ExplainerSeptember 17, 2026
Quebec Made Blue-Bin Glass Good Enough to Become a Bottle Again
For decades half of Quebec's curbside glass was buried as landfill cover. A $20M optical-sorting upgrade finally gets it clean enough for the furnace.
Topic
Landfill
What happens after burial: cells, caps, leachate and long tail emissions.
4 posts
ExplainerSeptember 16, 2026
What Drips Out of a Landfill, and New York's Plan to Treat It
Rain moves through buried waste and comes out carrying PFAS. Municipal wastewater plants were never designed to remove it. New York proposes making landfills do it on site.
Myth-BustingSeptember 11, 2026
"Compostable" Is a Facility Spec, Not a Property of the Object
Certified compostable packaging is engineered to break down in a hot industrial windrow. Put it in a garden bin, a recycling bin or a landfill and it behaves like ordinary plastic — because in those conditions, it is.
ExplainerSeptember 10, 2026
Satellites Can See Landfill Methane Now. Detection Is Not the Same as Repair.
Orbital spectrometers have found large landfill methane plumes that operators reported as far smaller. The measurement gap is now well documented; the enforcement and engineering response is not.