There’s gold in them there landfills
IN THE movie WALL·E, humankind has left Earth in a bit of a mess. The planet is choked with garbage and all the people have shipped out, leaving robot WALL·E to clean the place up and make it habitable again. Things may not be quite that bad yet, but there’s no doubt that we produce a huge amount of waste. Even with increased recycling, landfill sites are filling up by the day and -in the absence of a plucky robot – the waste experts of planet Earth are working on the next best thing: landfill mining.
The idea is simple. Instead of disappearing under mountains of our own waste, while paying through the nose for diminishing commodities, why not dig up and recycle what we have already thrown away?
Sorry but, since I don’t have a subscription to New Scientist I can’t excerpt anything from the main body of the article. We don’t have a national policy on the disposal of metals like the kind found in electronics so many valuable metals are ending up in our landfills. It does seem like a terrible waste of resources to not try and recover recyclable materials especially metals like gold, copper and silver.
The Antheraea polyphemus are found in almost every state and much of Canada. TTheir host plants include several tree species such as the oak which I know from personal experience. Other hosts include the willow, birch trees and maple. The female usually lays her eggs on the leak which the catepillars will eat when they hatch. They mate the same day they emerge from their cocoons.
tangledwing 