Added: 24.08.2010 14:16
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Rubbish dumps – mines of the future?

As demand for raw material grows, the old rubbish dumps – filled with potentially reusable material – might become possible sources for industrially exploitable material

Tags: recycling, materials, mine, rubbish dump

As the reserves of many natural resources are being depleted and opening new mines to extract still existing pristine recourses from the earths crust becomes more and more difficult due to difficult attainability and environmental laws, one possible place to look for new raw materials for industrial products in the future might be old rubbish dumps.

Since recycling of many non-renewable materials has been very little for the better part of the 20th century and is so even today (roughly half of the trash of the rich countries is still being transported to rubbish dumps) there is a vast stock of plastic, metal and building material that has been just dumped into the ground and is waiting there to be collected and re-used. For instance, it is estimated that in Britain alone, landfill sites could offer an estimated 200 million tons of old plastic - worth up to £60 billion (at 2008 prices) – to be recovered and recycled or converted to liquid fuel.

Already many old rubbish dumps are used as a resource through collecting methane generated by decomposition of organic materials. Once the methane discharges drain and the collection of the gas is no longer viable, it might be time to open up the site and search for the once dumped materials for recycling.

References:

Hietanen, Olli - Lauttamäki, Ville - Vehmas, Jarmo - Heikkilä, Juha & Lehmann-Chadha, Martin (2006) Jätealan megatrendit ja haasteet Euroopassa. Loppuraportti. 170 s. Tutu-julkaisuja 5/2006 http://www.tse.fi/FI/yksikot/erillislaitokset/tutu/Documents/publications/Tutu_2006-5.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_mining

Kelland, Kate. Landfill sites are being viewed as mines with buried riches. The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/business/worldbusiness/26iht-waste.4.15654024.html

Opportunity: new source for non-renewable resources and minerals

Threat: toxic waste possibly buried in the rubbish dumps

Do you have ideas for this vision? or

Solution(s) for this content
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Waste and energy consumption reduction, conservation of natural resources and material recycling are the one of the main challenges for future sustainable development.
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Yet another option to use ash waste as a raw material. Oil shale ash can be used as replacement of cement in classical concrete. This way the carbon dioxide emissions, energy demand and waste are reduced.
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Turning waste material into raw material is one of the greatest booms in waste management and waste reduction. New products produced by waste utilization can be used for example as construction material.

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Comments

magda.vankova
(04 Apr 2011)
Spam / Reply
Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, being about 20times more dangerous compared to carbon dioxide. There is a new directive concerning biogas plants connected to the same issue. There are usually two reactors or digestion tanks used in a biogas plant. The digested organic matter goes after the second tank to the storage tanks where the methanogenic phase might still continue. Therefore the storgae tanks must be nowadays covered since also the waste material might still produce small amount of methane. This even small gas volume cannot be released to the atmosphere.
magda.vankova
(04 Apr 2011)
Spam / Reply
With opening the old dump sites producing methane might be quite problematic. These places might not be anymore used for methane gas collection however they still often do produce some amount of methane.