New Jersey County Fights Landfill Odors Using Fragrant Spray Trucks 104
Not to be outdone by the Chinese and their deodorant guns, Middlesex County, New Jersey has unveiled their secret weapon against landfill stink, a perfume spraying truck. The flatbed truck equipped with special nozzles now drives around the 200-plus acre landfill spraying hundreds of gallons of a soapy, slightly citrus-scented liquid. From the article: "'It has a pleasant, showery smell,' said Richard Fitamant, executive director of the Middlesex County Utilities Authority, which runs the landfill. 'It's not offensive and it's not overpowering. It's a light scent.' Faced with a competing mandate to handle the loads of trash while curbing the stench, officials have turned to the roving, over-sized air freshener to control the smells wafting from the 200-plus acre landfill."
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Re:Smells fresh, but probably worse than trash (Score:4, Insightful)
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If they've thought it through they'll put the chemicals in there like in normal household deodorizers that numb your nose so you can't smell anything anymore.
Re:Smells fresh, but probably worse than trash (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Smells fresh, but probably worse than trash (Score:5, Informative)
Doing this is possibly a violation of Federal law:
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The air is not fresh. Somehow I think you have no freaking clue as to how bad a landfill smells. I still remember how bad the fieldtrip to a landfill site we were forced to take as part of "environmental studies" was. x_x
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The air is not fresh. Somehow I think you have no freaking clue as to how bad a landfill smells.
Sometimes? As in, you read my posts often, and you occasionally think I have no clue how bad a landfill smells?
I used to live near a landfill in Marysville, and I sometimes make a dump run to the local one in Clearlake.
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Someone is sure to object on those grounds...
But seriously, where does landfill stink come from, and why do they all small pretty much the same?
Land fills smell nothing like a dumpster full of garbage. So you can't blame it only on the garbage content.
Wouldn't it be better to find the the problem and fix that instead of covering it up?
One wonders if the stink is a necessary outcome of the landfill process or just a byproduct that is not well understood. With sealed landfills, some states mandate g
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Land fills smell nothing like a dumpster full of garbage. So you can't blame it only on the garbage content.
Perhaps there's a difference between a dumpster full of garbage and landfill site you haven't considered... like the length of time the garbage has been rotting.
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I'd like to invite you to drive the Tricity Beltway near Szadólki. If you have your windows closed, a well-hermetic car, an air refresher and have a cold, you may survive. That smell is so rancid that any concerns for the environment will go away the moment you take a whiff.
Of course, they could have placed that landfill away from housing and from the road that greets almost every visitor to Gdansk, sparing them such a grand welcome.
OT: screw you /. for that great Unicode support.
Re:Smells fresh, but probably worse than trash (Score:4, Funny)
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My mother once gave me a spray to use in my bathroom after I'd used the toilet. I thought that the smell I'd made was nicer than the spray.
Old spice missed an opportunity... (Score:3, Funny)
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Reminds me of Monsters Inc [imdb.com]...
Mike: Can I borrow your odorant?
Sulley: Yeah, I got, uh, Smelly Garbage or Old Dumpster.
Mike: You got, uh, Low Tide?
Sulley: No.
Mike: How about Wet Dog?
Sulley: Yep. Stink it up.
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giving the landfill a French Bath. How charming!
Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of consuming and throwing away less and living sustainably, our future is Febreze. If only that were a solution to the floating garbage island in the pacific.
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" If only that were a solution to the floating garbage island in the pacific."
No need to worry. Rush Limbaugh said "the Earth will heal itself."
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There's a good chance he's right. Unfortunately, since we keep adding to the problem, humans just might have to be eliminated for that to work.
it's not trash that smells, it's garbage (Score:2)
Instead of consuming and throwing away less and living sustainably, our future is Febreze.
It's not trash that smells, it's garbage (ie, food that's been thrown out.) If people had garbage disposals and compost piles, you're right, it wouldn't be a problem.
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If people had garbage disposals...
Wait, 'cuz its better to grind up our garbage and dump it into our graywater, instead of a land fill?
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Your sig fits the topic at hand and your comment wonderfully.
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Well, we could always go the Futurama route, and just launch a gigantic garbage ball into space, and forget about it for a thousand years or so...
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Good idea, burning is good. There used to be a waste-to-energy place about 40km from my home. Nimbyists successfully managed to get it shut down, it used to provide power to the city, hot water to all the nearby hospitals(4 of them), steam for those hospitals for various uses. And in the end it worked really well.
