of material such as waste material or bio mass through compaction. A trash compactor is often used by business and public places like hospitals to reduce the volume of trash they produce. A baler-wrapper compactor is often used for making compact and wrapped bales in order to improve logistics.
Waste stabilization ponds are ponds designed and built for wastewater treatment to reduce the organic content and remove pathogens from wastewater. They are man-made depressions confined by earthen structures. Wastewater or "influent" enters on one side of the waste stabilization pond and exits on the other side as "effluent", after spending several days in the pond, during which treatment processes take place.
A leachate is any liquid that, in the course of passing through matter, extracts soluble or suspended solids, or any other component of the material through which it has passed.
Municipal solid waste (MSW), commonly known as trash or garbage in the United States and rubbish in Britain, is a waste type consisting of everyday items that are discarded by the public. "Garbage" can also refer specifically to food waste, as in a garbage disposal; the two are sometimes collected separately. In the European Union, the semantic definition is 'mixed municipal waste,' given waste code 20 03 01 in the European Waste Catalog. Although the waste may originate from a number of sources that has nothing to do with a municipality, the traditional role of municipalities in collecting and managing these kinds of waste have produced the particular etymology 'municipal.'
Concrete recycling is the use of rubble from demolished concrete structures. Recycling is cheaper and more ecological than trucking rubble to a landfill. Crushed rubble can be used for road gravel, revetments, retaining walls, landscaping gravel, or raw material for new concrete. Large pieces can be used as bricks or slabs, or incorporated with new concrete into structures, a material called urbanite.
A mechanical biological treatment (MBT) system is a type of waste processing facility that combines a sorting facility with a form of biological treatment such as composting or anaerobic digestion. MBT plants are designed to process mixed household waste as well as commercial and industrial wastes.
Sewage sludge treatment describes the processes used to manage and dispose of sewage sludge produced during sewage treatment. Sludge treatment is focused on reducing sludge weight and volume to reduce transportation and disposal costs, and on reducing potential health risks of disposal options. Water removal is the primary means of weight and volume reduction, while pathogen destruction is frequently accomplished through heating during thermophilic digestion, composting, or incineration. The choice of a sludge treatment method depends on the volume of sludge generated, and comparison of treatment costs required for available disposal options. Air-drying and composting may be attractive to rural communities, while limited land availability may make aerobic digestion and mechanical dewatering preferable for cities, and economies of scale may encourage energy recovery alternatives in metropolitan areas.
Green waste, also known as "biological waste", is any organic waste that can be composted. It is most usually composed of refuse from gardens such as grass clippings or leaves, and domestic or industrial kitchen wastes. Green waste does not include things such as dried leaves, pine straw, or hay. Such materials are rich in carbon and considered "brown wastes," while green wastes contain high concentrations of nitrogen. Green waste can be used to increase the efficiency of many composting operations and can be added to soil to sustain local nutrient cycling.
Waste diversion or landfill diversion is the process of diverting waste from landfills. The success of landfill diversion can be measured by comparison of the size of the landfill from one year to the next. If the landfill grows minimally or remains the same, then policies covering landfill diversion are successful. For example, currently in the United States there are 3000 landfills. A measure of the success of landfill diversion would be if that number remains the same or is reduced. In 2015 it was recorded that the national average of landfill diversion in the United States was 33.8%, while San Francisco had implemented the most effective policies and had recorded a landfill diversion rate of 77%.
Biodrying is the process by which biodegradable waste is rapidly heated through initial stages of composting to remove moisture from a waste stream and hence reduce its overall weight. In biodrying processes, the drying rates are augmented by biological heat in addition to forced aeration. The major portion of biological heat, naturally available through the aerobic degradation of organic matter, is utilized to evaporate surface and bound water associated with the mixed sludge. This heat generation assists in reducing the moisture content of the biomass without the need for supplementary fossil fuels, and with minimal electricity consumption. It can take as little as 8 days to dry waste in this manner. This enables reduced costs of disposal if landfill is charged on a cost per tonne basis. Biodrying may be used as part of the production process for refuse-derived fuels. Biodrying does not however greatly affect the biodegradability of the waste and hence is not stabilised. Biodried waste will still break down in a landfill to produce landfill gas and hence potentially contribute to climate change. In the UK this waste will still impact upon councils LATS allowances. Whilst biodrying is increasingly applied within commercial mechanical biological treatment (MBT) plants, it is also still subject to on-going research and development.
A landfill liner, or composite liner, is intended to be a low permeable barrier, which is laid down under engineered landfill sites. Until it deteriorates, the liner retards migration of leachate, and its toxic constituents, into underlying aquifers or nearby rivers, causing potentially irreversible contamination of the local waterway and its sediments.
This is a glossary of environmental science.
Products made from a variety of materials can be recycled using a number of processes.
High-density solids pumps are hydrostatically operating machines which displace the medium being pumped and thus create a flow.
Resource recovery is using wastes as an input material to create valuable products as new outputs. The aim is to reduce the amount of waste generated, thereby reducing the need for landfill space, and optimising the values created from waste. Resource recovery delays the need to use raw materials in the manufacturing process. Materials found in municipal solid waste, construction and demolition waste, commercial waste and industrial wastes can be used to recover resources for the manufacturing of new materials and products. Plastic, paper, aluminium, glass and metal are examples of where value can be found in waste.
The Newby Island Landfill (NISL) is one of the largest active landfills on the shores of the San Francisco Bay. It is located in Santa Clara County, California in the United States. The site is located within the city limits of San Jose, California at the western terminus of Dixon Landing Road. The address is 1601 Dixon Landing Road, Milpitas. Although the address and public street access to the site are both in the City of Milpitas, the landfill property is entirely within the City of San Jose. Newby Island Landfill has a length of 5.07 km (3.15 mi). It is located West of the City of Milpitas near Dixon Landing Road and Interstate 880. It is the terminus for waste for all of San Jose (62%), Santa Clara (14%), Milpitas (10%), Cupertino (5%), Los Altos (2%) and other cities (7%). The 342-acre pile is currently permitted to operate until 2041 and may extend up to 245 feet. The landfill is an island surrounded by a levee which keeps its runoff from directly entering the bay, and the water that drains from it is treated in the landfill's own treatment plant. Electricity for the landfill is generated by burning the methane collected from the decomposition of the waste. Dried sewage sludge from the nearby San José–Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility is the material used as cover, mixed in with the trash, blending San Jose's waste streams. It is operated by Republic Services (Republic), which, along with Waste Management Incorporated, transports and disposes of most of the household trash in the United States.
Home composting is the process of using household waste to make compost at home. Composting is the biological decomposition of organic waste by recycling food and other organic materials into compost. Home composting can be practiced within households for various environmental advantages, such as increasing soil fertility, reduce landfill and methane contribution, and limit food waste.
References
- ↑ "Going Undercover". Waste360. 2009-01-01. Retrieved 2021-10-19.
- ↑ "Plan for cover". Waste Today. Retrieved 2021-10-19.
- ↑ "Alternative Daily Cover (ADC)". Archived from the original on June 5, 2012. Retrieved September 14, 2012.
- ↑ "What is an Alternative Daily Cover?" . Retrieved March 30, 2018.
- ↑ Ng, Kelvin T, Irene M Lo, and Irene M Lo. 2007. Mechanical Behaviors of a Synthetic Paste of Tire Chips and Paper Sludge in MSW Landfill Daily Cover Applications. Canadian Geotechnical Journal. 44, no. 8: 928-941.
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