Landfills are becoming large concentrations of materials like plastic, aluminum and other. What part of the process of mining landfills and processing the materials for new products, makes mining raw materials from the earth and processing them cheaper?

Question

Landfills are becoming large concentrations of materials like plastic, aluminum and other. What part of the process of mining landfills and processing the materials for new products, makes mining raw materials from the earth and processing them cheaper?

In: Economics

Answer 1

The difficulty with landfill is that you have no idea what’s in it. There may be a host of heavy metals and organic chemical which pose an unknown hazard to anyone handling the material.
There have been many cases where people have been caught tipping materials which have not been authorised in landfill, so there will be many more who never got caught.