Sardegna Adventures: Class and Technical Visits

The past few days has been all class and technical visits. Monday, we gave our presentations which turned out pretty well. The day was just really long. After an hour and half presentation about mining in Sardinia from a Cagliari professor, we grabbed a speed lunch and began practicing our presentation on recycling glass and plastic containers in the US and EU. There were 5 groups of us altogether and each gave about 30 minute presentation. Following that we had another final presentation on landfills in preparation for our landfill visit Tuesday. Despite being really long, the presentations were very eye opening. The US really is incredibly bad with sustainability, and we have almost no federal legislation for recycling or waste management. Then you look at places in the EU like Germany and Belgium who really have their shit together, and it's just like "Damn, it isn't even that difficult for them. We Americans are just seriously slacking." Its been worked into their culture, so it's just something they do now. We seriously need that in the US.

Tuesday, the technical visit to the landfill was pretty interesting. It wasn't what I was expecting. I was expecting a kind of junkyard filled with heaping piles of trash like the pictures you see online of US landfills, but it wasn't like that at all. It was actually far more contained then that. There was almost no trash in site actually. This was because no municipal solid waste gets dumped there, but regardless I was still impressed with how clean it seemed. Rather then being heaping piles of trash, there were just lots of hills of dirt. It was also contained with a few different barriers to prevent chemicals leaching into the ground water and hooked up with pipes to collect methane from the decomposition in the piles. This methane was then burned to create energy and redistributed into the grid. I am certainly not a fan of landfills because they are unsustainable, but this landfill had a far lower environmental impact then I was expecting. I was thoroughly impressed with how they managed it.

Some pictures of the landfill.

The building where they convert the methane to energy.

Dylan glazing over.

Today, we had a bunch of lectures and had our 2nd group project assigned. My group got stuck with Nashville, TN, so now we have to go and research their recycling, land-filling, and recovery operations to make recommendations for changes to become more environmentally friendly in a feasible way. Should be interesting, but finding data on waste has already proved to be very difficult.

Took a nice long walk around the city again today, first heading up the hill and than back down into the heart of the city. It was really cool just walking through the streets and seeing everyone go by. This was the non-touristy area so I got a real feel for their city setting.

Here are some of the better picture from the walk.