As a garbage truck driver I am VERY familliar with the landfills in and around the Salt Lake valley. We do have 1 burn plant, 2 construction only non-lined landfills, 1 standard lined landfill, 4 construction recycling facilities and even 1 landfill that captures the methane gas for power and heating gas. Utah is quite the environmental underdog when it comes to waste disposal.

hey SciSchow!! big fan here, i've watched you guys for a long time. there actually are landfill gas to energy power plants! i know because i work at one. there are miles of piping in our local landfill and it is all run back to my power plant. we take in about 1800 to 2000 SCFM of methane along with oxygen and other balance gases and burn them in special Caterpillar engines that are hooked up to generators. currently the facility that i work at has 5 such engines, three 16 cylinder engines hooked to 800KW generators, and two 20 cylinder engines hooked to 1600KW engines. i have been at this job for a little over a year, so i'm still fairly green. but i would love to try answering any questions you might have :) the process is really interesting, and i think the community here would definitely benefit from another video explaining this.

The way he says "Delicious" at 7:14 is the most amazing thing ever. I literally burst out laughing.

I'd like to see more episodes about waste management. I love the space stuff, but waste is really interesting too.

Here in France there are WTE facilities in every medium sized towns I've been to. But what isn't good is that although mentalities have changed (in most countries of Europe at least) and more and more people recycle their garbage (plastics, glass), not all materials use the same recycling process. So when the recycled garbage is collected, if there's one type of plastic that isn't suitable for recycling, the whole recycling skip is thrown in the WTE site. So basically people are recycling for nothing... The recycling process is more expensive than what the WTE facilities can produce and sell to manufacturers. The greed for money is the problem at the end of the day

you deserve a show on television

Sometimes i get drunk and watch these videos, and then i dont pay any attention to what he says. Its soothing for me. weird ... or understandable?

Over the past few weeks I've suddenly become very interested in waste disposal, so this video was right on time. I didn't know that the US had WTE sites, nor that they were all so old. Learn something new every day :) Thank you Hank and thanks SciShow crew!

Landfills: The environmentalist nightmare and future archaeologist's wet dream.

Now we put our trash on MTV

Oh look, a science video about me!

It is amazing how much I learned about waste management by playing various sim city games. Also would like to point out that around a third of our landfills are filled with construction waste, if you have ever been to a construction site you would be sick at the amount of waste. Same goes for a lot of industry and commerce, when it isn't your money going in the trash people throw out a lot more stuff. End consumers produce relatively little waste.

3:12 Wow Hank, you look way too happy when you say that!

I just want to say this to the entire DFTBA enterprise (right term?), and many of their suggested channels: Thank you so very much for what you guys do. It is refreshing, enlightening, and reminds that learning something new every day keeps my brain sharp. If I had the additional funds, I would be giving to Subabble (sp?) like crazy. Now back to not reading the comments on the Internet...

WTE facilities are such an important part of building our sustainable future :D I'm so glad it's really starting to catch on.

As others have already told you guys: you all deserve for this to be a TV show. I'm sure such a change would involve some overhauling (and possible loss of full creative control) but I would keep the thought up there (or just take it as a compliment, which it really is). I've been keeping up with you guys for quite some time now and realized why you guys are so appealing. For a good part, it has to do with Hank's personality and speech, but I think that in a deeper way it really has to do with the passion you guys have to share your love of science with others. That passion is so damned inspiring. I, with all the honestly in my heart, feel that passion for knowledge, in all its aspects, so I started uploading videos of my own to share this love of mine. I am new to it, and I am always learning, but if you are interested feel free to give it a chance. All I can promise is to do my best but I need your feedback and support. That is all, my friends.

I live in Albuquerque, NM. Every home in the city was given a big blue recycling bin the same size as our trash bins. My family has been recycling for years, but now its a lot more apparent that about 2/3 of our waste is recyclable. We only need to have our trash bin emptied every other week, but our recycling bin fills up every time they come to take it away.

