US Landfills Are Major Source of Toxic PFAS Pollution, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 47
Toxic PFAS "forever chemicals" that leach from landfills into groundwater are among the major pollution sources in the US, and remain a problem for which officials have yet to find an effective solution. Now new research has identified another route in which PFAS may escape landfills and threaten the environment at even higher levels: the air. From a report: PFAS gas that emits from landfill waste ends up highly concentrated in the facilities' gas treatment systems, but the systems are not designed to manage or destroy the chemicals, and much of them probably end up in the environment.
The findings, which showed up to three times as much PFAS in landfill gas as in leachate, are "definitely an alarming thing for us to see," said Ashley Lin, a University of Florida researcher and the lead author of the study. "These findings suggest that landfill gas, a less scrutinized byproduct, serves as a major pathway for the mobility of PFAS from landfills," the paper's authors wrote.
PFAS are a class of about 16,000 compounds used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems. As researchers have begun to understand the chemicals' dangers in recent years, the focus has largely been on water pollution, and regulators have said virtually all leachate from the nation's 200 landfills contain PFAS. But scientists are beginning to understand that PFAS air pollution is also a significant threat.
The findings, which showed up to three times as much PFAS in landfill gas as in leachate, are "definitely an alarming thing for us to see," said Ashley Lin, a University of Florida researcher and the lead author of the study. "These findings suggest that landfill gas, a less scrutinized byproduct, serves as a major pathway for the mobility of PFAS from landfills," the paper's authors wrote.
PFAS are a class of about 16,000 compounds used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems. As researchers have begun to understand the chemicals' dangers in recent years, the focus has largely been on water pollution, and regulators have said virtually all leachate from the nation's 200 landfills contain PFAS. But scientists are beginning to understand that PFAS air pollution is also a significant threat.
they use PFAS in cash receipts (Score:1)
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Re:they use PFAS in cash receipts (Score:4, Informative)
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Here's one for you, then. [deviantart.com]
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Additional - pharamcuticals in drinking water (Score:2)
https://www.usgs.gov/special-t... [usgs.gov]
> For example, endocrine disrupting compounds, can alter the hormone system of fish, resulting in changes in secondary sexual characteristics and potentially resulting in reproductive failure.
Can this be linked to declining fertility rates along with the endocrine disrupters leached from plastic food containers?
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25% mestis (½ spain ½ sierra leone)
50% knivsöder
50% jämt
100% botkyrka
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they obviously do this intentionally, how much does a laser version cost? but theyre small and probably cheap so thats why they use em. as for
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"Bisphenol A in certain doses increases the AGD of both genders of a study on mice." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I already added what I could below, but I want to comment on how I went to my files a while back, way back, and found a number of important receipts were nearly blank. They were in a folder in a drawer. Since then, I scan very important receipts and keep with my backed up data. I rarely have to and it's not a bother when it's something like warranty, takes 10 minutes or less to scan and throw in the dox bin.
Uh, they're landfills. They're full of garbage. (Score:2, Interesting)
This (Score:5, Informative)
New landfills are built with barriers so crap doesn't leech out. Old landfills weren't. Digging out an old landfill to fix it will probably do more environmental damage than leaving it alone.
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Accurate. Informative. Pertinent. Downmodded. (Score:1)
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"regulators have said virtually all leachate from the nation's 200 landfills contain PFAS."
The number of landfills in the U.S. is in the thousands--not a couple hundred.
Re: Uh, they're landfills. They're full of garbag (Score:2)
Recycling plastics works fine if you use fluid bed pyrolysis. It's not profitable so they don't do it. Stop repeating the lie that it cannot be done.
If it's not profitable, it can't be done. (Score:2)
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Bites depolymerizes plastics without creating toxic chemicals or carbon streams, using biological processes to transform it into a protein source with very low or zero greenhouse gas emissions. It does this by feeding the waste to hungry yeast strains and then further processing the product.15 maj 2024.
2 [climatesort.com]:
Students from Yale University discovered a mushroom species that can eat plastic. The mushroom, called Pestalotiopsis microspore, comes from the Amazon rainforest. Astoundingly, these mushrooms can survive on plastic alone. The fungi consume polyurethane and convert it into organic matter.
Is this a uniquely American problem? (Score:2)
Sounds like this should be a problem everywhere — or is there something unique about American landfills in particular?
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It probably is a problem everywhere.
We'll never know. (Score:2)
The plastics industry (an offshoot of the petroleum industry) learned from the petroleum industry's mistake back in the fifties and sixties. They're not going to fund research into Antarctic ice cores to verify whether or not PFAs are reaching there - oh, they're quite certain it's not so, but why take a chance?
If the research is done by the plastics industry and the results are not what they want, they'll be buried until Congress pries 'em loose. If the research is done by anybody not with the plastics
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Sounds like this should be a problem everywhere — or is there something unique about American landfills in particular?
It's a problem everywhere. That said, and this is important, only in America will we find a way to build an entire industry around the problem that makes lots and LOTS of money for somebody, probably while making the taxpayers cover the cost.
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funny to hear a complaint about government spending from the same Communism-sympathizers, to whom a solution to every problem lies in creation of a government agency tasked with solving it.
No, it makes sense to be against businesses externalizing costs on the taxpayer. Especially if they were aware all along. Most government agencies are based around preventing businesses from abusing their position to create externalized costs in the first place (e.g. EPA)
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Ah, the "externalized costs" song. If a business has hurt you, sue them. Elen Brokovich has shown you, how it is done, has she not?
I don't quite understand, what you're talking about — business send little to landfill, it is the consumers doing that, as far as I know, but regardless...
Meanwhile, I await your examples of how the enlightened other countries are fighting this problem — you did claim, only in America (and
Get the companies who developed them (Score:2)
to pay for the clearup (when someone figures out how) as they obviously didn't bother to do proper enviromental and biological tests to discover the full impact.
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I just watched Dark Waters this week, that tells a different story, of dupont (and 3M) knowing well what the damage was that PFAS could do, to humans and environment. They just decided to ignore it.
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There's an easy solution to this. (Score:3, Informative)
It's not one the /. crowd will like because it produces CO2, but thermal decomposition would work perfectly well to get rid of it all and then compress the remaining material into blocks and toss into the now empty landfills.
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I personally feel that burning waste is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff to the co2 it produces since there are additional benefits besides the extra energy but as you mentioned you can condense waste and sequester contaminates at the same time. There are many, many easier targets for co2 reductons before we get to this one.
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Plasma Gasification would work even better (Score:2)
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Correction: "it's a shame we can't leverage that."
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I do love the idea of a scifi waste chute that feeds into a pool of lava. Makes me think though that US alone produces a lot of trash so i wonder what the "eat rate" would be on something like that. Like you said about a river, I wonder how much churn you would need to the rate of flow and incineration.
On a similar ntoe I wonder if in the future where fusion power becomes more commonplace that could be leveraged as incineration, it's super hot in there.
Re: The solution is right under our feet (Score:2)
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Who's surprised? (Score:2)
Removing PFAS (Score:2)