Where I live we have two separate waste pickups, one for compost, any organic waste from yards like grass clippings, leaves, etc. And one for regular trash. Wouldn’t it make sense to combine them? All that organic waste mixed in with the trash would have to help it decompose, right?
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The trouble with compost is that it can spontaneously combust. That’s bad enough on its own. But if it happened in a garbage dump that’s filled with flammable thigns and materials that are toxic when burned, it could cause a lot of problems.
There’s things that people throw out that will take forever to decompose, such as plastic and metal.
With organic waste, there’s three things:
1. It can be made into compost and used/resold to the market.
2. By putting organic waste to landfills, you’ll fill up the landfill faster; and one of the major cost is land area (which means once it’s full you’ll have to find a new landfill place)
3. Because organic decompose, it can create settlement within the landfill. Just imagine like a sinkhole, because what was once organic solid (like banana peel) will have shrunk and essentially dissipated to gas; so all the layers of landfill (what was formerly a tall hill) will be a not-so tall hill. This shrinkage, if too much, may cause the landfill lining to be ineffective.
Basically. Why throw out organic waste when you can use it as a valuable resource?
In order to decompose properly, compostable materials need a lot of oxygen (aerobic decomposition). Landfill is about shoving as much as possible into the smallest volume – leaving no room for oxygen so it decomposes anaerobically.
These two processes are totally different and give different things at the end.
Mixing waste reduces its value- metal, plastic paper and organic waste etc separated out can be reused or recycled more easily.
If you add organic matter to a landfill it will decompose often anaerobiclly This causes two issue. First that releases methanecwhich is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide- whjchnhs what is relased if you compost organic batter properly.
Second you get a liquid effluent produced in the landfill which needs dealing with, this often has alot of toxic chemicals in it from both the organic batter abd other waste. If you remove as much organic batter as possible from landfill waste the amount of effluent and its strength is much reduced.
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