4:31 15 year old hotdog in a 20 year old bun?? Lol that guy was in no hurry

I remember some documentary mentioning mushrooms and fungus in general being able to break down trash very well, and thanks to breaking it all down, quickly makes it survivable for other plants like grass, and then attract things like insects thanks to the grass. They did some experiment with two piles of trash by seeding one, and the mushroom-seeded trash decomposed in a month or so to the point of being able to be used in gardens. Would something like that be applicable to more hazardous trash, factoring in the leachate and such? Since I'm all for quickly-populating things like mushrooms and ants being used everywhere. (I assume it's somewhat deadly, though the video mentions leachate having a small amount of nitrogen which is a common nutrient for mushrooms, so, well).

Great video! It's nice to be *President of Space* :)

"Guys, there's poop in the street. We've got to do something about the poop in the street."

"All that delicious trash juice". Laughter ensued :D

America doesn't recycle as much as it could though. Four years ago I traveled from Canada to St. Louis for a conference. In the airport before getting onto my plane to return home I bought a meal that included a bottled drink. After finishing the drink I went in search of a place to recycle it. In Canada there is a recycling bin next to almost every garbage bin in public places. (In my work place we have six different bins for waste in the break room. One for garbage and five for various types of recyclables) In the St. Louis airport I searched for quite some time for a recycling bin. I found one for paper, but none for bottles or other things. I started to ask around to see if anyone knew where one might be. I tried a janitor and he told me that he thought they had "one" somewhere, but he didn't know where it was. I asked a pilot thinking that he might have been in the airport a lot and could have seen one. He hadn't seen one, but told me he thought it was a cool idea. No one knew where one was. I almost gave up and thought about leaving the bottle on top of a garbage can or paper recycling bin, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I get annoyed with hippies and obsessive environmentalists where I'm from, but I just couldn't throw away the bottle. So I put it in my bag and kept it until I arrived back in Canada and found a recycling bin within a minute in the airport. America needs more recycling bins in public places.

I worked for a company in Louisiana called CPL that took landfill gas and sent it to plants' boilers to be fired. That was over 5 years ago, so that technology is in practice and isn't that new. Interestingly one project we worked on was reducing the amount of water content in leachate to reduce its volume and in turn the shipping cost of the landfill.

Thank you, Hank and the scishow team for, unlike Vsauce and your brother, keeping on making videos for us who are not partying our heads off.

"Trash juice" and "trash hole" are my new favorite phrases.

Here in the Netherlands, we recycle more and more. Paper, plastic, glass and plant-based waste (Groente-, Fruit- en Tuinafval; literally vegetable, fruit and garden waste) can all be easily collected separately. With a little extra effort there are waste disposal facilities where waste can be separated even finer: things like wood and appliances like fridges and tvs are separate, as well as chemical waste like batteries, videotapes and engine oil.

I'm always amazed by the "mountains" outside of Chicago

4:10 "Trash hole explosions" I blame my kids, or my wife, or the dog, or my co-workers, or my friends for all of my trash hole explosions.

Billings Montana's landfill captures the gasses excaping the ground and uses it for power already. Surprised it was not mentioned here! LOVE SCISHOW!!!!

seriously so glad this video is here! watched some other episodes like 2 weeks ago and thought to my self "I wanna know about garbage". low and behold I come back this morning and here it is!

I LOVE THIS CHANNEL. Thank you for all the information Scishow.

One thing you didn't cover is how incredible of an impact bio-waste (such as food) has on climate change. Dumps produce methane which is, as you said, way more potent than Co2. It also has much more of an impact on the climate because of its chemical structure. This is important because bio waste, besides taking a very long time to decompose in dumps, also produces methane there, instead of the co2 it would produce elsewhere. So it's actually better for the enviro,net to drop that rotting banana on the floor than throw it away.

Interesting tidbit: a friend of mine was developing a plasma furnace for waste breakdown. Just as it sounds, this furnace would heat everything up to a plasma, then cool and all the different elements could be removed individually. They perfected the design in 2007, just before the recession hit. When they tried to sell it to counties, they were declined due to cost. My friend then retired. Perhaps one day, we will see a resurgence of this technology in recycling and reusing our waste, rather than leaving everything to rot.

