When you throw away your trash, where does it go? Trash can. Uh, I don't know, garbage?
Trash can? I'm not sure. Um, you mean like... after I throw it in the trash can?
Yes. I assume a dump, just a massive landfill. So what happens to your garbage once it gets to the landfill? Just sits there.
It probably just sits there. It just builds up and builds up. I'm assuming it sits there for a long time. I'm not really sure. I always see fire.
Nothing good probably happens to it. I have no idea. They stick it in the dirt, and they make a mountain out of it.
Right. And then eventually they're going to build an apartment complex on top of it. How many pounds of garbage do you think that you create a day? Oh, I would say 25, 30 pounds.
10 pounds. 27. 10. Probably about 3. Too much is my answer. I don't know. It's usually like half a bag, so whatever that is in pounds.
Do you know where your local recycling facility is? I have no idea. No. I have no idea. All I have to know is there's so much stuff in Orlando, I've never looked for it.
Can we do this again? In thinking about some of the current problems that citizens have in getting rid of their trash, one of the things that anthropology can do to bring some insight into that is to look at a long-term or historical perspective. Trash has always been a problem. There has always been particular problems with trash since man started to collect.
And we know that by looking at past cultures and historically how people have gotten rid of trash that although they had much less to deal with they also had things that really decompose quickly on their own. Music It seems that ancient times people were a lot more resourceful when it comes to reusing as well. First sanitation group was in Rome and it consisted of two guys in a cart and they would go down the streets since the nearest place to throw your trash was out the window or the front door, then they would go through the streets once a week and pick up your trash and then as with most civilizations, that we know of, Greek, Roman, they started to build upon that trash. Eventually it got so bad they couldn't cart it away, they couldn't clean it up. So what they would do would be tumble the structures down and build upon it.
And these are some of the primary causes for many of the plagues, many of the diseases that we even have in the world today. Many countries do not have proper sanitation or proper sanitation systems. or waste disposal. And I think what you can see is after the Industrial Revolution and when goods and services started to be packaged and shipped really long distances is where you really start to see the problem with trash generation coming in. But then with the industrial age, the concentration of people started to expand.
And to handle the growth, population growth, they would start to build mounds. When I first moved to Tampa, I came from an area that had mountains. And one of the things that was really shocking to me was that essentially the highest point around that you can see is a landfill.
If you go up to one of the tall buildings in downtown Tampa, you look out on the horizon and this landfill is sort of looming on the horizon near Tampa Bay. Landfills are obviously not desirable, but they're inevitable. We're going to need some land area to dump all of our waste.
Obviously, land is very limited. Eventually, we're going to run out. And then you also have to consider what is going to happen to that waste that is sitting there.
And although landfills are one way of dealing with this problem, it's pretty apparent that we're going to need to come up with some other solutions for the future. Americans generate a lot of waste that needs to be managed. Today in the state of Florida, about 30 million tons a year of solid waste is generated by the residents. That compares to about 16 million tons 20 years ago. In the United States today, the average person uses about four pounds of trash a day.
And our main problem is that we're not thinking about ways to reduce the amount of waste we create in the first place. How that works is that we purchase something that's made very quickly and cheaply and we can access it at the big mega store down the street, but everything that's gone into the production of that item has, in many cases, some negative effects along its chain of production. And it might start somewhere else. It might start in China, it might start in Central America. And these products are developed there using resources, uses a lot of resources to get to the store where we buy it.
Many people when they throw their garbage away they see the garbage man or the waste disposal company as like a faceless entity. And once it's thrown away it's out of sight, out of mind. That's simply not true. Making people think about where they, you know, when they throw their trash away, where does it go?
And I think one of the difficult things about this is that in our society we have a very sort of complicated structure that makes the trash disappear to people's everyday experience. And looking at ways to maybe change that, I think education is a good place to start. When you throw away your trash, where does it go? Trash can.
And from the trash can, where does it go after that? To the dumpster. And then where does it go from the dumpster? To the dump.
Your garbage doesn't magically fly away, it goes somewhere. And somewhere is usually a solid waste operations, where it's either burned and made into electricity, or it is put in a landfill and might be ground into mulch. But of course the best thing would be to recycle it, not even to put it in your trash can.
Have it recycled and have it made into a new product. We receive at Bridgeway Acres Landfill, our facility's name, we receive about 1 million tons of solid waste every year. On average, we receive about 3,200 to 3,300 tons per day over the course of the year. In Pinellas County we have 24 cities within the county and these 24 cities all pick up trash either themselves or stuff and that's how the trash comes to our facility. When your trash comes to Bridgeway Acres, it of course comes in in a vehicle which is directed to our waste to energy plant to download on a tipping floor or it may be sent over to our landfill area and possibly to the mulch area.
What waste energy does is it takes the volume of garbage and reduces it by roughly 90%. So where you would have had a thousand tons of garbage taking up a certain amount of space in the landfill, the ash from combustion only takes up 10 tons. percent of that space.
