Waste Management Could Make Big Advance

Every week we put our garbage out on the curb to be hauled away.  During the week we set aside paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum to be recycled if our city doesn’t have a recycling pickup program.  Where is all that garbage going?  Usually to a landfill to be buried, thus continuing to exist for eons under a cover of earth.  There are some places that have incinerators, but this creates air pollution.  Recycling gets to be tedious, it’s often only the desire to do something good that keeps us doing it.

I think in the future there will come a much better way to recycle and dispose of waste.  Landfills and incinerators will be replaced by a totally new inovation: combined recycling and decomposition centers!  Just what would this mean?  Recycling could blended into waste management and several presently separate programs could be combined into one more efficient one.  Ugly landfills could then be beautified and made to again look more like the way nature intended.  This idea will start in the USA and quickly catch on around the rest of the world.

Now, just what will these places do and how will they work?  They will be huge but attractive buildings built on the sites of existing or old landfills.  They would be paid for by tax dollars but would be much more economical; they would even make money! 

Here’s how a typical work period will go in one of these waste processing phenoms.  At one end, garbage trucks would come and empty their loads into huge chutes, much like they now do at landfills.  At the same end would be a separate chute for private vehicles to do the same thing.  People will be able to come and for a small fee dispose of anything, like is commonly done today at landfills and transfer stations.  There will be a third chute for the dumpsters waste management companies lease to industry and consumers. 

As the loads are discharged down the chutes, computer technology will go to work.  Sensors, cameras, and software will begin sorting out everything that can be recycled; taking it much further than we do now.  All metals, plastics, glass, paper and paper products, will be separated away from the mass and sent down separate paths.  These paths will keep separating even more until all the items were sorted by type, color, tint, chemical composition, etc. . .  Most of the work will be done by robots and other technology, but there would be plenty of jobs created humans, too.  At the end, all the recyclable materials will reduced to fine powders, including the metals.  These can then be sold to various businesses at a third the cost of raw, mined materials.  This could prove especially important in the future.