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Eco landfill.


bigclive

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I wonder if the people making the ongoing EU lighting regulations realise or even care about the amount of landfill they are causing. I'm seeing a worrying trend in LED products where the short lived emitters are permanently attached to a large mass of alloy that gets scrapped when the LEDs or circuitry fail. That includes some outdoor fittings where the cases are physically glued shut Apple-style.

 

When you consider that traditional lamps were made of a tiny amount completely inert materials like glass and simple metals, it makes you wonder if the new era of lighting is actually causing more harm to the environment than good.

 

If the people making the rules were technically competent they might consider standardising on heatsink, emitter and driver forms that allowed easy changing of components in fittings to allow the casings and heatsink castings (quite energy hungry to produce) to be reused easily. At the moment you can often change some of these components, but it takes technical competence to do so. At least the LED industry has standardised on a few form factors for higher power LEDs.

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I wonder if the people making the ongoing EU lighting regulations realise or even care about the amount of landfill they are causing.

This was on my to-do list to see if they had considered it, and if not then complain in the consultation. Anyone like to calculate the carbon footprint of a new Source 4 LED, to figure out how many hours it would have to be used in place of an existing tungsten profile in order to pay back that carbon and actually save anything? I'm expecting the answer to be a long time!

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I worked out that the ecological production costs of a hybrid car would make them worth the effort only if they all lasted 32 years. Then I saw the results of rare earth extraction in China and gave up trying to work it out.

 

Very much like biodiesel. All the rage for a while until the reduced life of engines is added to the calculations and the carbon/eco footprint of making more of them more often.

 

We are more short-termist than ever and seem unable to join the dots or take a holistic view on anything. The sound of the 21st century so far has been the flapping of chickens coming home to roost.

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I wonder if the people making the ongoing EU lighting regulations realise or even care about the amount of landfill they are causing.

 

Oh dear Clive you're assuming they have brains. Sadly they are mediocrities who can only grasp one idea in a lifetime - and then only tenuously. All they have managed to grasp is that some lamps use more energy than others when they are alight ergo they must be ditched for those which use less. It's a big sentence that, so it is all they can absorb. It then controls all their policy making GBS nearly had it right - he should have said 'Those who can, do. Those who can't quite, become bureaucrats. Those who just can't, become politicians." See Merton on the dysfunctions of Bureaucracy...

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WEEEEEEE! [siw] requires that most of the products (from traceable suppliers) are in fact actually recycled.

 

Heatsinks are dead easy to recycle as they're a large mass of relatively pure aluminium, so can just be tossed into a crucible.

 

The better boards are aluminium-cored, which means they're mostly aluminium and copper - both fairly valuable and easy to extract from the finished product by tossing into a crucible.

The (probably not recyclable) insulator is a very thin layer.

 

The diodes and driver electronics are rather more difficult though.

I'm not entirely sure if one even could recycle an LED diode, other than by burning it to extract the tiny amount of gold bond wire.

 

(Ebay and the like completely ignore that of course, because they still claim not to be selling anything.)

 

Dimmer racks are mostly steel, aluminium and copper. Nobody is going to toss that amount of copper - even if you did, just leave it in a skip and somebody will claim it!

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In doing some research on the town where I live, I've discovered loads of nice places and built up areas that are on old landfill sites. When I was a kid, we had a quarry - used for years and years. Then not became the landfill site, and is now grass, with trees, and looking nice. In 100 years nobody will even remember it was anything else other than countryside. Same with the 100 yr old ones that are now caravan sites and a huge grassy area near the beach. We need building material that creates holes and we fill the holes. I fail to see what exactly is wrong with this. Kerry's comment about what happens abroad because we want certain core materials worries me. Just recently I discover we are the major importer of palm oil, wrecking the environment elsewhere because they want to supply us. Cutting down rainforests and other habitats surely matters in the eco-chain. We just see our own local benefits. Our air is cleaner. We now are arguing about micrograms of particulate in the air being BAD, yet we've all forgotten the smog/fog of my childhood from coal fires. Somebody was complaining the other day about the air around a local school from car exhausts, yet only 30 years ago today's 'polluted air' would have been considered fresh. Are we on a pointless quest to have perfection.

 

Our standards seem to be changing and blinkers put on?

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We need building material that creates holes and we fill the holes. I fail to see what exactly is wrong with this.

 

Part of the concern is that, in theory, toxins from electronic material in landfills can leach into groundwater. This was apparently the issue behind the directive for lead-free solder. This has created a mountain of landfill itself, as items prematurely fail (it's telling that medical and aerospace applications got an exemption).

 

Meanwhile, it's still fine to use lead flashing on roofs, where our increasingly acidic rain washes down it and directly into watercourses.