Love how excited he gets when he talks about the explosions.

Funnily enough, I learned about the problem of flammable gas build up in dumps through a bible study. I was told that Gehenna became synonymous with hell because it was a dump that occasionally had fiery eruptions, just outside of Jerusalem. In my tiny amount of research sparked by making sure I spelt it right, I've learned that this reasoning for its association with hell is not only debatable but not very likely. Still, it was entertaining to learn about scientific problems with garbage during a bible study.

Is it just me or did he get super excited when he first mentioned gas explosions?

I like what Arthur says "Solid waste are raw materials we're too stupid to use"

HAHA I get the back to the future reference. I remember doc brown’s mr fusion on the delorean. The mr fusion thing creates power from trash, lol.

I never used to recycle and didn't care where my trash was going. Only recently this year I started sorting my garbage and trying to recycle what my local center would accept and switched to reusable grocery bags. Sadly about 70% of my households trash still ends up in the county landfill. And its typical to have my dumpster full if not overflowing every week before pick up. Obviously we need a new offensive on all fronts from the average consumer to government and industry to really turn things around.

Speaking as a first year archaeologist, holes in the ground have been used as waste dumps for a long time. Like, a really long time. You can tell a lot from one, since people just throw all kinds of things into them.

The president of space. That had me in tears. Good one Hank.

I went on a field trip to a landfill recently in Southern Oregon. They are already capturing the methane and running generators off it, producing up to 300 megawatts.

Have a Trash to Steam plant kinda close here. When the wind is blowing the right way and it is humid can get a whiff of it.

You should do an episode on exploding casket syndrome. Its very interesting how people expect to completely seal a body in a casket and not have it turn into body soup.

Oh, the WTE plant on the picture is the one in my town, Malmö, Sweden! It's used for central heating.I went there with a course at university, it's quite cool. Sweden have even built too many of those plants, so no we import garbage to burn. Norway pay Swedish companies to take care of some of their garbage.

Hank and Co., you're doing such a great job with this project! Thank you! Happy 2014!

I burst out laughing at "delicious" 😂

I feel like the US is always behind on things

2 Kg = almost 4.5 #/day Although this segment is rather old, it can be informative and useful going forward. Honestly I was amazed that many years after going to college and hearing so much about recycling, the town we moved to had a dump - not a transfer station or any kind of limit on what was "deposited", just a dump. At the start it was drive in, dump bags, drive out. Before they finally switched to transfer station and recycling a few years later, it was drive UP, dump and drive down! Not even a large town at that time. As long as the waste facility used recycles, my regular trash is way less than the 4.5#/day. Often only 1 large 33 gal trash bag is produced every 2 months. Although lookup says it can hold 50-60#s, no way could I lift that into the bin. Mine is more likely 20 or maybe up to 30#. Recently our transfer station has included more plastic in the plastic bag container, aka plastic wrapping on various products (nothing icky like meat wrappers!) This helped reduce the trash bag contents, especially in winter as the pellet bags can be recycled now. Trash middens were/are gold mines for archaeologists. In antiquity, especially pre-history, these would not be quite as toxic, although there likely were nasty things produced and dumped, but not to the extent that "civilized" societies go! There were also a lot less people involved. The dig I was on (final course, Harvard Yard - yes, THAT Harvard Yard) was searching for any remains of the building known as Indian college. The pit I ended up working on was the literal trash pit. Walk a bit behind living quarters and *DUMP*. We had to dig down a few feet before reaching ye olden dump, documenting more recent stuff as many areas in/around Boston have had a lot of land fill added - this can contain old artifacts, but are out of context. Once the "pristine" surface was reached, this pit was so rich it was extended as far as possible (sidewalk prevented going further.) It ended up being about 8' deep, with a solid clay original surface bottom. Everything but the kitchen sink! Fish bones, beef bones, rat teeth, clam shells, broken glass, bottles and pottery of various types, broken spoon, boar tusk, with one layer being what I called the fireplace cleaning dump layer - several inches of damp ashy gray stuff full of clay pipe pieces. Every handful of soil included a LOT of refuse. At the very bottom was the total remains of a broken Bellarmine jug, dating it to early days of Puritan occupation. Sadly many "transfer" stations ship the regular trash off to other locations, which can be dumps or burn facilities rather than some kind of recycle/better processing facility. There needs to be much more invested into "processing" this refuse in better ways. As for Arthur Clarke's comment - whittle that down to just "We're too stupid".... I would hazard a guess that too many people DON'T bother recycling and just toss everything. No consideration for how much that waste will accumulate and impact the future. Sadly information as informative as this might be, we aren't going to change their minds. Their brains are composed of cement - permanently set.

