How it works:

Bioreactor Technology

• On the east end of the dump stands a tower that stores sludgy recycled trash water containing bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms or microbes.

• The yucky mix flows from the storage tower into horizontal perforated pipes that line the landfill.

• The liquid is then injected into the trash, where it acts as food for hungry microbes, causing the trash to decompose much faster than it normally would.

• Accelerated decomposition means faster generation of valuable gaseous byproducts — methane and carbon dioxide.

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• Another set of vertical pipes act like wells, sucking up the gas and transferring it to a processing facility on the west end of the land.

• Machinery at the processing site sterilizes and separates the gases, preparing them for sale to Atmos Energy and other customers.

“We would love for it to be out,” Smith says. “It’s not a perfect world but it is getting better.”

Now you know what happens to all those dirty diapers and half-eaten sandwiches (a.k.a. the icky trash) and bulk trash. but what about the so-called clean trash — the stuff that goes in the blue recycling bins?

Here’s how it works: the city’s sanitation services department collects recyclables from the single-family and community recycling bins. t hose recyclables (30,000 tons in 2008) are shipped to the city’s recycling processor — Greenstar at Northwest Highway and Shiloh in Garland — which separates the materials into marketable packages, and sells the materials to buyers (except for glass and non-recyclable contaminants). the city’s share of the 2008 revenue that GreenStar earned from those sales was $2.2 million.

Any recycled glass is delivered to the Mccommas bluff landfill — not for disposal but for beneficial reuse: the landfill is able to crush the glass and use it as a gravel substitute for below-ground drainage features. (“that reduces the amount of clean gravel we’d otherwise need to purchase for those drainage features,” Nix says.)

Any contaminants, roughly 10 percent of what Dallasites place in