I blame enviromentalists and idiots. Both were at fault for it, now it sits there. Of course, if one remember the other day with the 'smart recycling bins' in a lot of places recycling materia
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I'll bet that you'd have felt a lot different about it if you were downwind from it. While it might seem like a good idea, trash-to-steam is actually a fairly expensive way to create power, and can produce a lot of really toxic waste. Of course every generation of the plant gets a little better, chances are that your 'nearby' plant was older and less efficient.
Not really no. I've lived in some massively shitty places, before. I can also recognize when something benefits me and the community. Considering I was very hopeful when they were going to build a medical waste incinerator here, that would generate power and create somewhere around 400 jobs. Of course nimbyists and environmentalists killed that one too. Well considering steam is generally what is used in most power plants to generate power, that's kinda moot isn't it? It's not hard to pipe some off fo
Just more odor (Score:2, Redundant)
So instead of doing something to actually reduce the odor, they try to mask it by adding yet more smells.
Re:Just more odor (Score:5, Funny)
Fragrant Spray Trucks (Score:3, Funny)
Nice. I hope the spray is also fragrant.
I have the solution (Score:2)
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What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
"Fixing" things is now too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
If near term cost is the only concern, all you do is create more problems. They could build a geodesic dome over the land fill, and burn the methane and turn that smell into energy, but that would require investment.. They could start separating the trash and recycling, while keeping biological waste in compost heaps that reduce the smell, but that would require investment.
America is basically like a 7-11 that's about to go under. The shelves are barely stocked, the sign has been broken for months, and nobody really gives a shit because they've been watching the boss raid the cash drawer for years.
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A truly disturbing metaphor.
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and immigrants are the only people working.
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A geodesic dome would not be very efficient. SOP is just to use a UV-stable plastic tent. Quonset huts would be somewhere in the middle though, requiring less materials.
America is basically like a 7-11 that's about to go under. The shelves are barely stocked, the sign has been broken for months, and nobody really gives a shit because they've been watching the boss raid the cash drawer for years.
Vehement agreemsg.
New York's Problem Becomes New Jersey's? (Score:4, Interesting)
NYC handles little of its trash in the city, a minority of it in New York state, and otherwise sends it all into New Jersey, on barges and rail cars to Tennessee and Virginia, etc. Pretty much every sanitation policy of NYC constitutes a fiscal and environmental disaster. New Jersey may be wasteful and rude as well, for all I know, but I'm betting the majority of the extra trash comes from New York. This problem just might disappear if New York were to construct a few of the (profoundly environmentally friendly and electricity producing) new models of incinerator or build landfills in their own damn state. I'm not from any state discussed in my rant, by the way; I just think New York is an all-consuming, wasteful jerk of a city.
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Well, it's not as if New York is catapulting it's garbage into New Jersey. There's a financial compensation that New Jersey's comfortable with. Otherwise, they'd say to just move along.
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Well, it's not as if New York is catapulting it's garbage into New Jersey. There's a financial compensation that New Jersey's comfortable with. Otherwise, they'd say to just move along.
You're mostly right, of course, although I'd argue two minor but significant points: one, it's beholden upon everyone to reduce consumption, for national fiscal survival if not for environmental reasons, and New York compounds their ridiculous over-consumption via the extra energy costs of all this poor planning and shipping trash up and down the eastern seaboard. It's waste upon waste, bad money after bad, that anyone with even a trace of environmentalism or frugality in their blood can and should ridicu
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There's a financial compensation that New Jersey's comfortable with. Otherwise, they'd say to just move along.
It's not that easy to say "Move along". Virginia has tried to stop/stem the inflow of out-of-state garbage but was forbidden to do so by the federal government. States no longer have any right to refuse refuse from being dumped into their state! I can't imagine that the founding fathers ever envisioned the Commerce Clause being used to force interstate commerce.
From this article [ilsr.org]:
"Virginia tried to b
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It's not that easy to say "Move along". Virginia has tried to stop/stem the inflow of out-of-state garbage but was forbidden to do so by the federal government. States no longer have any right to refuse refuse from being dumped into their state! I can't imagine that the founding fathers ever envisioned the Commerce Clause being used to force interstate commerce.
Way to spin it, jackass.