However our waste energy plant now now being about 26, 27 years old we've invested in keeping up the maintenance of the plant keeping it refurbished updating it on that and under the present circumstances our landfill here has a life projected at about 70 to 80 years under current circumstances. Pinellas County was looking at problems with solid waste management in the mid-70s. We wanted to be able to handle the garbage in Pinellas County. We didn't want to have to ship garbage out of county to someone else's landfill.
And they looked at what technology was out there and available and decided to to use waste to energy. The waste to energy plant has four main processes. In the combustion chamber we burn the garbage at about 1,800 degrees. When we burn the garbage it heats up water and turns it into steam. The steam drives a turbine generator that creates electricity which we then sell to Progress Energy and it ends up going out and powering homes in Pinellas County and other areas of Progress Energy service area.
For air pollution control, we have to carefully control how we burn the garbage to minimize how much pollution is generated. And then we have different processes to capture. That pollution and pull it out of the gas before it's released to the atmosphere. And the final process is ash management where we take the ash and residue generated from the combustion chambers and we recover ferrous and non-ferrous metals from that ash.
We try to send everything to the plant for combustion that we possibly can. We don't really want to landfill any garbage. There are some wastes that can't be burned. They may be restricted by permit or by the size, and those will be sent to the landfill. We also have to landfill waste at times when the amount of garbage generated is more than we have the capacity to burn, and those get diverted to the landfill.
A lot of people question the environmental impact of waste to energy and people have a lot of different opinions on that. In fact, if you put garbage in a landfill, the amount of emissions that it creates and the potential for pollution is greater in a landfill than it is in a waste to energy plant. Once this site is closed, it'll be very difficult to site another landfill within Pinellas County.
It's very developed and there's always opposition to locating new facilities. We actually did a survey of the trash that was disposed in Pinellas County and it showed that 76% of what people throw away can actually be recycled. I guess the main issue is that consumers simply aren't the most conscious about where their products go after it's consumed. The landfills are not the answer. The answer is use less, create less waste.
It's up to each of us as individuals to create less waste. Don't rely on somebody else to do it. We have to do it ourselves.
Education is probably the most important aspect of this. Just simply informing citizens that there are alternatives to simply throwing something away in the garbage. Just letting them know that there is an impact, an environmental impact, to throwing stuff away, and that just alternatives exist. I think it's very, very important that people understand the proper ways of disposal, the proper ways of recycling, how to do it, and how the system works and what needs to be done. True or false, we are running out of landfill space.
Absolutely. Definitely. True, we're eventually going to run out of landfill space, but if the landfills are designed well and effectively operated, they will last. well into the future. True or false, there is no need to sort trash because it's sorted after pickup?
It's not sorted so that's false. False. Trash is not sorted.
Once it's in your trash can it goes to the waste energy energy plant or is buried in the landfill. It is not sorted. Now if it ends up in your recycling bin, it is sorted and is turned into recycled material.
So you want to make sure that any type of recyclable material is in your recycling bin or taken to a recycling facility where it can be recycled. True or false, it is okay to throw away biodegradable material because it will decompose naturally in the earth? Uh, biodegradable material. It's got to decompose naturally. I mean, I would say true because I trust the labels, but that's just me trusting the labels, I guess.
I don't know. False. Actually, archaeologists have done excavations that have looked at trash that has been produced in the past.
past and they have done what are called cores and they found out that there are actually newspapers 40 years old that are still readable, hot dogs that are 15 years old that are still in landfills and there's a real false perception out there that when you send things to a landfills landfill then it's going to biodegrade. When in actuality landfills almost act like museums where things are preserved. True or false, Americans are producing garbage at an increasing rate? Um, that would, I would say that's true. True.
Americans do produce garbage at an alarming rate. On average, Americans produce four pounds of trash per person every single day. That is an alarming rate and we've seen that double or triple.
in the past 20 years. True or false, recycling is only beneficial if it reduces landfill use? False. True. False, false.
Recycling does reduce landfill use but that's not the only reason to recycle. You also want to recycle because it's reusing that material so you don't have to gather the raw materials to make a new product. True or false, landfills pollute the environment. I would say probably not.
I think they're doing a pretty good job with them these days. True. Landfills, what little decomposition of landfill there is, there is some emission of gases such as methane.
In some cases, the landfills will recapture that and use that to produce energy, but in other cases, it's emitted into the air. Landfills can be non-polluting, but there's a big effort that goes into assuring that that happens and that sufficient monitoring goes with it to assure that they're safe. We have a lot of checks and balances here on the site from the time that you first enter and reach our scale house to the time that you hit the tipping area.
We have spotters that inspect each and every load and if prohibited or hazardous materials are observed they're removed. They're removed from the waste stream and properly managed for safe disposal to ensure that we are not allowing this material into the landfill. With our facilities, our landfill, and our waste energy plant, one of the things we want to do is avoid putting potentially hazardous materials or chemicals through the process. We have here a household electronics and chemical collection center to manage those waste.
