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
Mining engineer here. The reason it is cheaper to mine directly from the Earth is because sorting Mineral X from a bunch of rock is a fairly straightforward process. Rock has a set of properties and Mineral X has completely different set of properties. So you can use the differences to extract what you want. For example, magnets and density separation could remove iron from rock.
If you were to mine from a landfill, you would have to sort out countless different types of material. All these materials act differently, so you would have to individually process for each type of material. It is possible, but there would be so much contamination and the process would be very expensive.
In the future, landfills will be mines, but right now it’s too expensive.
Think of it this way – we have been mining natural resources for ages and have established methods and equipment. Depending upon the type of landfill, mining out usable materials can be done, but each facility can differ and there is no set method to implement. That increases labor and possibly requires additional equipment, both of which increase the costs.
Also, modern landfill methods tend to diminish oxygen needed to rot organic material. Add to that the fact that post 1950 landfills are packed with unusable plastics that will need to be separated and that newer facilities have everything wrapped in plastic bags, the work necessary to get recoverable material is very costly.
The optimal thing on this topic would be to mine the oldest landfills that have practically composted the waste first. Then, if technology catches up move on to newer facilities.
It’s cheaper to mine material and create new material than to go through garbage to recycle. Even the stuff in recycling rarely get recycled (about 1/3rd depending on where you live), it’s just too expensive and more and more countries refuse recycling because they get too much garbage mixed in it and it’s just not worth it.
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