YSM Issue 91.3

epurposed By:
Katie Schlick
Rags to Riches
Excavating a 21st Century Waste Management Solution
Similar to the ghost-like greenhouse gases that
bloom from car exhausts, factories, and power
plants and then float into the atmosphere, the
manufacturing of a cell phone also employs the
concept of invisible waste. Yahya Jani, a postdoctoral
fellow at Linnaeus University in Sweden, says that
around 86 kilograms of invisible waste are involved
in the production of a single phone weighing
approximately 0.15 kilograms. After receiving his
PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2006, Jani has
received a second PhD, this time in Environmental
Science, by taking a closer look at waste. His
dissertation, published in March 2018, is the first to
reimagine landfills as useful stocks of resources.
For two years, Jani collaborated with different
universities in the Baltic Sea Region to gather data
from two landfills—Högbytorp in Stockholm
Sweden, which sees 700,000 tons of waste each
year, and Torma in Tartu, Estonia. Jani found that
over two-thirds of waste and two-fifths of waste
at Högbytorp and Torma could be recovered,
respectively. These fairly promising results at just two
of the thousands of landfills across the planet indicate
that countries can improve their hazardous, polluting
waste management systems in unprecedented ways,
potentially reversing the course of landfills currently
maxed out on storage capacity.
Pukeberg, a glasswork dumping site in Nybro,
Sweden, served as another test excavation site.
Cadmium, lead, and arsenic were extracted from
this site by the classic reduction-melting method,
which involves melting the glass into a solution,
and the transformed metals fall to the bottom of
the glass solution. This process ultimately had
a 99 percent success rate, demonstrating much
promise for future trials with extraction.
Cadmium, lead, arsenic, and zinc were also isolated
by various chelating agents, which bind to the
elements and mobilize them into releasing from the
surfaces of soil and glass of particle sizes less than two
millimeters. Testing a selection of extraction methods
was a critical supplement for the research because the
ability to characterize the waste in landfills around
the world is one of the first practical steps toward
remediation. Though pleased with the results of
these two extraction methods, Jani believes that there
are many more extraction methods that need to be
developed. He hopes to expand the body of science
on cost-effective resource extraction techniques in
order to propel these landfill reformations forward.
Jani’s work builds on the popular concept of a
circular economy—in which the outputs of the
system are recycled and then fed back into the
system, as opposed to the wasteful, single-use nature
of a linear economy, which would generally lead to
the dumping of waste products—as a mechanism
for embedding sustainability into development
and government. It adds one more composite layer
into the circle: the recycling, extraction, and reuse
of waste. Once implemented, the latest component
of waste management—the recovery of materials
and energy—would combat scarcity of resources,
as well as pollution that leaches from hazardous
waste materials. The technologies could even
extend to cleaning up hazardous wastewater and
harvesting nutrients. Particularly with such an
abundance of electronic e-waste—collectively, the
industry yields 750 million tons of it each year—
but such a lack of the rare earth elements needed
to create the number of electronics demanded, Jani
envisions the replenishment of needed resources
with what has already been used, or with what has
been carelessly left behind in landfills.
When asked about the best approach to tackle waste
management issues, Jani spoke of what he perceives to
be the triple helix of change: society, decision makers,
and academia. Uniting these three populations on a
global scale and directing their focuses toward open
dumping sites, which serve as troves of resources and
opportunity rather than as piles of waste to be buried,
can have profound impacts on the future of the
Earth. The transition requires a vast accompanying
shift in the global mindset toward considering waste
as a secondary resource. Tackling climate change
and other global environmental issues, however, will
require unprecedented levels of collaboration and
innovation; perhaps the next transformative climate
solution will actually emerge from the world’s rubble.
35 Yale Scientific Magazine October 2018