More CRT's going to the landfills

I know here locally the local municipality changed their policy to putting CRT TV's in with the regular household trash....it's posted on their website and they told me the landfills are lined to prevent leeching....take it for what you will but if this is what policy here dictates that is where they go

Originally Posted by mikeinreco

I know here locally the local municipality changed their policy to putting CRT TV's in with the regular household trash....it's posted on their website and they told me the landfills are lined to prevent leeching....take it for what you will but if this is what policy here dictates that is where they go

Directing the waste stream one way or another gets complicated Mike. If that's their policy then just go with it. Sometimes there are no good options available. You just gotta choose the least worst thing.

< Sigh > My generation is paying for the sins of our fathers here. My dad's generation just didn't know any better back in the 1960's & 1970's. It used to be that every town had a town dump here. The fathers would pick out the most worthless piece of land where things didn't grow well and that's where they dumped the trash. Fast forward sixty years and we learned that those worthless pieces of land were the very best recharge areas for our underground aquifer. Anything and everything went into the old dump. All that poison leachate found it's way into our well water.

We closed our old time landfills about 35 or 40 years ago. As it turned out ... the damage was already done though. Ours is a small community where everybody knows everybody. I started to notice a cancer plume within a one mile radius of the old landfills over the years. The people getting sick were people i had known for years. Some were even family members. The local medical center was within the one mile radius. I casually mentioned that there might be something going on and to watch for it. They didn't see it at first ... but they eventually figured it out when one of their own doctors died of cancer in her early 40's. It took her fast.There was no stopping it even with the best of medical care.

Nowadays ... all of our trash gets compacted at the transfer station and trucked out of the area. I ship out roughly 24 - 30 tons a week depending upon how busy it is. It's currently going to a state owned engineered landfill about 70 miles away. It's an expensive proposition. Higher trucking and disposal costs blew our operating budget this year.

Anyhow ... long sad story. The main point is that leachate at the state owned lined landfill is a problem too. There's a drainage system and all of the liquids that run off have to be collected and trucked to a sewage treatment plant.

It's not a perfect world. Sometimes the waste solutions we have aren't all that great so you do the best you can with what you've got. It is however, a good idea to be a little careful about what you're putting into the landfill because it's apt to come right back at you in some other way.

It's not very often that people from all over the world agree on anything. The thing is that most people involved in waste management and the environmental sciences have reached consensus that things containing lead and mercury really should be handled separately from the general waste stream. It's not hard to do. Just set em' aside and ship them off to someone who is set up to process them. Recycling is not a bad thing.

Edited to add: Not being all high and mighty here. Maine is way out there on the bleeding edge of the environmental movement. Sometimes the people calling the shots and making the rules about how things are done here take it to extremes. Just cause we do things a certain way doesn't mean that someone in another state should do things that way.

Honestly don't get to many CRT these days and have gotten rid of what I did have over the last year or so........CRT recycling was never really profitable and now municipalities are just biting the bullet and throwing away what remains of these ancient artifacts