Science AMA Series: I’m Jon Powell, a Doctoral Student in Chemical &
Environmental Engineering at Yale. I study how waste and discarded
materials are managed and recently found that Americans dispose o
Abstract
EDIT: I’m now live - bring on your burning garbage questions, Reddit!
Thanks for so many great questions so far, I’ll be hanging out Friday
afternoon and checking up on new ones that arrive. Hi reddit, I, along
with my co-authors, recently published a manuscript in Nature Climate
Change that had a few key findings. First, we found that every American
is disposing of about 5 pounds of waste per person per day, but that US
landfills generally have several decades of life remaining. Second, we
examined engineered systems built at landfills to collect gases produced
when waste decomposes and identified the factors that most greatly
impact the performance of these systems. Taken together, we identified
areas where significant reductions in greenhouse gases can be achieved
and uncovered opportunities for additional renewable energy production.
I have worked on materials and waste management issues across multiple
continents and am passionate about expanding the use of data to better
understand how we manage materials in the US, with the goal of
identifying hotspots where more sustainable decisions can be made. TL;DR
America disposes of a lot of waste and we can reduce current/future gas
emissions and produce more energy with improved gas collection
practices.