Essay On Landfill

There are thousands of landfills located around the earth. Many people believe when they put trash in their recycling bin it’s being treated like all of the other trash that can’t be recycled. However, that is not the case. Many researchers have discovered that more garbage was dumped in the landfills in 2012 than ever before. John T. Powell, a researcher from Yale University, used trade data to measure trash levels in the landfills. He also discovered that in 2012, a total 262 million tons of waste were dumped in the landfills. Although putting our garbage in a landfill is better than throwing it out in the yard, or even the ocean, it produces a greenhouse gas called ‘methane’. Methane is the second most prevalent gas emitted by human activity followed by carbon dioxide. Methane is 25 times more dangerous to the environment than carbon dioxide. So, if landfills produce methane, what about the oceans? If there are thousands of pounds of trash worldwide, how are there still animals living in the sea? Methane kills the coral and plankton at the bottom of the ocean, not to mention that plankton is a number one food source in the ocean.

Even though methane occurs in the lower concentrations, it still puts out 21 times as much warming as CO2. Methane accounts for 20% of the ‘enhanced greenhouse effect’. So, before we go on about global warming, what is global warming exactly? Global warming is the observed century-scale rise in the average temperature in earth’s climate system. We can’t potentially dispose methane, simply because it will warm the earth for a decade or two before decaying CO2. What is the greenhouse effect? The greenhouse effect is the process by which radiation from a planet's atmosphere warms the planet’s surface to a temperature higher than what it would be without an atmosphere. Methane, carbon dioxide, and water vapor absorbs energy slowing or preventing the heat to