In my home town (Kitchener, Ontario), there was an old landfill that had been covered over in dirt as the city grew past it. I was told the methane gases it produced were being used to power the plaza they built across the street from it. It was a pretty tall pile of trash, so when it became open to the public, it quickly turned into a favorite local tobogganing hill. It was also unofficially dubbed "Mt. Trashmore", and Canada's first Krispy Kreme tried and failed to exist on it.

As I’m listening to Hank talking about methane seeping up into basements, I’m like “yeah, like the house down the street that blew up when I was a kid in… ROCHESTER HILLS MICHIGAN!!!” So funny to hear such a seemingly unknown event from my childhood backyard talked about by Hank Green.

I don't think anything other than this video has made me excited to get rid of trash.

Furthermore: what isn't immediately recycled gets burned, and extra heat is used to generate electricity or transported to places where heat is needed (for example homes or factories that need heat, like oil refineries). Magnets are then used to filter metals from the ashes, to recycle them. Of course, there is a lot of improvement possible, but I think we're doing quite well.

I'm confused. I saw something a couple months ago where they doing just as you were hoping. Biodegradable material was placed in a landfill "shell" composed of polyurethane and what-not. When filled, the shell was capped off and covered in dirt. They then showed how they were harvesting the natural gas that was generated from the decomposing material. They even built a park on top of the area after they were finished.

Here in Columbus, OH they have built a public golf course over an old landfill complete with power generators that capture and use some of the escaping methane

Awesome episode Hank & Co.! I recall seeing an article about bacteria that eat plastics and their possible role in reducing plastic wastes. If possible, I'd like to see an episode or a segment about that.

Arthur C Clarke, is the man. Love him!

You rock Hank! I got a WWSD poster from DFTBA.com for xmas and it makes me so happy ^^ Please don't stop doing this for a while!

This is awesome! thank you!

You are awesome Hank.

Nice to see the city where I live get mentioned in a video, although it was for landfill gas house explosions...

bottom line on this is that we're doing all we can to make garbage disposal efficient now. And remember sometimes it costs more to, "recycle" something than it's worth.

6:21 That reminds me of something I have said about LoL and SC2. "All ins are just aggressive builds that are not perfected yet." Basically, a rough idea that noobs can pull off. And if you are good, a scary game winning ability.

Ok that is so cool! The picture you showed to illustrate the WTE facilities is from one in sweden! I have even been there, with a project we did in school - it is super awesome, does not even smell that bad in there!

Side note on bio gas. Here in Sweden i work in a company named Gothenburg Energy (Göteborg Energi in swedish). There they have a factory producing bio gas out of wood, named GoBiGas (stands for Gothenburg bio gas). I don't work at this plant but i think you would find the chemistry in there pretty interesting.

same in Australia! Sunday isn't complete without a scrounge through the dump to find freebies.

In some Australian landfills they do have methane retrieval processes where they collect the gas and run a small electricity plant using the methane collected.

Is it just me, or did the "Sometimes Expload-y" thing catch you eye?

Honestly, it is not like the US to miss an opportunity. All our rubbish is sorted for recycling at robotic plants with only a the minimum being dumped. The plants all run a profit when markets permit. Overall it's a very profitable industry but I'm guessing the raw material suppliers won't allow anything to come in to competition with established monopolies.

