Environmental Problems with Landfills

Do you know Mt. Fuji? Mt. Fuji is well-known all over the world as a beautiful and the highest mountain in Japan. However, there is a lot of garbage which is thrown away by climbers or tourists among the mountain. Therefore, Mt. Fuji hadn’t been accepted as World Heritage until 2013 in spite of desiring the registration. People have promoted volunteer activities such as cleaning up and gathered several kinds of materials as garbage since 1960’. For example, there are plastic bottles, cigarette butts, empty cans, glasses, wastepaper, lighters, batteries, tires, computers and so on. Every day many materials are thrown into the land as garbage might damage our natural environments. Some products which are thrown away cause problems with landfills including toxins from electronic waste and poisons from food waste because they contain harmful substances.

There are two problems for being caused by the waste with landfills. One of them is toxins from electronic waste. Electronic waste such as broken televisions, batteries or fluorescent bulbs leads harmful substances because they contain toxins; they are mercury, arsenic or cadmium. Toxins such as mercury or arsenic from electronic waste leach into our soil and ground water as the products degrade. It is very harmful problem and damages on natural environments. When the waste breaks down in landfills and water filters through the waste, leachate is the liquid formed. That is why this liquid is toxin and damages the land making grains and ground water. If we might be eating crops from the land or using from the water, we have attacked of the toxin.

            

Another problem is poisons from food waste. Food waste such as food scraps or expired-foods from house-hold or restaurants is generally compacted down and covered in landfills when the waste is dumped in landfills. How much is food waste gathered every day? It must be huge amount food waste. The landfills being filled foods waste produces poisonous methane because the land continues to decompose by lacking in oxygen. Methane is 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide when released into the atmosphere. However, Methane is a valuable resource. The natural gas piped into our homes is primarily methane. Food waste can also be treated to make compost and soil conditioning products, as many people do in their backyards and gardens. Such as this, we can help our environments for several ways of recycling.

            

Recycling must help our environments. Recycling of the waste is processing used material into new or useful products. We can protect from harmful problems and do something to recover them. That’s why the recyclable waste would have been burned or buried in landfills. Pollution of the air, land, water and solid is reduced. Also waste recycling saves energy because it takes more energy to produce items like natural gas with used materials such as food scraps. This means we have more energy efficiently.

We are consuming a lot of products to make our life abundant every day. At the same time, we are facing problems with the waste because of a huge amount of garbage; they which have spoiled in landfills change harmful substances like liquid and leak into soil or river. Thinking about what we can do during ordinary days to protect our environments from harmful things is important for us.