Landfilling 101 (Ew. Gross..)

There is nothing quite like off-roading in a bus. I highly recommend it. Today we traveled to Ecoserdiana Landfill, to the north of Cagliari. The gates were nestled between two hillsides, rising well above the road. Shrubs and wildflowers and dried grass covered them, and they were framed by the surrounding countryside.

The two female engineers get on the bus, and immediately point out that the two hills are closed landfills, one from 2000 and the other from 2012. The first was opened in 1980 as one of the first sanitary landfills in the area. Originally it was not fitted with pipes to collect the methane gas produced by the organic components of the municipal solid waste, so in the 1990s it was retrofitted with the necessary requirement to collect the biogas.

This landfill is currently equipped to handle industrial waste, some types of hazardous waste, and bottom ash from waste to energy incinerators. Most landfills in Sardinia are no longer allowed to accept municipal solid waste. Because of this, Ecoserdiana faces a challenge in their future. Without organic waste, new landfills will not produce near enough biogas to keep their biogas combustion to energy plants running. As a result, Ecoserdiana has begun research into implementing an anaerobic digestion plant on site, and has already installed a small solar farm.

 

The current functioning landfill takes up a relatively vast area. Because of the composition of the waste the landfill accepts, the waste was almost entirely soot, ash, and chunks of construction waste. Surprisingly not much of a smell. This particular landfill is built over an old MSW landfill, and as such the top vents have to be built up with the rising waste. They are closed now, so only the biogas from the bottom vents makes it to the energy plant.

Sometimes this dialogue surprises me. This subject is not my forte; in fact it is so far our of my wheelhouse sometimes I feel as if I am swinging at air. However, every once in a while, if I squint, or look down, I find something you don't get to see everyday: hope.

Following the River, Wandering to the Sea

The bus rocked me out of another nap, the lurch sent me flying into the window pane, and I knocked my head into the glass. 

It's another overcasted day, and the cumulus clouds (nuvole, in Italian, as I've been told) drag race across the sky. The bus tilts again as we round another corner on a switchback, the railing disappears, and suddenly I'm hanging over a gorge: suspended over half a mountainside. That's one heck of a wakeup call. I catch snatches of a stream: white and furious at some instances, others a small moment of tranquility before the engine shifts and we lumber around the bend. The mountain path followed the little river for over a half hour, and I sat with my eyes glued to the window, following it like a starving paparazzi, waiting for the perfect snapshot. 

I am fascinated by water. It's ebbs, eddies, waves, and ripples stun and awe me. I suck it dry from my camelback, from the carafes and decanters at the restaurants, even the garden hose. Man craves water like a lover. We write songs to praise her. We dance to entice her to fall upon us. We build temples to her. We came upon a Roman temple, built to the god Antas. It is believed that there was once a spring that was believed to heal and cleanse its worshipers. In typical Roman (human) style, they built the hulking mass in the stolen style of the Greeks, and directly on top of a Nuragic shrine. For thousands of years, how many people prayed and begged for a miracle, for guidance? How many stood where I dumbly stood - yawning from my afternoon nap - with a motive and a purpose? How can I even begin to comprehend their humanity, when their lives we so unlike my own? 

The human body is comprised of 60% water. I guess that’s something in common, but I drink so little you can just subtract 15% or so.

The water moves mountains. It cuts away at the hills and shapes ridges and valleys. Every crevice of the mountains has its own river bed, now dry from the early summer heat. How old the stone is here? At Porto Flavia the shale practically crumbled to my touch, like compressed wood or shards of sand. Imagine mining through that. You’d be 15 kinds of dead under the mountain, trapped under the tons of collapsed rock. Luckily the port is carved of clay and limestone. Unluckily for the creators of the port, hydraulic mining wasn’t invented until the 1850s during the California gold rush. Yay chisels and mallets.

An ant moves 50 times its own weight all by itself; the current world record for a dead lift is 1155 lbs, only 4 times that particular human weight. I think of the time it took to create this port, to quarry in to the mountains in search of silver, gold, zinc, and iron. Humanity has moved mountains, in both the good sense and the bad. The abandon town on Ingurtosu sits crumbling atop the mountain, despite an inhabitance of over a thousand a mere 40 years ago. How odd is it to think our stones may still stand, even when we move on and others replace us. I can imagine it now: a valley oak, gnarled and blue-gray, growing skyward in my living room: its brown autumn leaves covering the stained oak floorboards, its roots twisted into our rotting plumbing. I wonder, if you turned down the hall and stumbled over the foliage into my old bedroom, if my stuffed bunny Oswald would still be sitting on my bed.

Maybe the force of the blow to my head was enough, or perhaps the engine's rumbling din knocked enough to my nerves cells senseless, and I'm still dreaming. It's hard to believe that everything, between the shallow, turbulent stream to the cavernous boreholes drilled into stone so old it crumbles to touch, exists.