One of the main issues with waste is that it needs to be transported. Local landfills have long since been replaced by large, regional landfills where waste from more metropolitan areas is gathered and then sent to be landfilled or recycled at a faraway location. When a garbage truck picks up your weekly curbside waste, that waste will likely make its way to a landfill or recycling facility only after it has traveled many miles on interstate and highways, passing through several transfer stations, and then more roads. In some cases, your trash will cross multiple county lines, or perhaps a state line, before it is finally recycled or landfilled.
Using the region of Southern California as a case study, we would like to investigate the real environmental impact of transporting waste in the era of mega-landfills. Do waste-by-rail projects, such as Los Angeles' Mesquite Regional Landfill, result in lower greenhouse gas emissions and do they offer a less deleterious solution as we make our way toward a zero-waste society?
The process of sending waste to transfer stations and to other municipalities also has the effect of obscuring the waste picture for a town or city. This effect can be quite serious, since not knowing how much waste your town produces or knowing where it goes may result in difficulties when advocating for and implementing responsible waste policies. In practice, it can also present problems when researchers, agencies and individuals and interpret and respond to environmental impact reports, such as planning documents required for the California Environmental Quality Act, (CEQA).
This project mainly seeks to democratize data and data-visualization tools by documenting our process of waste-data analysis.
It includes data from 10 Southern California Counties: San Luis Obispo; Kern; San Bernardino; Santa Barbara; Ventura; Los Angeles; Orange; Riverside; San Diego; Imperial.