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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A lot of facilities have started doing this. But it is not as simple as just blowing air into the ground. There is a big risk of fire at these facilities, even the heat from the microbes can start fires and once a fire start it is very hard to extinguish under ground. Adding to this you would get a lot of smell from the decomposition if you do not have enough oxygen, which they almost never have. And they need to reduce the amount of smell and even toxic gasses that gets released. There is also a big problem in that a lot of trash do not allow air to flow through it. So if you blow air down in one part of the landfill it may not get to all areas. So it is a very technical and expensive operation to make sure you get a nice controllable amount of air into the landfill without any of the issues with this.
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