Like what’s preventing us from living in a world like WALL-E in the future?
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It depends on the trash. Some things, like food or wood, decay pretty quickly. It the Methane released is captured and burned into CO2 to power the landfill or make electricity, this is not big deal.
Things like metals decay very slowly, and they are highly recyclable, so you really ought to recycle them. Glass is even more stable, sl you should recycle that also.
Things like plastic or computer boards will be there for a very long time. Either you build something on top of them or eventually it might be worth it to dig them up and reprocess them. That’s why you should minimize the use of plastic. Even if your recycling system takes plastic, it’s almost never actually recycled into something. Post-consumer recycled plastic is 1-2% of all the post-consumer plastic. **Don’t use plastic if there is another way to go.**
EDIT: I’ve since been informed it’s more like 2% of total greenhouse gases coming from landfill. I stand corrected!
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Apparently 25% of all greenhouse gases come from methane emitted by food waste biodegrading anaerobically in landfills. This is not good.
If your local area separates food/organic waste, please do so diligently. If your local area doesn’t, consider home composting if you can.
And above all try to generate as little food waste as possible.
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Some of it rots, and then it is compacted further by the weight of machinery or the weight of junk above it
Some stuff becomes brittle or otherwise crushes down into smaller parts of itself
Some stuff gets eaten, some of it dissolved and hopefully doesn’t leech into the surrounding soils
Then once it’s full of things that won’t condense down any more it just stays there and they dig another one somewhere else
Eventually they cover it with a layer of soil and plant plants over top so it looks like a regular hill with a bunch of vents to let the garbage gas out
Nothing happens to the trash in landfills. i had the experience of doing work in a landfill, they had to dig down to the bottom of the damn thing to fix a broken leachate line….the pipe that carries the black, foul smelling “garbage juice” from whatever water leaches down through the pile.
The process required digging down in steps with a large excavator, I’m not sure how many feet deep it was. I was surprised that the garbage they were bringing up from the bottom was NOT rotting, it looked like it had been put in there yesterday when it was from many decades ago that they started the landfill. there was newspapers coming up still in decent shape, you would think that would be the first thing to rot.
The process of rotting requires air to get at the material and there is not rotting if something is covered. even the stuff at the top would not be rotting because it is covered with a cap of topsoil to lessen the smell.
There are all sorts of things that can break down stuff on the surface of our planet, wind, rain, uv light, bacteria, small critters but none of those can get at the garbage we buried, it will be there for a long, long time and that is why people have been interested in new ways to manage our waste when we generate it at such alarming rates.
Edit: After reading a few other comments i am reminded, the methane would not be produced if nothing was rotting, so , something IS working down there but on a whole different timeline like radioactive half-lives.
I takes FOREVER. Thats why -in the Netherlands- we don’t use them anymore. You can still see some old ones, artificial hills now covered in grass.
I work for a flare company and exclusively engineer flare systems for landfills. We are selling plenty of equipment to new landfills, and they’re absolutely producing methane.
Everyone, trash decaying and methane production in a controlled manner is a good thing. It’s only bad when directly vented to the atmosphere because it’s insanely harmful in a greenhouse sort of way. We use gas blowers (large vacuums) that suck the gas out of the landfill, pulling in fresh air through the ground, and most of the time send it to a plant on site that either generates electricity or cleans the gas and sells to a natural gas pipeline. The flare is typically used as a backup because the gas coming out of the ground sometimes contains more liquid than the engines can handle and shuts them down.
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