The HCC3 Center is here to collect chemicals and electronics from the consumers in Pinellas County and to get the electronics and chemical waste out of the waste stream. They can harm the environment with the hazards that's in each one of the items. Chemicals in your home that would can be considered hazardous are like bleach, ammonia, the fertilizers, the brake fluids, automobile fluids, and stuff that you would see underneath your sink at home. You can bring it here, we're down in St. Pete, whereas you can drive through and we'll assist you with unloading your vehicle and properly handling the material and disposing it the correct way. In addition, we also conduct mobile collections for these materials under the goal of trying to keep these out of landfills and other facilities.
Basically what we do there is we set up shop in a parking lot and have cars come through. The people stay in their cars and we empty their trunks and process their chemicals and electronics. I think it's a great thing.
A lot of people have stuff like this in their houses and garages and, you know, you kind of always want to do something with it or take it to the right place, but this makes it real convenient. What sort of items are you dropping off today? fluorescent light bulbs and an old cell phone and propane gas for an old camp stove. And then from here I'm going up to recycle my trunks full of paper and cardboard.
We need to dispose of these properly so they don't get out into the just general landfill. We have a swap shop where we take materials that aren't regulated, that still have some useful value to other people, and we place them in a shop where our customers can come in and almost go through a little shop and pick out used materials. The name swap shop almost is a misnomer. You don't have to swap anything and I think the benefits of a program like this are multiple.
First of all I understand that it saves the county a considerable amount of money from having to destroy. the various things. The swap shop has such a diversity of items that anybody that has any type of home projects going can benefit.
Everything from cleaning products to paints to fertilizer to lawn products. In addition, we also have a mulching area where yard waste, green waste that is brought to our facility is mulched. We receive approximately 70,000 tons of yard waste a year.
Pollers and residents that bring yard waste to the Bridgeway Acres facility are directed to our yard waste processing area. Yard waste is classified as branches, leaves, grass clippings, stumps. It's important that yard waste is is recycled rather than put in the landfill because it saves precious air space.
It's a material that's managed and can be used as an alternative resource for other processes. In addition to our recycling programs, another unique way we recycle material, and particularly construction material, old concrete that's in large enough pieces, old pipe, we have a reef program offshore. where we manage a number of reefs.
The Artificial Reef Program has been around for about 30 years. The Pinellas County Artificial Reef Program has so far created 42 separate artificial reef sites. Materials used in the Artificial Reef Program are materials that we would not accept into our landfill just based on the size and quantity.
Materials like this would fill up our landfill space very quickly. We are a disposal option. This would be considered recycling of construction materials.
Artificial reefs are very beneficial to the environment in that they provide additional habitat to the sea creatures, fish, plant life, crustaceans. They provide that additional habitat where... Off the coast of Pinellas County, natural reefs are sporadic and will even come and go with the shifting of sand. In 2009, USF did a study on the economic impact of artificial reefs in the southeast region of Florida.
That study showed that within Pinellas County alone... The artificial reefs brought in around $27 million in 2009. In terms of the overall solid waste management picture, I think it's very, very important that people understand the proper ways of disposal, the proper ways of recycling, how to do it, and how the system works, and what needs to be done. Believe it or not, the best way to educate the public is to start with the children. Because they are excited, they form new habits, they're not embarrassed to say to their parents, hey mom or dad, why aren't we doing this, why aren't we recycling that.
Some of the small steps I think we can take as consumers is to really just be educated about the items that we're purchasing. Buying recycled material is really the way to close the loop. So looking for that recycling arrow on the items that you purchase, that's the way to really complete the loop.
I think that we as citizens really need to think about using less, buying less, sharing, donate. It's really important that we don't over consume and buy too many items. We need to create less waste because we don't have room in the landfills. We don't have land in other spots for new landfills.
And we're going to increase in our population. So it's up to each of us as individuals to create less than that four and a half pounds per person per day. We need to have an integrated solid waste management plan that incorporates landfills, waste energy plants, recycling, composting, and also reducing and reusing and recycling altogether.
So integrating all these components together and encouraging kind of these alternative ways to deal with our solid waste. is really going to help us in the long run. Each person needs to be responsible for their waste, whether they're six years old or 66 years old.
You need to be responsible for the waste that you create. America is definitely a consumerist country. We tend to focus very much on what it is we're buying and not so much on where it goes after we're done using it. So I think that if... We're generally more mindful of the environmental impact of what it is we're buying, what environmental costs there are of manufacturing that, transporting that, and then disposing of that once we're done with it.
I feel like we can be a more environmentally sustainable nation. I think Americans do have an obsession with stuff. And if you want to think of it as an anthropology of stuff, one of the things that is really apparent is that The consumption patterns in North America are really driving a lot of the unsustainable practices and also inequalities in environmental justice around the world. So I think better understanding what sort of drives people to make those choices or maybe they don't even think of them as choices maybe they just think of them as their desires or the things that they want and see as necessary. If we have a better understanding of that we might have a possible way of Communicating with people about the impacts of those choices and thinking about some alternatives.
We've only got this place for a limited amount of time while we're on the earth. It's our job as keepers to do the best we can.