Global Warming, Health and Methane Gas

The adage, "What you don't know can't hurt you," anything but true when it comes to America's improperly abandoned landfills. Uncapped and unlined, such landfills spew out methane gas: a threat to human health and a documented factor in global warming.

Methane is a greenhouse gas of such interest to science that researchers have drilled 2 mile long ice cores in glaciers to study methane in relation to climate change in eons past.

If you've ever seen a dead animal by the side of the road, its bloated belly is filled with methane gas. When organic material - garbage, dead leaves, dead anything - breaks down, methane is emitted. According to the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (www.atsdr.cdc.gov), "Decomposing waste in landfills generates gases containing many chemicals that transport through soils and may eventually be released to the surface," posing a risk to earth's atmosphere, and a potential health risk to nearby residents.

Most communities preferred to deposit accumulated refuse some distance from residential areas, so America's "green" space (farm country) is dotted with forgotten landfills. Those that predate the EPA (1972) were monitored by state and local health departments - often inconsistently. Once trenches in these dumps were full, such landfills were abandoned, but the stuff buried in them continued to decay. Though "licensed" to accept household trash only, not uncommon was illegal dumping of hazardous waste such as:

• Chemicals from factories.
• Radioactive wastes of unknown origin.
• Toxic heavy metals like arsenic.

Any sandy subsoils allowed these poisons to migrate down into underground rivers known as aquifers, posing a risk to the groundwater in drawn up through farm wells, and discharging into surface water: lakes, creeks, rivers. Some of the pollution became airborne, migrating up through the ground as gases, chiefly methane.

Some such landfills were later equipped with methane "monitors." As methane gas was emitted, the monitors burned it off.

Just how much methane permeates the air above the forgotten landfills that have no monitors is rarely known. One rural "improperly abandoned" Ohio landfill had never even been "capped" with clay, was not lined, and has no methane monitors. At the landfill that replaced it, methane monitors burn all night long. According to the US EPA (www.epa.gov), methane in soil can travel through field tiles into basements of adjacent homes, creating an explosion hazard.

Researchers today study ice cores and ocean sediments in search of methane clues, but as yet, no study has thoroughly inventoried America's improperly abandoned rural landfills.

Each global warming report is increasingly dire: As glaciers melt, gases like methane trapped in the permafrost are released, doing more harm to earth's atmosphere. Rising oceans risk swamping the nesting grounds for six of seven species of Caribbean turtles. Rising ocean temperatures spell doom for fragile coral reefs. The World Wildlife Federation (http://www.worldwildlifefederation.org/) says violent rainstorms and clearcut mangrove forests may spell doom for the world's largest population of wild Bengal tigers. On a human scale, hundreds of millions of people could be without food and water due to changing climates.

Right now, unremediated landfills that discharge their pollution into nearby rivers may be contaminating treated drinking water sources in downstream cities. Such buried poisons could be the source of area cancer deaths, birth defects and more.

Cleaning up trash along the nation's highways makes America look better. More important is cleaning up America's unseen trash - chemicals and other contaminants buried underground.