Environmental Technology

D'uh?
Releasing methane too quickly? What, like making too much proffit or buying too much beer?
Del

Sounds like an advantage to me. Cap the landfill and harvest the gas. Might need smaller, simpler, cheaper gas compression systems. No fracking needed. Easier than trying to capture methane from flatulent cows!

Landfills are being designed to handle this, for christ sake. Its a problem that can be mitigated....^{I like that word}. And not act as though you run around like a bunch of chickens with your head cut off. Crying the sky is falling.

Simple, for the author full of it, er, full of fear.

Eat from homemade stone dishes, with homemade wooden forks and knives. Thereby you achieve carbon neutrality, your own methane emissions excluded.

I suggest, you capture your methane emissions for better use. That is in sych with the level of your thinking.

How gets such a nitwit on an "Engineering Website"??

Wow.. whatever the landfill conditions are, they sure are not approximated by your backyard compost pile. I was duped into buying these 'biodegradable' plastic compost bags, and used them for about a year until I realized they were not breaking down at a reasonable rate whatsoever. Shreds of the offending material can still be found in the garden three years later. Paper bags, which are in the "slow" category according to the author, are gone by the time you turn the compost in spring.

Ah, you don't understand... the way to get plastic to degrade is to put something important, or something you don't want to spill into it.
You can bet the next time you pick it up, it will dissintegrate in you hands spilling the contents onto your feet.
Del

Indeed, the classic "forever' plastic bags reliably shatter in the cold here during winter, and are not nearly as durable as the biodegradable type. And thank goodness for cloth grocery bags, it seems a small miracle to get home from the store with everything intact instead of a bunch of stretched, holed, basically useless bags.

I can envision a new growth sector with solar-powered after-burners for cows.

There was a government funded study done on the methane production of cows.

as far as fart lighting......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddUotyR3WEA

Not really seeing a downside to the current paradigm. Don't "fix" what's not broken.

As a sailor,I go to sea & look into the deep;when the sun is right I can see the flecks of degraded plastic.Plastic particles are not as immediately lethal to sea-life as sheets of plastic;but they get into a 'soup'.The fish,whales & dolfins live in this 'soup'.

Plastic is with us forever,we're learning the problems:compromises abound.

Weather tis nobler to make/use durable/reusable -or-single use rapid disintergrate plastic,presumably there is justification for both.Ultimately they turn to dust & it's the chemical residue to consider after the physical hazards for wildlife has passed.

"Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life". [Linus Pauling]