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Things You Probably didn't know about Garbage  By Haydn Dunn

 

Some garbage can live a million years or more
Another thing you didn't know about garbage is just how determined some of it is to stay garbage. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that glass bottles require a million years to fully break down in a landfill; that plastic foam cups require over 500 years; aluminum cans between 200 and 500 years; plastic bags as many as 20 years, and cigarette butts as many as five years

Landfill garbage pollutes the air worse than carbon dioxide
Here's a sensible tip: Don't ever live near a landfill. Landfills have a tendency to emit a host of toxic gases into the air, and by toxic gases we actually mean cytotoxic or carcinogenic gases, like benzene and vinyl chloride. They also leak into the surrounding soils and water sources.

Furthermore, landfills produce methane -- rather, microbes produce it as they devour anything they can and emit methane as a waste product. Being lighter than air, methane works its way out of the air and into the soils or the atmosphere. Methane has a very high global warming potential (GWP), about 12 times as high as carbon dioxide. So you could imagine what the residents living near the Beetham landfill in Trinidad is going through ... 

 

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