The problem is that these states have privatized their landfill business in the first place. They then, understandably, hav
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What do you mean "spin it"? I live in Virginia. I don't want my state being NY/NJ's dumping ground (or any other state's, for that matter). My state government listened to us voters and attempted to limit out of state waste [stateline.org]. They were overruled by the Federal Government saying we had to accept out of state waste. MY state can be forced to take another state's waste?
Every college/university I know of can charge out-of-state students a lot more than in state - why is that legal? Why can't VA charge in-state d
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What do you mean "spin it"?
I mean you're blaming the federal government, and the laws of the land, for a problem the state created for itself by handing over waste management to private firms. It was their choice, and they get to live with it now.
Every college/university I know of can charge out-of-state students a lot more than in state - why is that legal?
Who said it was legal? Heck, it probably isn't. But unless a large, monied interest challenges the law (ie, the exact opposite of your average studen
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States can ban the importation of anything they want to from other states (like fruit into California, etc) if they consider it dangerous, or if they just don't want it (try selling handguns across state lines to people in Chicago). I would posit that imported MSW (municipal solid waste) is _much_ more of a hazard to the health of millions of citizens that get their water from the rivers around those landfills. Virginia should have the right to limit the influx of toxic garbage into the state, plain and sim
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States can ban the importation of anything they want to from other states (like fruit into California, etc) if they consider it dangerous
Sorry, that argument ain't gonna fly. If they're willing to throw their own garbage in a landfill, they can't argue that someone else's garbage is unsafe.
States can and do regulate commerce between entities with the state and entities outside the state all the time.
Clearly this power is not universal. Here's a good article [umkc.edu] that covers a wide variety of causes where state
Queue Jersey Jokes (Score:1)
Why stop there? (Score:5, Funny)
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HBO and MTV don't accurately portray the state (Score:5, Informative)
Why not the whole state?
Because a lot of the state is actually quite nice. Woods, rivers, lakes, trails, beaches ... Small/medium sized towns and suburbs filled with trees or on the coast ... The run down industrial areas that you see on the Sopranos and the tourist oriented areas you see on Jersey Shore are the exceptions, not the rule. There are lots of jokes about the industrial and tourist areas, many from New Jersey residents, but there are also some pretty nice areas that ex-presidents retire to, executives working out of NYC live in, etc. There are also a lot of nice places for middle class budgets.
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Yeah, mod this guy up.
When traveling to New Jersey, I was pleasantly surprised ... once I got past the industrial wastelands facing towards New York on the opposite side of the river/bay, and continued heading southwards. And as you suggest, I also didn't go as far to the south as Atlantic City and other tourist-infested areas.
It was particularly beautiful in the Pine Barrens [wikipedia.org]. Trust me, it's nice. I was traveling from Canada, and we have pretty high standards when it comes to beautiful forests.
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Funny you say should that - maybe they could use some of the landfill funk to spray on the evergreen trees along NJ highways. They actually have signs that read "Evergreen trees treated with noxious spray" to keep people from cutting them down for Christmas trees. Unbelievable.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/24/nyregion/the-great-outdoors-a-dose-of-smelly-chemicals-keeps-tree-poachers-away.html [nytimes.com]
lol (Score:3, Interesting)
WTF, the Navy fliss planes at night? (Score:4, Interesting)
Rotting food is not pollution. The problem isn't the smell, the problem is the number of people moving in closer and closer to the landfill. Wow! this house is only $150k! Whats that smell?!? We should complain!! Darn landfills making me not want to live in my cheap house that's right by the landfill!!!
I've seen similar issues in California. Homes gets nearer and nearer to Air Force and Navy bases and then the new residents complain about planes flying around at 3am. The Air Force and Navy bases were explicitly acknowledged in their signed disclosures but people have literally been quoted in the newspapers saying things like: I knew about the base but I never imagined they would be flying around in the middle of the night.
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The Air Force and Navy bases were explicitly acknowledged in their signed disclosures
You're kidding right? Just imagine, if you will, the dumbest American couple that you can find being presented with a stack of loose leaf paper 3 feet high (you laugh, but shit like this actually happened during the bubble) constituting their mortgage/home purchase agreement. They are told to sign here and initial there, all the while being rushed through the process and told "you don't need to read that", "almost done!", or "only 10 more initials". By the time the befuddled couple has left the real estate
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They are told to sign here and initial there, all the while being rushed through the process and told "you don't need to read that", "almost done!", or "only 10 more initials". By the time the befuddled couple has left the real estate office with the keys in their hands they don't know what the fuck they just signed.
