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 ?
In: 272
Modern landfills are constructed to be permanent storage for a toxic stew of no-longer-wanted items. They’re expensive to build and maintain. They are most definitely not designed to compost because the compost one gets out would be so heavily laden with toxic compounds that it would be a crime to add it to any clean soil.
As such, landfills are built to hold as much as possible before filling up. Therefore everything inside is compacted as much as possible and then sealed off in individual cells from the outside world to prevent infiltration of things like rainwater which would then have to be collected and treated. (This stuff is known as leachate and it’s some of the nastiest stuff going.) Anyway, this is the exact wrong way to build something if you were looking to pump air through it.
The idea that landfills compost was just what some civil engineers assumed would happen, because it was convenient to tell the residents at the time. Nobody ever actually studied it for decades, until some dude decided to go check on the progress and actually mined down into one of the original NYC landfill sites. What they found was that instead of composting, the landfills were PRESERVING the trash.
Latest Answers