"At nearly 150 acres, the Jardim Gramacho landfill in Rio de Janeiro was one of the largest and most infamous in all of Latin America. Now it’s a mangrove forest teeming with life.
Decommissioned 11 years ago, between 1970 and 2012 the dump, bordering Rio’s famous Guanabara Bay, received 80 million metric tonnes of trash from the area’s Gramacho neighborhood.
Now, a public-private partnership led by the Rio Municipal Cleaning Company has returned the area to nature, specifically mangroves, one of the most valuable of all ecosystems.
Planting 24 acres of mangroves at a time, today the forest stretches out more than 120 acres and is the largest mangrove area of the bay.
“Before, we polluted the bay and the rivers. Now, it’s the bay and the rivers that pollute us,” a lead official on the project told Africa News. “Today, the mangrove has completely recovered.”
Other organizations have taken action to restore mangroves along the bay as well. The non-profit Ocean Pact funded the Green Guanabara Bay Project which successfully restored 12.5 hectares or around 25 acres of mangroves.
According to some estimates, 1 acre of mangrove forests can store more carbon in roots and soil than 4 acres of even the most biodiverse rainforest, making them paramount to any world climate mitigation strategy.
Furthermore, their impressive lattice work of roots and insane durability means that storm surges impacting mangroves lose about 66% of their kinetic energy without even destroying the trees.
Lastly, coastal fishing communities, in [four] words, cannot exist without mangroves. They act as nurseries and perfect habitat for all kinds of fish and crustaceans that small-scale fishermen rely on for their daily bread."
-via Good News Network, 7/31/23
-video via Africanews, July 26, 2023
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i learned that living next to a landfill greatly increases your risk of developing all kinds of health issues including tuberculosis (x)
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"Of South Korea’s countless kilograms of annual food scraps, very few will ever end up in a landfill. This is because of two reasons—the first is that it’s been illegal since 2005, and the second is because they have perhaps the world’s most sophisticated food waste disposal infrastructure.
While representing a significant burden on the economy, the food waste disposal nevertheless produces ample supplies of animal feed, fertilizer, and biogas that heats thousands of homes.
As the New York Times’ John Yoo and Chang Lee reported from Seoul, South Korean cuisine tends to lend itself to creating food scraps, since many staple dishes come with anywhere from a few to a few dozen sides.
With the culture erring on the side of abundance rather than restraint, many of these small dishes of tofu, kimchi, bean sprouts, and other bites would be tossed in the landfill if it wasn’t illegal to do so.
The government put the ban hammer on it because the mountainous terrain isn’t ideal for landfill construction.
Instead, restauranteurs and street hawkers pay the municipality for a sticker that goes on the outside of special bins. Once filled with food scraps, they are left on the road for collectors in the morning who take 90% of all such waste in the country to specialized collection facilities.
At apartments and among residential housing areas, hi-tech food waste disposal machines are operated by a keycard owned by residents under contract with the disposal companies.
Once taken to the recycling facilities, the food is sorted for any non-food waste that’s mixed in, drained of its moisture, and then dried and baked into a black dirt-like material that has a dirt-like smell but which is actually a protein and fiber-rich feed for monogastric animals like chickens or ducks.
This is just one of the ways in which the food scraps are processed. Another method uses giant anaerobic digestors, in which bacteria break down all the food while producing a mixture of CO2 and methane used to heat homes—3,000 in a Seoul suburb called Goyang, for example. All the water needed for this chemical process comes from the moisture separated from the food earlier.
The remaining material is shipped as fertilizer to any farms that need it.
All the water content is sent to purification facilities where it will eventually be discharged into water supplies or streams.
While one such plant was shut down from locals complaining about the unbearable smell, many plants are odorless, thanks to a system of pipes built into the walls that eliminate it via chemical reaction.
It’s the way South Korea does it. Sure, it costs them around $600 million annually, but they have many admirers, including New York City which hopes to implement similar infrastructure in the coming years."
-via Good News Network, June 15, 2023
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Transformers: Mosaic #438 - "Dirty and Down"
Originally posted on December 10th, 2009
Story - Martin Fisher
Art - Gareth Watson
Colours - Ian Lea
Letters - Dave Reynolds
deviantART | Seibertron | TFW2005 | BotTalk
wada sez: Landfill is one of Budiansky’s stinky blorbos, a “veritable rolling garbage dump” with an “awful smell” who "leaves a trail of rotting refuse wherever he goes” and is “caked in muck and filth”—and “emits such a powerful odor that even the dumbest Decepticon tracker would have no difficulty finding him.” Fisher has settled on the exact opposite idea here, with Landfill’s fetid squalor being the only thing stopping the Decepticons from finding them.
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