BLOG 4

January 9, 2015

Today we went on a field trip to to Sycamore Ridge Landfill, which was located near Brazil, Indiana. This is an amazing experience. I have never been to a landfill my entire life and have only learned and heard about in books and among my classmates in this course. To my surprise, the landfill that I imagined in my head was exactly the one I visited with my classmates. Speaking of my classmates it was an interesting because

one of my peers was very acknowledged about the landfill, because he would visit

landfills during the summer and help out, and he also managed to learn new things. For

examples, the landfill reuses some of the energy to save on pollutions and adding more toxic, infiltrated water collects that are also recycles and is reused, and new laws that have been established for the safety and proper disposal of the toxics.

Overall, the landfill is way more modern and safer in disposing our trash. However, it definitely needs a few major improvement. First of all, one of the biggest problem that I saw was that not everything really gets disposed properly. When we went to go see the trash there were many things flying around due to the wind, and the only thing that was stopped the trash from flying away was these really tall fences. The problem here was does anyone actually pick everything up that flied away? Why must someone do this? The reason for this is because the trash is not disposed right, I mean we burn it, and it takes more than centuries for things like plastics to be disposed. The solution to this problem is that one of the workers should go around and pick of the trash and make sure everything is taken away. Secondly, I noticed that as one of the trucks were emptying the trash into the pile there were many individual plastics like chips bag that were flying around, to stop this problem workers should collect these small and ensure that all trash is in some sort of equipment and that way nothing is flying around.

Another problem was that there were plenty of birds flying around and were very close. This can be possibly hazardous to birds because there were big machines picking up trash and moving around all places, the birds were close and could possibly be killed. There should be a solution to this issues. The worker informed us that they put sounds that scare the birds away but the birds  got used to the sound. I don’t think the problem was handled effectively and should be reapproached.

Lastly, the biggest problem is that the landfill was very close to resident homes. This is very bad. The landfill’s toxins are released in the air, the land, and etc. These toxins could possibly be affected near by residents, and this should be addressed.

Overall, things cannot be changed overnight and I do not expect them to. However I am not saying landfills are awful and just killed us, there have been major improvements and modernization to the system, but this issue can be solved.