Fuck them. People signing shit without understanding it is always a gigantic failure, and it's how we got more and more legalese. If people just stopped signing shit, and instead started killing all the lawyers like punsters have been discussing probably as long as they have existed, we wouldn't be here today.
These are the same people who are now underwater on their mortgages and begging you, their fellow taxpayer (who didn't go out like a dumbass and overpay for a house), to bail them out.
I think most people knew what they were getting into, except they still thought America was great and therefore they could get somewhere with their scheme. Only a few chowderheads didn't know they were
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Much the same here. The local landfill is surrounded by farmland and industrial zones. While the major highway is nearby, it's opposite the prevailing winds and thus isn't a problem.
Easier (Score:2, Interesting)
Dose the it with liquid mushroom culture, and next year the pile will not only smell better, it will be smaller. Everybody wins.
Stinks (Score:5, Funny)
My girlfriend told me to kiss her where it stinks, so I took her to New Jersey.
Hey, alright! (Score:3, Funny)
The flatbed truck equipped with special nozzles now drives around the 200-plus acre landfill spraying hundreds of gallons of a soapy, slightly citrus-scented liquid.
I bet Kim Kardashian's pretty excited that there's finally a use for her new perfume.
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"I bet Kim Kardashian's pretty excited that there's finally a use for her new perfume."
Summer's Eve makes perfume?
This is what ahppens (Score:3, Interesting)
When there are services people expect to maintain civilization, but bitch whenever they are asked to pay for it.
But no, people don't want to pay for it. That want to 'cut fat' and lower taxes and get more service.
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Doing the smart/correct thing costs too much, so we will do the stupid/wrong thing until we can't do that anymore. By that time, doing the correct/smart thing from the start could have paid for itself but now will cost twice as much.
Sustainability. We've got to snap out of this daydream where we think we can just keep expanding and consuming. We can't, and probably within the next century or two we're going to learn the hard way that we can't. Continuing to ignore the issues like the Continent of Trash in t
And for the next step (Score:2)
Perhaps in a decade or so they will further imitate Europe in the middle ages and begin bathing and washing the refuse before burying it...
They're not "special" (Score:5, Informative)
"The flatbed truck equipped with special nozzles ..."
Hello -- "special" troll here with a special alert.
This perfume-dispensing nozzle is not special. It does what every other nozzle does: nozzle stuff. Nothing "special" about it.
If what you really mean is "I'm super-impressed by this nozzle, because it's doing nozzle stuff I've never dreamed of before," then say that instead.
Thank you for your cooperation.
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Yes, but your average perfume nozzle is on a vessel significantly smaller then a tanker truck.
That alone makes it unusual, probably purpose made or modified so it can be re-purposed. Which in a way makes it special.
Special is a matter of context, I suppose (Score:2)
You may be on to something here. And you've given me an idea.
How about taking one of those high-pressure water-spray trucks -- the kind that The Man uses to wash away street riots -- and filling the tank with perfume. The nozzle on that device might qualify as a truly special nozzle. And if not ... at least the riot will smell nice.
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Take it where it is needed the most (Score:1)
I think they are going to need more trucks (Score:1, Flamebait)
Shouldn't the truck be driving around the whole state.
Tactical Fabreeze bomb (Score:2, Insightful)
Not new (Score:2)
One of my clients was in the waste management business. They had stationary misting nozzles that did the same thing that this truck is doing in Jersey.
The coolest thing they had was a hawk to chase away the gulls. Almost as cool as sharks with laser beams... almost.
Stay classy, Middlesex (Score:1)
Kiss her where it smells... (Score:1)
"Kiss her where it smells, take her to New Jersey!" - George Carlin
I'm sure George would've had some very snarky and funny to say about this one... maybe "too little, too late" or "why didn't they think of this years ago?"
R.I.P. George Carlin
What abut the eco system... (Score:1)
This stuff leaches into the ground, anyone know what it will do to contaminate the eco-system, and what about air borne stuff, does it contain anything that is not good when it comes to air borne environment. We had something to say about spray cans and hairspray etc.... now we have full fledged trucks doing it, I hope we are not using the same technique as spray cans???
Great.. (Score:1)