Earth Day is Today!

Found on Askmen.com
let's celebrate Earth Day by looking at five things you didn't know about garbage.

1- The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

In one region of the Pacific, the discarded plastic garbage bobbing around is so prevalent that it outweighs the surface zooplankton population by a factor of six to one, according to a study by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation (AMRF).At any rate, the AMRF believes that the whole world's oceans may contain as much as 100 million tons of plastic debris.

2- Garbage is all over Mount Everest

You would never know it by looking at the majestic, snow-white contours of the world's highest peak, but the people who spend time there are colossal slobs.
The well-trodden but challenging paths up the mountain are notoriously filthy; the most frequently encountered bit of garbage is a discarded oxygen tank, but over the years climbers have been known to discard plenty of other gear on the mountain as well.If garbage-strewn paths weren't bad enough to spoil your leisurely hike 29,000 feet up, another frequent site will: dead people. A handful of climbers have reluctantly defied the old maxim about what goes up must come down, dying in a deep freeze at elevations too high to be retrieved safely.

3- Some garbage can live a million years or more

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that glass bottles require a million years to fully break down in a landfill; that plastic foam cups require over 500 years; aluminum cans between 200 and 500 years; plastic bags as many as 20 years, and cigarette butts as many as five years.

4- Landfill garbage pollutes the air worse than carbon dioxide

Landfills have a tendency to emit a host of toxic gases into the air, and by toxic gases we actually mean cytotoxic or carcinogenic gases, like benzene and vinyl chloride. They also leak into the surrounding soils and water sources.
Furthermore, landfills produce methane. Being lighter than air, methane works its way out of the air and into the soils or the atmosphere. Methane has a very high global warming potential, about 12 times as high as carbon dioxide.

5- Garbage and plasma could feed the grid

The last thing you didn't know about garbage is something Dr. Louis J. Circeo at the Georgia Tech Research Institute knows everything about: using plasma to obliterate garbage.
Plasma is a set of charged particles interacting with a magnetic field, and it is hotter than the surface of the sun. At a plasma arc gasification plant, plasma is put into contact with organic material, and -- poof! -- burns it into synthetic gas that's much cleaner than other burning processes. Inorganic material melts into useful construction materials.
Plasma gasification is extremely efficient; according to Dr. Circeo, incinerating your run-of-the-mill ton of landfill garbage could provide the power grid with over 800 kilowatt-hours of electricity -- several times the power needed to carry out the plasma gasification in the first place.