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Paul,

 

There is a certain degree of 'diminishing returns' as we improve environmental standards, but there's an element too of managing acute and chronic risks. The London smog of 1952 led directly to thousands of deaths. The Clean Air act helped to diminish that acute risk. Nowadays, longer term exposure to PM2.5 and PM10 fraction particulates will also kill thousands, but not in such a direct and easily quantified way. That doesn't mean we should ignore the risks presented - especially as the number of sources has grown considerably.

 

With regards to landfill, historical sites were just holes in the ground. Many caused pollution of local groundwater and watercourses. Some were environmental disasters, like the landfill full of tyres which ignited and burnt uncontrolled underground for years. More modern landfills require impervious liners to prevent escape of leachate, but in so doing create as many problems with management of the leachate and control of gasses from anaerobic digestion. Whilst the latter can be harnessed for local electricity and heat production, it can equally give rise to dangerous situations where methane collects and then ignites in premises built on landfill.

 

The second issue with landfill is simply one of capacity. Sending undifferentiated material to landfill was simply not sustainable... we did not have enough holes and/or ability to manage them, and our consumerist society threw out ever increasing amounts of waste. Landfill tax was designed to make users think twice about sending material to landfill, and differentiating with respect to material helped reduce the amount of dangerous waste sent for burial in inappropriate sites. Segregating waste means that "clean" soil and aggregate etc. can be reused as ground works material, recyclable stuff can be reused or treated more appropriately and inert rubbish can go to landfill without it causing additional long term problems.

 

New electronic devices pose their own problems in terms of recycling. Few are easily differentiated. Reclaiming useful materials is costly. The millions of CRTs disposed of in the past 20 years have been problematic because the glass chemistry varied between units, making it hard to recycle.

 

I'm sure that the "broad brush stroke" intention of modern environmental law is well intentioned and based on solid scientific appraisal and fact. It is, however, implemented by politicians, modified by pressure groups and then often ignored by end users. Somewhere in all of this, there is a genuine need to reduce environmental impact...

 

Simon

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You reading my mind Simon? I was about to reply to Stuart that acid rain is diminishing as catalytic converters and power station flue scrubbers do their work using the Great Smog of '52 as example. I just about remember it and estimates of 8-10,000 deaths and tales of cows choking to death in fields come to mind. 1962 I remember well and nobody under about 55 can have the faintest idea how scary those things were.

 

We do make mistakes and we do overdo things but nanny state it is not. The Clean Air Acts worked miracles and landfill is safer now than since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

and in the fifties, before the ICI smelters closed, it had a little verse.

It happened once, in days of yore,

The devil chanced upon Landore,

He said" with all this fume and stink

I can't be far from home methink.

The past is a different country ..... and a bl00dy dangerous one!

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... historical sites were just holes in the ground. Many caused pollution of local groundwater and watercourses. Some were environmental disasters,...

 

Absolutely. You only have to listen to what's currently happening in Ambridge to see how the past can catch up with us.

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... historical sites were just holes in the ground.

 

I have a friend who used to work at a builder's merchant. They supplied a shipment of plasterboard to the site of a new housing estate. It turned out that the person placing the order had made a mistake, they thought the quantity on the order was the number of sheets to be supplied. Instead it was the number of pallets, so they had roughly 24x the amount that was required.

 

The builders decided that, rather than admit the problem to those higher up, they would simply bury the excess in a neighbouring field. A large JCB made quick work of the job. All was fine until a few years later, when someone was doing some test drilling in the field (which was due to be developed). They went down three feet and hit Gyproc.

 

There was a fully inquiry/witchhunt which is why my friend found himself getting quizzed about an order from years before. Apparently the guilty parties got in quite a bit of bother over it.

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Oh well, I'm on my own then. I just discovered there's an old pit full of scrap cars locally too - that will be interesting when dug up in a couple off hundred years?

 

I'm still not quite convinced that burying rubbish is totally bad. I get the pollution element, but it seems a solution to what happens when we dig out the ground for use in house building? If there's a big hole, somewhere where ground water contamination isn't an issue, why not fill it up?

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I'm still not quite convinced that burying rubbish is totally bad. I get the pollution element, but it seems a solution to what happens when we dig out the ground for use in house building? If there's a big hole, somewhere where ground water contamination isn't an issue, why not fill it up?

 

There's still plenty of stuff sent to landfill - around 50 millions tons annually.

Trouble is, now that they are sealed at the bottom, they fill up with water. When full, they have to be capped and then require continual monitoring. They can be unstable from a geotechnics viewpoint - so building on them is often problematic. Old sites are often "lost" and have a habit of being unstable. They might only be 'found' again when new houses start falling down...

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