We, as individuals and as a society, produce remarkable amounts of waste. It's one that I, as a County Supervisor, think about a lot. The United States produces over 150 million tons of solid waste every year. The main way we dispose of this waste is to send it to sanitary landfills. The wastes are then covered with a final layer, typically clay.
Present rules require or encourage landfills to remain relatively dry.
The United States is full of such conventional landfills. Yolo County, and a few other landfills, however, are doing it differently. It's an amazing technological step forward. Here's how it works. In the bioreactor landfill, more environmentally sound management practices are used and more liquid is added to the waste.