As recycling becomes more common, use of landfill is reducing, but it is still an important means of waste disposal. For example, 2012-13 figures from Defra (department of the environment, food and rural affairs) for England show that 8.51 million tonnes, or 33.9%, of waste collected by local authorities went to landfill.
Continue reading “Monitoring and Analysis of Landfill Gases”
We have covered some serious subjects over the past few weeks, so I thought this time I would talk about something a little bit more light-hearted, at least on the face of it.
Back in January of this year, there were reports from Germany of an explosion – a herd of cows nearly took the roof off their barn because of the amount of methane they were releasing, when a static electric charge caused it to explode. The blast damaged the roof of the barn and one cow (out of about 90) received minor burns.
Last week we looked at Carbon Dioxide from an industry point of view, so this week I thought I’d highlight the dangers of this gas from a domestic side.
What is Carbon dioxide?
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a gas that the human body produces naturally. Everyone is exposed, to some degree, to this gas every day. It occurs naturally in the Earth’s atmosphere as part of animal metabolism, plant photosynthesis, decomposition, and combustion. The gas is colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-combustible, is soluble in water and makes up slightly less than 0.5% of our atmosphere. CO2 is classed as a ‘greenhouse gas’ and increasing CO2 is debated to be one of the main causes of global warming.
