but if garbage dumps fail to facilitate decomposition due to the lack of an oxygen rich environment, why wouldn’t the waste managers bore columns to pump in oxygen and good bacteria to compensate ?
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The issue here is that not all trash is suitable for this kind of processing. And not all landfills are built to decompose trash. Mostly it’s just kicking the can down the road for a few centuries if we can.
What you are describing is known as an air sparging system. It’s used to clean up a variety of chemical spills that have entered the water table. Usually stuff thar is normally a vapor but is just dissolved in the water.
Air is injected into the ground. It’s stirs up the water and aerosolizes the vapors. Shakes the junk out of the water. Then you have a vacuum system sucking the air in the ground out. This can be done with a buried tube covered in fabric connected to a vacuum.
You can also use this system to inject nutrients to bacteria, as you say. A common gas to I just is actually propane. This is used when the chemical involved doesn’t have carbon in it. Normal bacteria can eat chemicals to rip carbon off them to make more bacteria. So propane is added to give the bacteria carbon to grow, while also eating the harmful chemical.
Regular air can be injected into the ground also. However, some chemicals break down into more dangerous ones in the presence of oxygen. So sometimes it is more practical to just bury it and let it degrade slowly over time.
Source: I went to school for environmental remediation. This is literally something I’ve studied.
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