It is already very common for landfills to burn landfill gas in turbines to produce energy. In fact, if a landfill has enough organic material in it, it can produce enough gas to make energy production a cost effective solution for up to 50 years after closure (but most last around 25 years after closure). I have worked on the engineering and management side of the solid waste industry for several years.

I am a simple man. I see "SciShow" and "explode" in a video title, I watch the video.

A good idea for a video is explaining the concept of calories and what exactly they are. Great vid hope to see more :)

Thank you

Should do a followup about garbage island and what is being done to remove garbage from the ocean if anything is being done at all.

Space Junk Sucks Too! imagine sleeping and space junk crashes through your bedroom from outer space,kinda scary and it happens more and more as time goes by!

I think pretty much all waste that isn't recycled in Sweden is burned to produce heat. But I still feel like burning waste is a bit ehh maybe not the best. Like it's great to have a warm house, especially now during winter but I still try to produce as little waste as possible, especially like plastic waste, I always wash and re-use plastic bags.

president of space XD thouroughly enjoyed this episode, these are always super entertaining and informative

I once had a Twinkie during a hostess worker's strike. My Dad told me if the myth no new Twinkies had been made in the last 30 years anyways. In the words of Apu: "You cannot destroy a Twinkie!"

You are awesome, my man

I worked on Landfill in the UK for a while as an environmental monitoring technician. Thank you for doing this video Hank people really need to know how bad a solution it is. Leachate is disgusting stuff part of my job was to draw off samples of it. One particular sites leachate had such strong chemical and biological reactions going on in it that it was constantly hot and had the consistency and colour of thick pea soup.

From Hobart, Australia, our city land fill has a methane power station onsite! Only small but produces about a MW

This is actually fascinating.

As a part 2 of this and your piece about the "Door to hell", you should do something about catastrophic mistakes in human history. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Centralia, PA mishap. (since this is the garbage episode)

I had no idea how old this video was until I scrolled down into the comments but wow.

"Delicious trash juice..." LOL!

"Trash hole explosions" *choked giggle*

3:15 Yeah every time we Drive by Rochester Hills my Father usually says how polluted that area is for being a "Supposedly" nice area to live in.

I live in the US and my street doesnt have a trash service because they refuse to come near the gravel road, or any where near the street in about a miles radius. Our only option is to load up trash (in our vehicles btw) and drop it off at our grandmas house who let's us put our trash in her dumpster.

Rundle Park where I live used to be a landfill. Now it's actually a pretty park

Steam powered turbans! Ha, you really do learn something new every day.

I have a WTE place a few miles from me. Only smells a little bit, really interesting to hear more about it here.

1:20 typo with degree*

I don't know why all places don't do the compost thing. My city has brown waste bins that all bio material goes into and that cuts down on trash a significant amount. They pick up actual trash maybe once a month, and the compost bins weekly. I believe they then reuse the decomposed dirt to plant the town gardens & whatever else the city may need. Apparently the whole operation is cheaper than doing just one trash bin with everything.

For the trash issue, I think we need to find a way to separate plastics and glass into their separate elements so they can be used to make new things. For example breaking polyurethane into pure hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen (I think that's what's in it (I'm not a chemist)) which can be used to make new things.

I suggested a WTE plant in my town , the council members looked at me like I had three heads. I've seen them the size of a tractor trailer & up to 20 acres. I look to gasfier gennys, so simple.

Was disappointed there was no mention of plasma converters. Can you explore plasma conversion in a Garbage Part 2 episode? There are many in use around the world and they seem to have no downsides.

So, Scishow, can we expect an episode on recycling too? If necessary talk about waste handling/recycling in Europe. (As a European, I'm actually quite curious)

Delicious! You should be on TV Hank!

3:17 I'm from Rochester Hills, MI...it's sad but this is the FIRST time I've heard someone mention my city in an unrelated video...how embarrassing 😰